Why I Still Go Busking

Something that always tickles me, when I’m out busking, are the people who walk up to my guitar case, have a look inside then walk off again – without making either a comment or a donation. I’ve often wondered why they do it. Perhaps they are a branch of HM Revenue and Customs, trying to get an inside take on this particular section of the (not so lucrative) black market economy.

Or maybe they’re thinking about a career change. In which case, I’d be interested to know what threshold figure they have in mind, in order to chuck it all in and try it themselves. Whatever that figure may be, I imagine my own meagre takings fall well short of what they would consider viable. (But who carries change these days?)

Just as well I don’t do it for the money. I do it for the occasional person who really seems to get it. For that guy. You know, that one person who will sit and listen for a while. And may even tell you they enjoyed it. You can never tell who it’s going to be. Over the years, my guys have come from every imaginable demographic (and I imagine musical taste). Without their interest, I would certainly have called it a day years ago. But here I am, in my sixth decade, plodding along and singing the songs.

If you’ve ever been one of my guys, thank you. Not just from me, but for the thousands of us who carry on without any real prospect of recognition. It is you who gives us that little bit of encouragement to keep going. Your kindness means a lot to us. Please keep doing it. For busking is, though jolly good fun, not as easy as we sometimes make it look.

In common with most performances, you are not so much seeing a gift being flaunted, as the result of many hours of practice. All of which brings life to the high street and puts smiles on faces. Carrying no cost to the communities in which we operate, you might think buskers would be actively encouraged. But across the country, rules have tightened and pitches have vanished.

Dig around on the internet and you will see that a lot of the new rules were introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic. For understandable fear of contagion, you were not allowed to draw a crowd. Local laws were introduced to ensure this couldn’t happen. Fair enough, a sensible idea for its time. The trouble is, now that lockdown is firmly in the past, many towns and cities have left those rules in place.

Time was, you grabbed your guitar, found your pitch and off you went. But now, more and more, you need to pre-book one of an ever-decreasing number of pitches and agree to a set of restrictions that make it all but impossible to get a buzz going in the crowd. And for most places, you need a licence…

To get a licence, you have to agree to certain things. Such as not playing in most places, or for very long. Or very loudly. I say not loudly but one city council has specified a maximum volume of 50 decibels. That might sound like a lot, but once you consider that your average street background noise is between 70 and 80, it puts it into context. Yes, you can play, just as long as no one can hear it.

And this whole amplification thing is a bit misleading, too. Sure, if you play the trumpet you can get by without one. (A trumpet is around 100 decibels.)  Or the violin – again, around 100. Or, arguably, if you use a lower chest voice vocal delivery, you can start to approach that volume. But, as most popular songs don’t use that type of delivery, this is of little help to the unamplified singer.

And as far as playing an acoustic guitar goes. Well, maybe if you strum/ bash the chords as hard as you can, you might just be audible to the odd passerby. But how does that help most buskers? You know, guitar pickers who sing in one of the modern styles. Trust me, without an amp, you will not be heard above street noise.

As a compromise, some councils have introduced rules about the size of the amp you can use (in watts). But power and loudness are not the same thing. You may well instinctively think that a 50 W amp is 10 times louder than a 5 W. But sound just doesn’t work like that. Doubling the volume requires 10 times the power. And, for that matter, when we talk about volume: what part of the volume are we talking about?

Bass notes, being far lower in frequency, need more energy to move them through the air. So, while it is quite possible to hear a 3 W amp screeching away from the other end of the street, a nicely balanced 50 W amp could have a far shorter (and more pleasing) reach.

And anyway, are buskers really that bad? Is turning up a small portable amplifier, so that the performer can actually be heard, really such a terrible thing? After all, they have practiced. Even the ones who might not yet have reached their full potential have practiced for hours. (None of us are all that great at the start. We know that. But we also know that we need to perform in public if we want to get better.)

Oh, and then there’s the time limits. One of the places I still visit requires street performers to move on every fifteen minutes. That means setting up, playing and then completely breaking down your system. Then loading it up on your trolley and leaving. All within a quarter of an hour of arriving.

And then there’s the pitches, which have all got fewer and further between. Although this is generally true across the country, London remains in a class of its own when it comes to limiting the number of available places you can legally play. And, if you discount the pitches that you can’t use an amplifier on (which is, strictly speaking, most of them) it really does become slim pickings. Apparently, this has something to do with the City of London’s history. Having held out from the Norman conquest, it was granted special privileges that it still exercises to this day. (Mainly in the business sector, but also extending onto its streets.) That’s the main reason, in case you were wondering, why large queues of performers wait so patiently for a 30-minute slot in some parts of London. Thirty minutes! After waiting all that time!

And to whose benefit is this seeming crackdown on busking? Surely not the public, who seem perfectly happy for the momentary distraction of a little live music as they pass by. Or the business owners, for whom a lively high street is a draw for their customers. I would suspect that these decisions have been made by a very few people – and not necessarily the people we meet when we’re out busking.

Sure, there are one or two “buskers” who spoil it. Those who just won’t be told. Overly versed in their imagined rights, whilst oblivious to the notion that they may also be subject to some responsibilities. These guys can be a blooming nuisance. But they are few in number. Usually they do it for the wrong reasons. Once they realise that busking isn’t the pot of gold they’d hoped it would be, they soon pack it in.

So why not move those guys on and take a more common sense approach to the overwhelming majority of street performers who genuinely want to entertain? Isn’t the current approach a bit like banning bicycles because one or two of them cause problems?

Considering all these factors, is busking still worth doing? Well, just as long as there’s always that guy to look forward to…yeah…you bet ya!

Me, out busking.