The Metropolitan Police – lawbreakers or guardians of our safety ?

Police Constable Simon Harwood is in hiding today, having avoided being charged for assaulting an innocent bystander watching the G20 demonstration in London nearly two years ago – a bystander who later died after being struck by PC Harwood’s baton and being thrown to the ground by PC Harwood.

PC Harwood was subject to disciplinary proceedings six years ago for excessive force against an individual and he dodged another disciplinary charge for road rage by retiring from the Met Police. He then joined Surrey Police before being transferred back to the Met.

It has taken the Met 18 months to investigate an incident that was filmed from beginning to end. In the process the Met obstructed an IPCC proposed investigation by refusing to allow its representative to attend a post mortem on the victim, conducted alone by a doctor who is under investigation for poor practice in conducting four post mortems. A second independent post mortem established that the victim did not die from natural causes ( a heart attack), but from internal bleeding caused by a blow or by a fall.

I am quite certain that if I had hit this victim with a weapon and then thrown him to the ground in front of countless policemen, that I would have been charged, tried, imprisoned and released by now. Why does the Met seek so blatantly to protect its own policemen ? PC Harwood has three incidents on his record. He was allowed to retire and then rejoin the Met without the second being brought to investigation. Clearly there is something about this man’s attitude and behaviour that needs looking into.

Policemen do a difficult job at the best of times faced with often drunk and aggressive people. But the attitude of the police as a whole towards the G20 demonstrators was recklessly savage and accusatory. People are allowed to demonstrate in this country and it is difficult to understand why a massive force of police in riot gear, including a special force of men and women trained to deal with seriously criminal mobs, was deployed in this instance.

More often than not, in my experience, the police create the atmosphere and conditions for a confrontation by their very presence and display of riot gear at the slightest opportunity. Perhaps it is a game for them – lots of overtime and a chance to have a bit of a punch-up.

You see it at most football matches. How is it that I can go a YEAR or more without seeing a policeman or woman walking the beat in my home town (I’ve seen three in four years), yet when I go to a football match in London there are dozens of them in riot gear with horses and armoured vehicles. It’s a football match for goodness sake, not a war of insurgents ! The answer is, of course, that the police charge huge amounts of money, by force, to unnecessarily police many football matches – sure helps the Police Authority coffers, even after overtime payments. But their presence at these events ups the ante enormously. The tension rockets when lively, often amusing, football fans come together to enjoy a match – to be confronted by riot police galloping on the pitch at the slightest provocation. There’s always a policeman available to escort the winner of the Grand National. Is this reasonable and sensible use of resources?

Someone is breaking into your house and threatening your family. You call the police and they tell you they will call back with an appointment time – if they bother to turn out at all. But go to a football match or go to peacefully demonstrate against the government (especially Labour) and there will be thousands of officers immediately on hand ready to batter your head for the slightest movement.

Guardian of the law – or lawbreakers ? You decide.

Saturday July 24th:  How interesting that the Federation of Football Supporters has come out today with a report denouncing the ‘over-policing’ of football matches and the treatment of football fans by police solely as ‘hooligans’ when many are parents with children.

