Julian Lloyd Webber: Save us from aural assault

When I was 15 I embarked on a Great Adventure with my brother Andrew, who was 18 and therefore would be doing all the driving. We had determined to discover forlorn and forgotten outposts of the English Football League and our pilgrimage required careful planning.

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 North County 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 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 bar, restaurant or cafe, are we assaulted by someone else's choice of muzak? As writer Nick Hornby laments, how can a piece of music ever seem the same after you have heard it in Starbucks? 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 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 can join Pipedown - the Campaign for Freedom from Piped Music. They can be found at: www.pipedown.info/



* "I am not in the business to sell a lot of records and 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 in February.

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 CDs of music the major labels shunned.

* The news that the Vienna Philharmonic has finally admitted a woman to its ranks shows we have come a long way since Sir Thomas Beecham querulously declared: "The trouble with women in an orchestra is that if they are attractive it will upset my players and if they are unattractive it will upset me."

Now what we need is an all-women orchestra, preferably hand picked by recording moguls whose sole criterion - as in the case of the all-girl string quartet Bond - will be artistic excellence.

A happy side-effect will be the willingness of male conductors and soloists to considerably reduce their fees to make beautiful music with such a fabulous band. And, to make sure they do not get too lonely on tour, I am certain their wives will wish to accompany them.