How music inflames the savage breast

Just off to Africa - pop acrorse and pairtr'nise the blairk mairn, don't you know? - but before I go I thought I'd let you know what I've decided about this business of music.

Do you remember, some weeks ago, the man who was nicked on Hampstead Heath for playing the bagpipes? Never mind the wicked homos cavorting in the bushes, the monstrously ugly families with mouths stuffed with burgers, the dayglo psychopaths heaving along in their damnable running shoes, and all the rest of the crowd of perverts, chancers, ne'er-do-wells and slobs who frequent the Heath as they have since time out of mind. No: this bugger was playing the bagpipes and therefore he had to go. Can't have it. Won't do. Heard the definition of a gentleman? Chap who can play the bagpipes but ...

So along went a jobsworth, waggling his little rule-book, and told your man he was nobbled. Bye-Law, you see. No Playing Musical Instruments On The Heath.

There must be something about the bagpipes - all that elbow-work to no good avail, perhaps - that sharpens the intellect. I suppose, subjected to bagpipe music (an oxymoron like "civil servant" or "military intelligence") at point-blank range, the mind would wander, if not actively flee, and hide in a corner of the skull concentrating on higher things. It certainly worked for your man, because, quick as you like, he'd come back at the jobsworth with the sensible observation that, if that were indeed the Bye-Law, he was in the clear, on the grounds that bagpipes were nothing to do with music, but an instrument of war.

I don't know whether the case has been heard or quietly dropped, and I can't be bothered to find out. But after considerable reflection, I have come to the conclusion that your man was occupying an ethically sound position, and that not only bagpipes, but almost all music is warlike in intent.

In Procter Street, around the corner from where I live, there is a terrible shop called City Sounds. It sells records - not CDs, actual records - to thin hopeless club DJs with pendulous lower lips. They sell two sorts of records. One sort of record goes "Duh, duh duh-duh, duh-duh, duh duh- duh" and the other sort goes "BOOM ching BOOM ching BOOM ching BOOM ching". Occasionally, above the duh duh or boom ching, an androgynous parrot-squawk can be briefly heard, but otherwise that's it: 140 beats per minute of relentless, imbecile aggression. It's no more music than the cadaverous, shattering creak of the bagpipes. It's war; war upon the human spirit, and bugger me but it seems to be working.

The other thing, of course, is its built-in sectarianism. There was a time when people who liked the lush rhapsodic ecstasies of Grandma Brahms were uneasy in the presence of those who embraced the shifting irresolute chromaticism and lunatic-with-a-calling-card Leitmotif system of Wagner. Now, people who like their boom ching at 130 beats per minute wouldn't be seen dead in the same club as people who like it at 140. And what about those damned songs? You can get your face smashed in, at the very minimum, for walking into a Protestant pub in Belfast whistling "The Men Behind the Wire", but if you walked in mumbling the words under your breath, nobody would be any the wiser. Music exists to exacerbate our deepest, most primitive tribal feelings, and without it the world would be a more peaceful place; not just because we would be spared the endless torment of having to listen to other people's music, every bit as offensive as having them come up and shove their reeking armpits in our face to mark their territory.

There's no absolute in this. The amiable evening witterings of the man next door on his piano might be as irritating to some people as the vacuous snivelling of the builders' radio (rusted permanently on to Radio 1) out at the back, or the boom ching of the sods across the road. The only undeniable factor is that duh duh, boom ching, and all the rest of the drum-machine bollocks which passes for "music", is low-frequency noise and so carries further; which I suppose makes it a more effective territorial marker.

Take it away, and what happens? Can you imagine your man going into a staunch Provo pub, buttonholing the curate behind the bar and murmuring, "Listen, I'd just like to mention that I was once a jolly ploughboy and I ploughed the fields all day, till a sudden thought came to my head that I would run away. The thing is, d'ye see, I've always hated slavery since the day that I was born, and I'm off to join the IRA. And I'm off tomorrow morn. Fair enough? Good, and a ball of the malt if you'd be so kind." It just doesn't have the same ring of glamour as humming the beguiling tune, do you see, and nor would walking into a club and just saying "Evening. Boom ching," or, come to think of it, all that religious stuff, your plainchant and your chorales and muezzin and gamelans setting man against man and leading directly to strife.

So when we all laughed at those pompous humourless fools who complained about the Olympics - was it? - using Beethoven's Ode to Joy (and it wasn't; it was Schiller's Ode to Joy, which Beethoven set in the last movement of his 9th Symphony, harrumph, pshaw, whatever is the world coming to?), we were quite right to laugh. They were arses. But arses sometimes have a point, and to claim that the Beethoven was being used because of his sentiments of brotherhood is disingenuous. Put it to the test. Can you imagine everyone standing up and reciting the Ode? "Joy, beautiful spark from God ..."? Honestly?

Of course not. Once again, it's the music getting everyone pumped up and ready for conflict. Well, it won't do. Far from soothing the savage breast, music merely inflames it, and if Mr Major wants to win back the favour of the nation, the best thing he can do is ban it, all of it, at once. Boom ching. !