Ben Summerskill – sit down and shut up

I am moved to return to my blog after a lengthy absence by the outburst in today’s papers by Ben Summerskill, chief executive of Stonewall, that the portrayal of homosexual people is insufficiently positive on television for young people.
Why should the portrayal of homosexuals on television only be positive ? Why can’t they be lampooned or stereotyped like every other sector of society ? I am fed up with this hysterical ‘chip on the shoulder’ attitude of zealots like Ben Summerskill. I am sick and tired of the evangelising of homosexuals, especially to young people, that being homosexual is normal. It may be normal for the minority of people who identify themselves as homosexual but it is not normal behaviour for the vast majority (probably more than 85%) of UK society and it is wrong to suggest to impressionable young people that being homosexual is as normal as being heterosexual. It is not.
Let me say as quickly as possible that I am not anti-homosexual and my experience of homosexual people as friends and colleagues, especially in the entertainment industry, has been never less than delightful. Half my life has been enriched by the creative work of too many homosexuals to name and I am, in general terms, very much against discrimination of homosexuals, just as I am strongly opposed to discrimination on the grounds of race, religion or colour.
Judaism is one of the ancient and respected religions of the world. But just as the Israelis scream ‘anti-semitic’ to anyone who dares to criticise their murderous terrorism in the Middle East, so people like Ben Summerskill scream hysterically if they count too few seconds of positive screen time portraying homosexuals to young people.
Frankly I was appalled to turn on my television at 8.15pm the other evening and see two young men kissing on ‘EastEnders.’ But then ‘EastEnders’ appals me anyway as a relentlessly negative portrayal of low life England.
Homosexual people (or their self-appointed evangelists like Mr Summerskill) are simply in denial. Why can’t they accept that their personal preferences are not normal; that they represent a minority of people in society and that the vast majority of people, like me, are quite happy to accept them as part of society as long as they are as discreet as the average person about their way of life and they stop demanding that everyone else dance to their agenda.
There are people who like to urinate on one another for pleasure; there are people who like to have sex with animals. Their behaviour, too, is not normal and very much, I suppose, a minority way of life. Are we supposed to allow public urination ? Pissing Pride marches ? Civil partnerships with animals ? Why do we have to endure Gay (how I hate the misappropriation of that word) Pride marches and this constant banging of the homosexual drum. For goodness sake, accept that you are different to what society regards as normal; accept that you are a minority of any population; enjoy that difference and then you can enjoy the respect of the huge majority of people who will accept a homosexual person as readily as a heterosexual. I do. Just stop screaming at me and stop trying to bombard impressionable young people with your propoganda. Let them find their own way. Be ready to offer help and advice for young people who sense their own homosexuality by all means.
Television should generally reflect our society in terms of sexual preference and ethnicity. Given that homosexuals represent a little over 10% of UK society, there is actually far too much portrayal of homosexuality and overtly homosexual performers on television. But nobody is screaming blue murder about that.
So sit down and shut up Mr Summerskill.

Gordon’s in a spin – again

When will Gordon Brown learn to utter a simple, factual sentence instead of trying constantly to bamboozle us with breathtakingly obvious lies spun as ‘ a great step forward by New Labour.’

The latest absurdity to come from this man’s arid mind is a huge plan to put Great Britain at the forefront of broadband technology to ‘lead the world’ in internet capability where the future lies. As ever, there is no explanation of how this is to be done, when it is to be done, or who is going to pay for it other than the usual suspects – us, the taxpayers, through yet another secret tax.

He crows absurdly that the Government will order a nation-wide broadband capability of TWO negabits per second average speed. Will someone try and grab the odd moment when he is not in a volcanic temper throwing mobile phones around and berating all and sundry, to gently tell him that in the UK we already have an average broadband speed of 4.1 mbs, although most ISPs claim speeds UP TO eight and ten mbs, without any achieving their advertised speeds.

Compare Brown’s fabulous claim of TWO megabits per second with the normal speed in France of FORTY-THREE mbs and Japan’s routine broadband speed of NINETY-FOUR mbs, forty-seven times FASTER than Brown’s pathetic spin. There are many other countries with much faster broadband speeds than Britain.

The truth is, as usual, the reverse of whatever Brown says. Britain lags far behind other countries in broadband technology making our industry and enterprise a mile away from competing. And Brown’s ambition is about as awesome as a drop of rain in an English summer.

Why not a demilitarised Israel ?

There is a PowerPoint presentation doing the rounds of email in-boxes – I’ve had three versions in the past three weeks – detailing the severity and the unspeakable horror of the holocaust in World War II – nearly 70 years ago.

