On Music in Market Square

Today I tried for the second time in a week to eat lunch in the lovely grey-stone square behind Kingston’s City Hall. The pretty scattering of colourful metal tables and chairs set out there is a bright idea. It really should be a fine place to rest up for twenty minutes with a salad or a slice, what with the tourists mostly gone and the road traffic light, the fountain still foaming gamely, the sky big enough to impose itself.

One should be able to sit there and listen to the way the breezes move between the old buildings - it’s possible, I swear - and the way the delivery trucks jockey for position on Brock, and the way the drivers of those trucks clatter their trolleys up restaurant steps, the impressive Oof as they drop their bags of flour on the steel-top bar, the gentle You should have seens and Oh my Gods of the passing bankers with their laminated plastic name-tags. The tap-tap of the blind boy’s cane, the jackass seagulls reminding everyone just how close we are to the big water. One should be able to take a stab at imagining the noise of downtown Kingston’s past - the cart wheels and horse snort, the antique sales pitches and squarenail building projects.

But no, there will be none of that, will there, because some tone-deaf underpaid smart-arse in Tourism has decided that the way to enliven this important community space is to broadcast Sirius Radio into it, over shit speakers, most of every day. For us to have to listen to over-trebled and under-bassed Rolling Stones and Cream tunes. To be transported one more time by crap-sounding Zeppelin and Genesis. To endure the banal intros and facile enthusiasm of the American DJ. There is something intensely gladiatorial about the experience.

I am here to say that this is a truly awful idea. If people want music with their pizza they will put on headphones. And pick their own tunes! I have to be in the right mood for rock classics. If you jump in my car and started messing with the stereo, I’m likely to call you a cab. For crying out loud (and I think I did exactly that today) let us stare into the middle distance without Phil or Mick or Janis telling us what to think while we do it. Let us talk to our friends without musical accompaniment. We’re in a public square, not a crowded bar. For crying out loud, just let us be, why don’t you? The world is loud enough already.