There must come a point in every person’s life when they realise that they’re going to be largely in or out of step with their times. Mine came in Glasgow in 1964 when my grandmother took me to see The Beatles’ first film, A Hard Day’s Night.
It contains a scene in a train carriage which the loveable moptops are sharing with the distinguished character actor, Richard Vernon, who is playing a pinstriped City gent trying to read The Times, his bowler hat quivering with disapproval. After an argument about opening a window, the cheeky young scousers switch on a transistor radio to listen to pop music, Richard Vernon objects, and one of them says, “But we want to hear it”. Eventually, John Lennon (I think it was), says “Knock it off, Paul. You can’t win with his sort”.
As the audience bridled at the toff’s unreasonableness, and my long-suffering granny yet again shushed the squealing girls seated immediately behind us, I experienced a revelation: I was his sort, not theirs.
I was definitely a Beatles fan: after all, I’d forked out over six bob of my pocket money (6/6d to be precise) for their first single, “Love Me Do” and subsequently persuaded my parents to buy me the first two Beatles LPs and had almost worn out With The Beatles already . But, despite my fan status, I could see absolutely no reason why anyone on a train, no matter how unpleasant they were, should have their peace and quiet shattered by someone else’s music. After all, his pleasures were self-contained, while theirs affected other people: ergo,he was in the right.
The blaring radio has for half a century been the weapons of choice of builders, delivery men, minicab drivers, and oiks on the beach. The flood of iPods and MP3 players in the Noughties has meant that “our sort” – in other words, those who prefer not to make others suffer for their pleasures – have had to endure the rhythmic hiss of recorded music whenever we use public transport (not to mention having to endure other people’s banal mobile phone conversations.)
Strangely, the massed ranks of Hissing Sids aren’t entirely made up of the usual suspects; many of them look like updated, if slightly younger, versions of Richard Vernon’s stockbroker. No doubt, if asked to turn their music down or, preferably, off, the more polite among them would respond, “But I want to hear it”.
I can’t decide why middle class, middle income people have chosen to ape those lower down the social scale. It could be the same cult of selfishness and instant gratification that led to the banking crisis. Or an understandable desire to block out the insistent racket from other people’s headphones. Or just a symptom of the coarsening of public behaviour which a broken society, where the old courtesies and obligations are no longer recognised, inevitably produces.
Or could it be the result of the increasing infantilization of the British people? Maybe these noise leakers haven’t deliberately set out to assert their right to drive fellow-commuters mad, but are in fact locked in a solipsistic universe where magical thinking prevails: if I’m wearing headphones, only I can hear my music. Some small children believe that they can render themselves invisible by placing their hands over their eyes – in other words, if they can’t see other people, other people can’t see them – and perhaps grownups are starting to suffer from a similar delusion.
If middle class commuters follow the grotesque trend of playing music stored on mobile phones out loud, we can probably agree on the trickle-up theory of bad behaviour: if they stick to headphones, we’ll know it’s rampant infantile solipsism.
Whatever the explanation, thank God I no longer have to commute.
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