I detect a strong whiff of propoganda around this circulation at this time of an event which is ingrained in all our memories and histories, but which the Jewish people encapsulated in the state of Israel still persist in forcing to our attention, despite similar and sometimes worse acts of genocide having occurred more recently in Africa and the Horn of Africa. It could be said that the victims of these acts of atrocity lack the sophisticated PR skills and supporting funds of the Israelis.

The smell of propoganda seems strong to me because of a clear desire on the part of the Israelis to cast their own actions in Palestine into a smokescreen of obfuscation and lies. The truth, in my opinion, (and I understand that I will immediately be branded as anti-semitic, even though nothing could be further from the truth), is that the Israelis have adopted all the techniques of Hitler’s Nazi party to exploit their US-funded might against the Palestinians and the Arabs of the Middle East.

They have turned the Gaza strip into a concentration camp where nothing – nothing – can take place without their express approval. They control the borders, which have never been properly opened despite repeated UN resolutions and US requests; they control the sea, the air, the power, the water supplies and the ability of the Gazans to work. All this in contravention of international law and multiple UN resolutions.

Israel has stolen Palestinian land and built settlements on it, again in contravention of international law and UN resolutions. Israel has built a ‘Berlin Wall’ through Palestinian territory cutting off Arab families and their businesses, again without the support of international law.

Israel flouted international law and the United Nations by invading Gaza and smashing the place to bits, using illegal phosphorous weapons to kill hundreds of women and children and innocent men in a euphemistic battle against Hamas and a few impotent rockets into its territory.

Israel kills Palestinian men, women and children on a daily basis but screams blue murder if a rocket shell hits a pile of sand in Israel. Israel demands the right to be the only state in the Middle East with nuclear weapons. Why ? Israel pre-emptively bombed Syria’s nuclear installations.

Israel is a nation of bullies, thugs, and murderers, which sets itself above all laws of decency, humanity, international convention and United Nations strictures. All of its leaders since 1948 have, until recently, been terrorists and guerrilla fighters in their time. Yet the minute George W. Bush declared war on terrorism, Israel immediately branded the Palestinians and any inconvenient Arabs as terrorists every time their PR donkeys opened their mouths.

The truth is that Israel is the terrorist and its leaders should see that if it stopped being so obscenely belligerent towards everyone else in the Middle East, then it might gain some respect and some easing of the retaliation – for that is what it is – the retaliation of beleagured peoples like the Palestinians. Stop treating them as worse than pork and maybe the two-state solution has a chance. What right does Israel have, armed to the teeth by America with nuclear power, nuclear bombers, missiles et al, to demand that a Palestinian state be demilitarised with no control over its own borders and airspace?

No reasonable person denies that Israel has a right to exist. It was given internationally-approved territory in 1948. Since then it has waged war after war against its neighbours to grab more land. The United States should compel Israel to start behaving like a state of human beings instead of bigoted, belligerent thieves and warmongers, by withdrawing all of its funding for a lengthy period and warning the state of Israel that any further breaches of international law and continued proliferation of illegal settlements will be challenged.

Let me once again emphasise that I re-affirm my support for the Jewish religion 100%. What I do not support are the zealots who run the state of Israel. They are the true terrorists and – yes – the Nazis of the Middle East.

Diabetes UK

A while ago, noted writer and broadcaster Libby Purves wrote a piece for the Times entitled ‘Charities must get back to doing good works.’ *

It’s worth recalling some of the points she made. “In even a minor public and journalistic life, you encounter a lot of charity people. So I had a good view these past few decades of how the ‘sector’ works. Looking more widely at modern charities, there are certainly questions to be asked about their ethos and priorities.

“Professionalism, I suppose, had to come. There is a limit to how effective you can be without proper systems, and most charities seem to spend only about 12 per cent on administration (although some go far higher).

‘However, once you start ‘professionalising’ and deliberately mirroring the commercial world, you create a whole cadre of employees whose expectations and behaviours rapidly become expensive, potentially wasteful and at times merely self-aggrandising.”

Hold those thoughts for a moment while we look in particular at Diabetes UK, the multi-million pound charity dedicated to supporting people with diabetes through research and practical help with the condition.

