RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30959, 15 January 1966, Page 38

RANDOM REMINDER

BEAT THE RETREAT

Its a fortnight now, since the year began and the din is just starting to die away. We are referring, of course, to the drums and bagpipes, both of which seem to fill the air from about a week before Christmas until a week after the New Year. This is not the time and the place to go into the merits of the bagpipe, although it is relevant to recall that the Education Department, which can be expected to give a lead in such matters, regards neither the drum nor the bagpipe as a musical instrument; both are excluded, as being non-musical, from the items eligible for subsidy in schools’ music. Our principal objection to the

bagpipe is that it is played too loud, by too many, too close to the listener’s ear. Because pipe bands very often go out to entertain, and to supplement their financial resources, just before Christmas, and naturally they seek out places where people are grouped together such as hotel bars It is very often difficult to conduct a conversation on orthodox lines in a hotel bar, at the best of times. But when the wail of the pipes is thrown in, it is blasphemous. We have also had a close association with the drum, for someone near us acquired a full set—including the cymbals—about Christmas time. And hardly

an hour of the day is not shredded by sound. Sleep is shattered—as early as nine or ten in the morning—by the racket, and the best one can do is lay there working out what role the drum happens to be playing. Sometimes the best is easily recognisable as the muffled message of the M’Bongo S’Ongo witchdoctor from his surgery, at others it holds the urgent note of war. Next day it might be Gene Krupa, or his more modem equivalent, or the marshalling of the British Square preparatory to invasion by .the Fuzzy-Wuzzies. The drummer is a man of parts, and moods. And we’re getting with him, in the moods.