Last word
Busk off
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
If Time Out did not exist it would be a brave man who tried to invent it. It comes into that special category, which Mr Malcolm Muggeridge once noted, of things that defy parody: each time that the satirist adjusts his sights the target moves just out of range. Private Eye has from time to time taken a potshot at Time Out but can never quite capture the blissful absurdity of the original. Each week we stand in the pub thumbing through it to see who can find the best bit: will it be the Agitprop page — 'Hands Off Campuchea'? (Did you notice, by the way, the photograph in the paper a few days ago showing students with a banner saying 'lands Off Vietnam'? The students were in Moscow. the banner was in Russian: one of the most complicated historical ironies for some time.) Or will it be the movie reviewsSatyajit Ray's delightful The Chess Players is condemned for its 'stunningly inadequate analysis of colonial politics'?
Last week there was a prize-winning entry of quite exceptional quality under the headline 'Happy Gays Are Here Again' on 'The Second Gay Times Festival': Among the forthcoming attractions, 'Gay Liberation's overdue response to the Minehead hearing comes from the Brixton Fairies'. But best of all 'the men of Gay Sweatshop will be previewing a new play about the 19th-century gay poet and philosopher, Edward Carpenter . . his pioneering sexual politics [why did Tom never think of that phrase] were nurtured among workingclass socialists in Sheffield'.
Enough. Even Time Out cannot completely avoid contamination with sense, and as I turned the pages amid guffaws I found a cause where they are incontrovertibly in the right. The Metropolitan Police are conducting a deliberate campaign of harassment against buskers and street performers. One performer argued in front of the magistrate that Leicester Square was a traditional place for street musicians and entertainers to perform. He might have added that Leicester Square is now so detestable and so depressing that any attempt there to add to the public stock of harmless pleasure should be applauded. This is a new form of adding insult to injury: the authorities make an area almost uninhabitable (or allow it to become so) and then forbid any attempt to alleviate the misery. A year ago, for example, the local borough council tried to stop children skateboarding on the south bank, in the area between the Festival Hall and the river. That godforsaken waste-land is good for little else. Is there anywhere, outside a Soviet industrial centre, such a collection of gloomy and soulless buildings as stands between the London Weekend centre and Hungerford Bridge? Skateboarding would seem to be one of the few rational purposes for those vistas of concrete and paving with curious hidden recesses and — for the skateboarder — challenging ramps. I am delighted to see that the council has failed: at any rate, as I walk to the concert, huddled against the wind, I hear the rattle of the boards, some small evidence of human life.
There is worse to come in the Time Out story. London Transport has also been persecuting buskers: in all the tunnels connecting underground platforms there are notices threatening musicians with hideous penalties. Now they have added insult to insult. Muzak has been introduced at Oxford Circus station — for a trial period, of course. A trial period in such a context as this is a sure sign that we are stuck with something for good. And some overdeveloped sadist has now decided that West End buses shall have recorded music 'interspersed with commercials'. So there is to be another encroachment of canned music, that curse of the age. Until now the top of a bus has been a most congenial place to read and think. From April we shall have to sit, grinding our teeth, enduring the aural torture of that rubbish which bears just enough resemblance to music as to render it impossible to ignore. Before long there will be nowhere left for silence unless like Mr Enderby we shut ourselves in the lavatory.
Despair, as always, is easy. Maybe it is not necessary. As I have delicately hinted before, Muzak systems are quite easily sabotaged. Let us — the Enemies of Noise — equip ourselves. When next I go to Oxford Circus I shall take along my Swiss Army penknife which has all sorts of gadgets for undoing screws and cutting wires. Be prepared!
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