Diabetes UK has a chief executive called Douglas Smallwood who has been in charge for about four years. Some might regard him as ‘ a safe pair of hands’ having come from the banking industry (not quite the recommendation it once was !) and he has headed the charity without too many signs of flair, originality or progress.

But even a cursory look at the state of Diabetes UK should raise some concerns. Under Smallwood’s regime, no less than seven board directors have parted company from the charity for various reasons in his four-year tenure – when there were, until recently, only six directors on the executive board. Each of these departures cost the charity varying sums in settlements especially those which involved grievance procedures against Mr Smallwood.

At this point let me declare an interest. I was a director of Diabetes UK for a time in 2007 until my growing shock and anger at the way the charity was “mirroring the commercial world” added my name to the ‘Diabetes Seven.’

Back to Libby Purves: “And what about the general public relations bill ? During the years of inflated economy, PR cleverly branded itself as a highly-skilled profession, claiming arcane secrets and magical powers. Charities piled in and bought this overblown delusion.

“I served on one voluntary PR committee (which) spent a two-hour meeting locked in a mad debate about ‘targets.’ The question, as far as I can remember, was roughly this: should we set a target of having 43.8per cent of 19-30 year olds placing us at seven on a scale of one to 10 by year 2012, or aim by 2014 to have 62 per cent of 25-60 year olds placing us over 15 on a scale of one to 20 ?

“When I expostulated that we should rather be using our time thinking up wheezes to make people like the charity, I got a stern lecture on the importance of target-setting in the ‘science’ of public relations.”

As a seasoned communications professional, I note Ms Purves’ confusion in advocating PR to’make people like the charity’ whilst falling back on the hoary old journalistic cynicism about the very communication skills that make their own industry work more effectively.

But she makes a doughty point about ‘target-setting.’ This is the world of Diabetes UK in general and Mr Douglas Smallwood in particular. Assisted by a succession of professional mentors, or personal coaches, (it is rumoured that he has employed at least six in four years) at a cost of tens of thousands of pounds of charitable donations, the chief executive dithers endlessly over targets and philosophy bought from business school graduates and couched in their own mumbo-jumbo language.

The whole procedure takes up an inordinate amount of time whilst few effective actions result. The upshot is a charity, heavily overstaffed and preoccupied with red tape sourced by the chief executive. Is that an appropriate way to spend charitable donations ? A reasonable person might suppose that a chief executive was fully-formed for the task without the need to have expensive personal advisers at his elbow.

Should not the trustees of Diabetes UK be taking a closer look at the way their charity is being run, especially at the total of legal fees over the past few years ?

As a diabetic myself and a former regular giver to Diabetes UK, I have severed all links to the charity while the present chief executive continues to procrastinate over ‘blue skies’ thinking and target-setting in lieu of positive and effective actions.

Diabetes is one of the most serious and fundamental health conditions in the world and treatment costs the NHS billions of pounds a year – not to mention being the indirect cause of many thousands of deaths each year. Its sufferers deserve better.

Ms Purves sums it all up rather well: “In a hard winter the organisations themselves might draw back from glossy ‘professionalism’ and think more about their roots. That legacy is more precious than any gloss: they were born of a spirit of simple indignation, fierce compassion and a burning resolution to improve the lot of their fellow men – while using both sides of the paper and wasting not a widow’s mite.”

Amen.

*Extracts from ‘Charities must get back to doing good works’ by Libby Purves. The Times 23-12-08. www.timesonline.co.uk

Phil Spector

I guess it’s easy to say with hindsight that Phil Spector would come to a sticky end after a lengthy second trial found him guilty of shooting Lana Clarkson, a nightclub hostess.  But, in truth, that didn’t come to my mind when I spent an evening with the diminuitive record producer at the Gold Star studios he frequented in Los Angeles and from which many of his ground-breaking hits came.

