Over the past months I have had the chance, if that's the right word,to visit and witness the sights and sounds of a good few towns and cities.
It is with the sounds that I would like to concentrate on.
As a music lover and a former amateur tunesmith I have noticed a real and unfortunate decline in the traditional art of busking.
If you cast your minds back just a decade or so ago the streets,subways, alleys, in fact any spare piece of pavement was occupied by a chap or chapess and their guitar, open case,if they were lucky, on the floor or maybe their hat strategically opened to be able to hold the odd bit of change their efforts rewarded them.
Now at this point I'll repeat part of the scene, the person and their guitar...period.
What you heard was either their talent or their need to practice a bit more but it was them!
Various songs presented with varying degrees of success but you admired the effort and in a lot of cases the talent.
Let me bring you up to date and I'll use the example of my nearest city, Liverpool, though I could pick any of a dozen visited over the past months.
The main musical noise to be heard now in Liverpool, home of the Beatles and some of the greatest exponent of the guitar ever, is that of a cheap and tacky backing track which wouldn't seem out of place on the earliest singalong computer games.
In front of these machines are people who wouldn't know one end of a guitar from another and pretend to play and unfortunately not pretend to sing along to the tape.
Novelty at first, pain and sad now.
The voice and guitar can't really compete with extra volume generated by the karaoke kings.
It's like that worse nightmare at a party when the karaoke comes out and you know that the same person will hog it all night pausing only to remind everyone that they should be on The Voice.
Live music seems to have been relegated to the certain pubs or rooms with participants regarded as enthusiasts...real shame.
And it's not just live music that is suffering.
My other old hobby of DJ seems to be in the doldrums as well, a wedding I attended had a DJ armed not with discs but yep you guessed it a karaoke machine into which he and he alone sang all night, it was truly awful.
Karaoke was fun when it first arrived but now it seems no one can do anything without the backing track to support them...hardly surprising I suppose when TV programmes such as X Factor are just a glorified karaoke night.
It's time for our guitar toting musicians to hit the streets early, grab the best spots, grip your plectrums and get playing again, let's push karaoke back to where it belongs...behind closed doors.
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