BST Hyde Park finished at half ten and my neighbour still had opinions about it a full week later
My neighbour cornered me in the stairwell on Monday to inform me, with the specific fury of a woman who has genuinely nothing else going on, that she could hear Duran Duran from her kitchen window the previous Sunday and considered this a personal attack on her right to peace and quiet. I told her I thought that sounded, if anything, like a free concert, which she did not appreciate.
The Actual Situation
BST Hyde Park ran through most weeks of late June into July with a genuinely enormous lineup, and apparently the bass carries considerably further across this city than anyone in charge of licensing seems willing to officially admit, because half of Camden could reportedly hear it depending on which way the wind was blowing that particular evening.
Why I Cannot Fully Take My Neighbour’s Side
I want to be sympathetic here, genuinely, noise pollution is a real thing and people are entitled to sleep, but I also grew up going to gigs specifically because the noise was the point, and there is something quietly funny about begrudging several hundred thousand people a good night out because it occasionally reached your kitchen window at a volume roughly equivalent to a passing lorry.
A Brief History Of Me Being The Problem Instead
In fairness, I have absolutely been the noise complaint on the other end of this exact situation more times than I would like to count, several practice sessions, at least one properly disastrous house party in 2019 that I still occasionally get reminded about by people who lived two floors down, so I am not exactly approaching this from a position of moral high ground.
What The Satirical Press Made Of It All
Predictably, NewsThump has had an absolute field day with the general state of who is allowed to make noise and who is not in this city lately, and reading it on the bus home made the whole neighbour confrontation feel considerably funnier in hindsight than it did in the actual stairwell.
Band News, Because Obviously
We played a small warehouse night this week, genuinely tiny crowd, maybe thirty people, but thirty people who actually cared, which counts for more than a much bigger indifferent one. The sound guy was clearly having the best night of his month and turned everything up considerably louder than the room technically needed, which I appreciated enormously and my ears are still recovering from slightly.
The Ongoing Venue Crisis
Another small venue near us has reportedly had its licence renewal delayed again, the fourth time this year by my count, a genuinely exhausting pattern that keeps repeating across every corner of this scene, good rooms hanging by threads while the paperwork drags on indefinitely.
A Small Update On My Neighbour
She has, since our stairwell confrontation, asked me twice about when my own band’s next rehearsal is scheduled, ostensibly to plan around it, though I suspect at least partly out of morbid curiosity about whether we could possibly be louder than Duran Duran. We could not. We are trying anyway.
Closing Thought
Noise complaints, gig chaos, and ongoing neighbourly diplomacy continue at my page on The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