I was the rather ornately titled Head of Popular Music Management for Polydor International, then part of the PolyGram music group which has been subsumed into Universal Music in recent years. My job was to sign up, sustain and develop individual artists and music catalogues for Polydor companies worldwide.

In the mid-seventies Polydor concluded a deal with Spector’s lawyer Marty Machat to re-promote much of his outstanding catalogue under the Phil Spector International label. It gave us access to his ‘wall of sound’ classics which had previously been issued on his Philles label.

As the street-level boss of pop music worldwide for Polydor, I set out to meet Spector on one of my frequent visits to Los Angeles with a mixture of awe and curiosity.  Spector’s halcyon days were over – at 37 ! – but it was far from certain at that time that this genius of the studio would never produce another classic chart-topper.

I drove into the small parking lot at Gold Star, an unprepossessing little studio complex just off Sunset Boulevard and was soon ushered into the studio where Spector sat hunched at the control desk with an engineer. More ominously two, maybe three, rather large suited men positioned themselves between me and the door as Spector began his performance for the record exec from Europe.

He was apparently mixing some tracks pretty much in ‘wall of sound’ mode.  I say ‘apparently’ because ‘mixing’ consisted of playing the tracks over and over again at absolutely full volume on huge speakers positioned a matter of a foot or two away from our ears without touching the faders on the desk. Suddenly Spector decided he was satisfied and insisted that I needed feeding.

I demurred, having not long left the sanctuary of the Beverley Hills Hotel and its legendary Polo Lounge, but Spector continued to offer food in a rather menacing way.  A revolver lying on top of the mixing desk and the clear implication that the ‘assistants’ were armed, coupled with Spector’s notoriety with mindless pranks involving guns, led to “chilli dogs” being ordered and one of the assistants being despatched.  Clearly I was to be the cabaret for that evening’s session because the very last thing I wanted to eat at that moment was a greasy hot dog full of chillies.  I succeeded, much to the amusement of the assembly, and I suppose my fortitude in dealing with the chilli burger allowed my diplomatic exit from the studio a few minutes later.

My impression was of a desperately flawed personality whose success at a very early age enabled him to hold court and behave like a bully in his own school playground, surrounded by his rather larger ‘minders.’  Yet he wasn’t so different from many of the colourful characters who inhabited the pop music world of the 60s and 70s. Fame, alcohol and drugs did for so many of them.

In passing, I strongly recommend Mick Brown’s outstanding biography of Spector, ‘Tearing Down The Wall of Sound’ (published by Bloomsbury).

Gordon Bennett !

In my darker moments, of which there are an increasing number, I dwell on the thought that there is a hidden agenda, emanating from Scotland, to subjugate England and overcome it by stealth Stalinism.  No seriously !  Consider how in the past 12 years a Labour party has stolen the middle ground of politics in England under a traditional Tory manifesto and moved rapidly to establish such draconian controls on the populace to make one wonder if they are trying to see how far they can push the country before the revolution breaks out.

Enter ‘ Call me Tony’ Blair – a Scotsman, with his machiavellian marketing skills honed by his mouthpiece Alastair Campbell, to introduce a Presidential-style Premiership which scorned Parliament in favour of a few friends on the sofa at Number 10.  He then set about building himself up as some sort of international statesman on the back of positioning the country behind the axis of evil in Washington, Dick Cheney and his puppet George W. Bush.

In an era of consummate smoke and mirrors, Blair achieved but one thing in his ten years at Number 10 (apart from building his own career) and that was to achieve peace in Northern Ireland at the expense of appeasement to the IRA, apparently not led by Martin McGuiness and Gerry Adams.  Expediency loomed large in Blair’s methods – whatever moved his career forward was OK – and it was easier to hand over Northern Ireland to the one-time terrorists than try and persuade the Protestants that their future lay (safely) in the hands of Eire where many Protestants live in peace with their Catholic neighbours.  A united Ireland is actually the final solution to William and Mary’s enforced colonisation of Ireland but it was quicker and easier for Blair to despatch the problem the way he did.

