A journey through Berlin via album covers…
“In spring 1990 I embarked on my first bicycle ride through Prenzlauer Berg,” recalls Bernd Leyon in the foreword to his striking coffee-table book, Berlin On Vinyl. “’I’ll ride to the other side’ people said back then when talking about East Berlin. Soon enough I stumbled upon a weekly market in Cantianstraße, near Schönhauser Allee. Makeshift wooden stalls, fruit and vegetables, and among junk from all over the world and countless crates of books—vinyl records. Down on my knees, I dug through a collection of records, hidden underneath one of the stalls, and there I found a gem: “Gross Stadt Rhythmus” (Big City Rhythm). What a title, what a cover. It showed a twenty-year-old snapshot of Schönhauser Allee…
Leyon continued rooting through the racks at flea markets and music fairs all through the nineties and early noughties, re-selling many of his find through his own record store, Musik Department store, which he opened in 2010 and which closed in 2018. On the wall opposite the shop’s entrance was hung an enlarged print of the cover of “Gross Stadt Rhythmus”. “Customers would stand in awe in front of the picture,” he says. “Sometimes even people anxiously waiting outside for their tram to arrive would get distracted from their own “big city rhythm” by the picture and get washed into the shop. Parents have told their children about the old days while standing in front of the photo…people from all parts of Berlin, East and West alike.”
In 2014, Leyon decided to compile a book of Berlin-themed record covers. Featuring over 200 of them, spanning the ’60s-’80s, it’s a completely unique visual journey through the city: “A journey through time, across the decades, beginning in the 1960s, gathering speed all the way to the 1980s,” he comments. “If I were granted a wish it would be that the reader takes the time to thumb through the pages, to browse, to excavate submerged memories. Make your own comparisons about what is and what has been, what remains, what has vanished, what the new times have brought with them and what remains of the old times. In short, I wish you to marvel like I do every day anew, about these covers, these pictures and this city.”
How did you research and find all the vinyl covers once the idea was started?
BL: “For sure, without the internet, this project would be hard to realise, but thankfully I could research online a whole universe of collectors and sellers. I already had a certain number at home, especially East German stuff that I bought cheaply in the nineties. I also searched endless boxes in the flea markets, which helped. A lot of them were very hard to find. I made a list of artists in Berlin but surprisingly ninety percent of Berlin-born artists never created a vinyl cover using a photo from Berlin.
The book span the 1960s-80s. Why those decades?
BL: “I started as early as possible. Album vinyls didn’t exist in the forties, just 78s , without picture covers. The 1950s started just five years after