The gig that cannot be reviewed

In keeping with the recent convention of this blog, it was always my intention to review a gig I attended earlier this week, but for reasons that will become clear, I cannot review the acts, since circumstances decreed it impossible.

The Other Half had discovered Nouvelle Vague some years ago – a French outfit that covers punk and new wave music in a bossa nova style (I shall assume you’ll all get the three-way pun involved).

When it emerged that they were playing a gig at The Forum in Kentish Town, we decided to give it a whirl.

The best thing about the evening was, as it turned out, a pint of proper ale in the Bull and Gate just a few steps away from the venue – and a very nice pub it is too. Though to be strictly fair, The Forum itself – a converted 1930s cinema – is a lovely building with fascinating decoration that uses Roman iconography.

Liset Alea kicked off the gig. One of the lead singers with Nouvelle Vague, she also appears as a support act on their tours.

A singer-songwriter, she played a guitar on stage and was accompanied by a lone musician playing both keyboard and percussion.

Now, I have very good hearing and perhaps it’s become more sensitive in recent years, because I could barely hear a word – I certainly couldn’t hear enough to understand a single individual song.

When she announced that she had just two songs left, I walked out and left the auditorium.

My hope was that the night’s main act would find the sound more balanced.

It was not to be.

Yes – I appreciate that this is ‘rock ‘n’ roll’, but that is not a synonym for ‘as loud as possible’.

The last gig I was at – I’m excluding Pink Martini as they’re not really ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ – was an intimate West End performance by 2 Tone ska band The Selector, and it did not have me wondering whether it would be my eyes or my ears that would bleed first.

Not only did I find myself miserably musing on such a question on Tuesday night at The Forum, I could feel the sound throbbing in my throat and ended up with a banging headache, even though we left early.

I’ve been informed since that some people take ear plugs to gigs. Which seems to me to be utterly daft.

And while that may dampen the sound somewhat, it does not address the issue of not being able to clearly hear lyrics or of every sound being so amplified that it ‘blurs’ around the edges.

So I’m sorry – there will be no review of Nouvelle Vague or Liset Alea. The sound levels were so uncomfortable and distracting that I actually cannot say whether they were good, bad or indifferent.

The incontinence of noise

Young, well-spoken and well-to-do, she sat at the back of a bus, phone to ear, explaining to a friend in a carrying voice about that afternoon’s appointment with her gynecologist, seemingly oblivious to all those around who were perhaps less than enthusiastic about the details of the encounter.

On a train, speeding north from London, a young man, seated at a table in a standard-class carriage, opened his laptop and decided that this was the perfect environment in which to conduct a business video conference call. Everyone within three or four seats in all directions was included – irrespective of their wishes or even the interests of business confidentiality.

These are two snapshots of a modern Britain where humans have become noise incontinent. And they will be familiar to most of us.

But it is not just a matter of conversations made public. It’s one thing for headphones to leak sound, but at least the wearer is making an effort.

Yet it is now the norm, in urban areas, for the first good weather of the year to see windows and balcony doors flung open, and music ‘shared’ with neighbours.

“Music,” that is, consisting of little more than booming bass. The same “music” that you’ll hear from passing cars, whether the windows are down or not.

But this is not simply a matter of individual behavior.

In shopping arcades, going far beyond the curse of muzak, shops blast out sound – presumably, because a psychologist somewhere has discovered that hi-tempo, booming tracks encourage spending and quickly.

The Arndale in Manchester is one example: on a visit one Sunday morning, only the Waterstones Bookshop and Games Workshop were peaceful – although both were busy. Even the Disney Store was playing music loudly – hi-tempo and with a beat, albeit rather more in keeping with little pink princesses.

On a larger scale, it is now apparently acceptable for a rave festival to be arranged and staged within 50 metres of homes, and if residents do not like feeling their bones rattled, that’s their misanthropy.

It never is, incidentally, Chopin rattling someone else’s windows – or Johnny Cash or Dean Martin or even Abba or the Stones.

But try to find a coffee shop – chain or independent – that doesn’t insist on providing some sort of soundtrack to your morning cappuccino. It might just be the radio, but you could be forgiven for thinking that we are scared to sit peacefully; to allow ourselves the opportunity to hear ourselves think.

There is a narrowing of basic good manners here – not a conscious one, but resulting from a sense of individual entitlement that requires no justification and expects no challenge.

‘Why do you think it’s fair for you to make other people listen to your conversation/music?’ This is not a question that usually earns a classier philosophical response than some form of take on a shrugged ‘because’.

Although in order to do so would require a way of explaining why the ‘right’ to converse or play your music in such a way as to force it on others trumps their right not to have it thus inflicted. Since nobody is saying that you cannot play your music or have your private conversation, then that would be difficult.

Perhaps much of it is about consumption.

On one level, we consume the gadgets that allow us to converse wherever we want. And then we consume anything we put on them. Except that, since we are encouraged increasingly to keep it in the ‘cloud’, we don’t really have it at all. When we want to conspicuously consume that tune again, we have to download or stream it once more – possibly with added consumption via whatever charges our telecommunications provider might levy.

On another level, there is a growing emphasis on consumption as a core part of citizenship: see all manner of things, from the small-state fundamentalism of the concept of the ‘citizen consumer,’ to the rising importance in the economy of the retail sector (and therefore of our personal and collective consumption).

You can find florid declarations of spending as a patriotic duty to aid the nation’s economy, while increasing suggestions that we’re in for a period of sustained low interest rates (in part because of past and present spending on ludicrously-inflated mortgages) produces a concomitant sense that we might just as well spend our hard-earned, then.

Once having consumed, we then have the right to enjoy that consumption. And after all, if it is a patriotic act we have carried out, then who can deny us enjoying it in whatever way we please? There’s no such thing as society any more anyway.

Now consider the onslaught on personal privacy of the last decade or so: the UK as the CCTV capital of the world; attempts by governments to introduce ‘snoopers’ charters’ to combat terrorism and child abuse º the two terrors of our age: all produce a semi-constant response of how, ‘if you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear’.

The ‘rights’ and ‘entitlement’ of the conscientious consumer sit well with an era in which the desire for privacy can be viewed as an admission of some guilt or other.

Consume, let others see your consumption – and never worry if you’re being overheard or watched, because it’s happening anyway. Quiet and privacy cannot be bought and sold: they have little value.

This incontinence of sound – this droning, banging, driveling bombardment of noise – is itself symptomatic of something wider: of a dumbed-down public discourse where whoever shouts loudest is heard; where considered arguments are battered out of the way by sensation and fact-free claims.

Will it take until all the satellites fail and all the ‘clouds’ burst and all the gadgets seize up to make us appreciate once more, quietness, a private conversation and music enjoyed without the need to foist it on others?

Or before then, will it dawn on people that all this incontinent noise is simply one more cover for our intellectually incontinent politicians and the corporatocracy on whose behalf they work?