Nevertheless relative peace has broken out in Ulster and we look forward to the day when England ceases to pour billions into the province to prop it up.

Blair then rushed to support Bush in his mania for war in Iraq because he (Blair) needed to be a hero in America if he was to have a career after politics.  Preventing Parliamentary (and Cabinet) scrutiny of the highly-dubious intelligence report on Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction was central to his undoubtedly illegal support for the illegal invasion of Iraq, relying as it did on an ancient UN resolution issued at the time of George Bush Snr’s disastrous adventure in the territory which left hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead.

In my view Cheney, Bush W, and Blair should be standing before the International Court of Justice in the Hague for war crimes.

And all along Gordon Brown was running the alternative government in England preparing solely for his accession to the highest office in the land.  He supported Blair occasionally, deserted the scene when it suited him and screwed the financial levers of power in such a way that he became the worst Chancellor in the whole history of the United Kingdom, a fact he now blames on the international financial industry.

It was Brown alone who sold one third of Britain’s gold reserves at rock bottom prices; Brown alone who devised the financial regulatory system of the Treasury, the FSA and the Bank of England; Brown alone who told those same regulators to tread softly; Brown alone who introduced tax credits and supervised the losses of billions of pounds in their first year of operation; Brown alone who introduced more than 250 new taxes on the British – the vast majority of which were not announced in his budget speeches or simply increased, like stamp duty by carefully-considered neglect or stealth; Brown alone who wrecked private pensions by removing tax exemption on dividend payments; Brown alone who engineered the nationalisation of various banks and encouraged mergers while not checking the detail and the implications; Brown alone who discreetly reduced real levels of investment in the armed forces so that our military has been fighting and dying without proper equipment for years  

Gordon Brown is interested in only one thing – being Prime Minister.  And there he stands, unelected, unloved, unsophisticated, and utterly incompetent, trying to convince us that he is the right man to steer the country out of the mess he created, just as other Labour Chancellors have done in the past.  It cannot be long before we go cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund for a huge loan because Brown has sucked all the spare resource out of the UK economy and borrowed so recklessly that even future generations will find it difficult to finance his stupidity.

And he and Blair, and their almost universally Scottish Cabinet minions, have presided over the introduction of so many draconian laws under the guise of protection against terrorism that the United Kingdom, and particularly England, is the most surveyed population in the world.  Commuters to work in London are watched on average by 300 different cameras on their way to work – and Blair tried to introduce loudspeakers on camera positions so that ‘ controllers’ could talk to errant members of the population going about their business – how 1984 is that !

The reality is that if Blair had not illegally gone to war in Iraq he would not have made England a prime target for terrorists.  If Labour had not surrendered to this small army of self-interested lawyers who invoke the Human Rights laws at the drop of a hat on behalf of terrorists bent on the destruction of England, we could be instantly deporting the lot of them.  It is not the business of the United Kingdom to stand in judgement on the human rights records of other countries.  If a national has come to this country to wreak havoc and then claims protection because he or she might be treated less benevolently in their home country, it is not our business to protect them.  They should go back to their own countries and change their own countries by the same methods they use in the UK.  I am not interested in the welfare of Islamist preachers who foment hatred and atrocities in this country.

The reality also is that we have had two terrorist attacks in this country in the past eight years – is that reason enough to ban protests near Parliament and allow local councils to use anti-terrorist legislation against dogs fouling the footpath or people over-filling their dustbins ?  We had worse from the IRA without constraining the whole population. Why does the Government arrest UK citizens who protest at Muslims carrying banners of hatred when our soldiers return from war, instead of arresting those who promote the hatred ?

