Joe Bennett: How much better the world would be with no recorded music

Columnist Joe Bennett muses on how much better his life would be if all music were live, with no recorded music available - though he draws the line at the Bee Gees.

OPINION:

How much better the world would be if we had never learned to record music.

No low-slung testosteronic cars throbbing with bestial rap. No just-below-the-threshold anodyne pop in shopping malls. No palliative pan pipes while you wait for the customer representative to whom your call is so important. No mind-numbingly cheerful radio jocks.

And no neighbour broadcasting the Bee Gees on a Sunday afternoon. If he wanted to listen to the Bee Gees he would have to go to where the Bee Gees were, while the rest of us could live in the bliss of Bee-Geelessness.

But live music brings its problems too. There's a piano in the main street here, an upright piano, painted yellow. It stands outside the supermarket beneath a canopy that keeps it dryish, where it attracts four types of people, the first of whom are vandals. They kick and break it. They spray it with their coded graffiti.

Once a week or so the man who put the piano there and presumably owns it, tends it. He repairs its wounds, removes the graffiti and tunes it. All for nothing. All for the love of it. Why? You'd have to ask him. He's a nice man.

The second group it attracts are little children who bang the keys at random with their fists. The discords are an assault on the ears, a please-stop-that-right-now noise, half-tolerated only because they are little children. If they have parents, the parents get stares.

Then come the adults who once learned to pick out a tune with two fingers and want to see if they still can. The tune is Chopsticks and they can't. But some persist in trying for quite a while. And the fourth type I shall come to. But before that, buskers.

We have three of them here, I think, who take it in turns to occupy the busking bench just along from the piano. One plays guitar instrumentals with electronic backing. I know him a bit and sometimes stop to chat. But I never give him money because if you've just had a chat with someone it would seem odd to pay him.

And also, though I admire his skill and courage and entrepreneurial independence, I don't like his music. Of course, as he would no doubt point out, I have the choice whether to pay for it or not. But I don't have a choice whether to hear it or not, which seems a little unfair.

The other two buskers sing, so I have never had a chat with them. I haven't dropped any money in their upturned hat or open guitar case either, because they sing the sort of popular songs I choose not to furnish my aural life with. But that doesn't stop me feeling mean for not giving and I don't think I should be made to feel mean when all I'm trying to do is buy a pound of pork chops (of which I am fond and which I bake in the oven with a little sweet soy sauce and a little sweet chilli sauce and a lot of balsamic vinegar) for my tea.

And yet, on the other musical hand, I recall a Christmas in the snowy streets of Quebec when I heard around some corner what may or may not have been a waltz and I followed the sound and came upon a rotunda with a brass band blowing away despite the cruel temperature, and right in front of them an ice-rink on which the citizens of Quebec, all excellent skaters, were serenely circling in time with the music and chatting as they did so. And the scene was so pretty - a sort of soft-boiled Brueghel - and the music so pleasing and the movement so elegant that I rented a pair of skates and stepped onto the ice.

I tripped, I stumbled, I fell. Old women helped me up. Little children held my arm to keep me upright. Still I tripped, still I stumbled, still I fell. Soon I crawled off the ice and the scene resumed its serenity. But the music was lovely.

And then today as I emerged from the supermarket the street was buskerless for once, but a youth had sat at the yellow piano and hitched up the sleeves of his pullover and paused with his hands spread a few inches above the keys and then he played. And what he played I recognised but couldn't name - a bit of Chopin maybe - and it was awash with melancholy beauty. I stood in the street and listened and basked and had there been a hat I would have showered it with dollars, but there wasn't so I didn't and then I went home and baked my chops. Thoughtfully.