When I was fifteen I embarked on a Great Adventure with my brother, Andrew, (who was eighteen and would therefore be doing all the driving). We had determined to discover forlorn and forgotten outposts of the Football League and places like Barrow, Hartlepool and Workington loomed large on the agenda. Our pilgrimage required careful planning and Andrew – already precociously versed in ‘matters of taste’ – decided that, even on a minimal budget, our base for these explorations must aspire to at least a modicum of gastronomic pretension. The Good Food Guide was duly combed and The Bay Horse Inn revealed – a remote Westmorland pub that was apparently serving superb cuisine. Andrew had obviously chosen The Bay Horse with his usual fastidiousness, for its guide entry contained the following seminal sentence: “As the landlords are musical there is no music”. If music is any good at all it deserves to be listened to, not merely to drivel away in the background like an incontinent aural pollutant. Piped music, canned music –whatever you call it – is a curse of our age: an insidious cancer that has eaten away at our right to choose. Why, whenever we sit in a pub, restaurant or café are we assaulted by someone else’s choice of muzak? As Nick Hornby laments, how can a piece of music ever seem the same after you have heard it in your local Starbucks? And the myth that background music is hugely influential in persuading people to buy more products has been propagated by self-serving ‘Psycho-Acoustic Consultants’, ‘Sound Designers’ and ‘Mood Engineers’. These vested-interest groups were discredited years ago when Gatwick Airport conducted a survey of its own which discovered that – far from being ‘soothed’ by piped music – its passengers would much prefer to have some peace and quiet. Gatwick is now a ‘muzak-free’ zone. If you hate piped music as much as I do, you have probably already joined Pipedown – The Campaign for Freedom from Piped Music. If not, they can be found at: HYPERLINK “http://www.pipedown.info/” www.pipedown.info/ I will be touring the Far East this month where it is wonderful to look out from the platform and see lots of young faces instead of the usual sea of grey! Many young people in these countries have a genuine love of classical music because – unlike here – they learn about it at school. So adopting Presley’s Principle: “A little less conversation, a little more action please”, I have joined a consortium with percussionist Evelyn Glennie, flautist Sir James Galway and composer Michael Kamen. Our objective is to continue the ongoing battle to achieve a basic musical education for children in this country. We will be meeting Charles Clarke, Secretary of State for Education, and seeking specific commitments and realistic timetables of achieving them. Certainly, I will be pressing for at least a few minutes of musical appreciation each week to be an obligatory part of the timetable in our schools. Is that really too much to ask?
“I am not in the business to sell a lot of records and to make money. I want to make nice records, records that need to be made, that no-one else will make.” So said Ted Perry, founder of Hyperion Records, who died last month. Given the pop-obsessed nature of our media, it would hardly be surprising if you blinked and missed the news of Ted’s death. Yet Perry was one of the great figures in classical music. Coming from a poor background he created an Indie record label out of nothing (moonlighting as a mini-cab driver in Hyperion’s early days to pay the bills) and left a legacy of nearly 1000, often outstanding, classical CD’s of music that the major labels shunned. The day this country truly recognises the likes of Ted Perry, musicians will no longer need to form consortiums just to convince our politicians to take music seriously.