Labour has wrecked education in this country for purely dogmatic political reasons.  We are breeding whole generations of ignorant young people who hold worthless qualifications in order to justify Ed Balls’s warped sense of priorities – privately-educated Ed Balls that is.  Labour has wrecked the National Health Service with its target culture breeding tens of thousands of useless but politically-correct bureaucrats while reducing front-line medical staff.  Labour has diminished the military with chronic under-funding led by Gordon Brown.  Labour has done nothing about crime, housing, transport and the police other than window-dressing by hiring millions of powerless and unqualified ‘assistants’ and the ludicrous Community Service Officers to try and convince us all that we have more teachers, nurses and policemen.

Round where I live in the West Country it is such an event to see a real policeman walking along the street that people stop and stare.  That’s what Labour’s target culture has achieved. Loads of people sitting around filling in boxes to enable the Government to skew statistics in an effort to convince us that they are succeeding.

They are not. Gordon Brown should look deep into his Methodist Scottish soul and resign for the good of England.  He should go back to Scotland with his cronies and take on someone his own size – Alex Salmond.  Otherwise it will be the end of the Labour party in 2010.

An open letter to Lionel Richie (and Chris Martin)

Dear Mr Richie (and Chris Martin)

You are one of the great songwriters of the modern era and have impacted many lives with ‘Easy Like A Sunday Morning’, ‘Three Times A Lady’ and many more. Such ballads have nurtured many a romance and your more uptempo offerings have fuelled many a party atmosphere – beautifully recorded and sensitively arranged.

Just last weekend I drove, with my wife, more than 600 miles to see you perform these wonderful songs at the 02 arena in London from our home in Cornwall in company with maybe 20,000 other fans, each of whom had contributed about $80-100 to witness your show, giving a gross of well over £1million.

My expectation, certainly, was that I would see a show of inspired musicianship, beautifully balanced sound and an evening of contrasts between the warmth and intimacy of the ballads and the drive of the up-tempo stuff.

I have to say that from the moment you appeared, almost inconspicuous in black by the lone piano, the evening disintegrated. The first chord of ‘Easy’ on that piano and the first vocal offering hit my ears with such a force that I never recovered.  You and your sound engineers must be great fans of ‘Spinal Tap’ because you didn’t mess about with turning the volume up to 11 – you started at about 13 and wound it up from there.

How can a craftsman like you assault and insult your public with a sound level that stopped just short of the pain threshold but crossed the distortion level by some distance ? It was so loud that you actually could not hear much of the music. Every drumbeat sounded like a sledgehammer and every bass note produced a thunderous wall of muddy noise.  And somewhere in the middle your voice occasionally cut through like a distorted siren.

Sure, you need a bit of volume to fill a 20,000 seat arena.  But the background music before the show filled the arena pleasantly enough. I’m not suggesting your band should play at that volume but it kinda gives the context to the raucous wall of noise that followed.  

Before you dismiss my plaintive ramble, let me tell you that I spent 20 years in the music industry and have been to arenas all over the world in the company of many of the great bands of our time like Led Zeppelin, Abba, the Who, Police, Styx and Bob Marley – and none of them assaulted my ears like you did.  Led Zeppelin were the masters of controlled power using light and shade for different songs without losing the dynamic of excitement.

I include Chris Martin of Coldplay in this grievance because this splendid band have fallen into the same trap of using sheer volume to try and make their point when their songs demand rather more subtelty.  At Crystal Palace a couple of years ago I stood by the mixing desk in disbelief when they attempted to blow the audience away – even on their more sensitive ballads.  I remember first noticing Coldplay on Jools Holland’s ‘Later’ TV programme when Chris Martin practically whispered ‘Yellow.’ It was an exquisite performance.  At Crystal Palace it was a roaring noise.

It may seem to the artist that the audience is enjoying the performance but bear in mind many fans would scream and shout just at the fact they were in the same room as the artist, no matter how big the room is.  The bands have a responsibility to give their fans as good a show as they can, including a level of sound that works for their songs.  Pink Floyd did it; the Eagles do it; Earth, Wind and Fire were superb at it.

Think on, Mr Richie (the first concert I’ve ever walked out of, along with quite a few others judging from the trail to the Tube station) and Mr Martin.