Campaigner wages quiet battle for sound of silence

Nigel Rodgers is in hell. A campaigner against piped music for decades, he stands in a shoe shop in London’s Oxford Street that is blaring out loud pop music, wincing visibly.

“It’s just as bad as passive smoking,” said the 63-year-old, sporting a blue blazer with a red handkerchief in the top pocket and eagerly eyeing the exit.

“It really is enough to drive most people bonkers if they have got any sensitivity at all.”

Rodgers has campaigned against the canned music, which is common in British shops and other public spaces, for 24 years, but his group Pipedown recently scored its biggest success yet.

One of the country’s top department stores, Marks & Spencer, said it would stop playing music after a letter-writing campaign by hundreds of Pipedown’s 2,000 members.

Now the group hopes to persuade other major retailers to follow suit as sister organizations emerge around the world, including in Germany and the United States.

Rodgers is far more comfortable sipping a cup of tea in the relative calm of the Marks

It really is enough to drive most people bonkers if they have got any sensitivity at all.”

Nigel Rodgers, complaining about the loud music being played in a London shoe shop

& Spencer cafe a few doors down on London’s busiest shopping street.

Here, he gently explains how he believes the mechanization of society has turned up the volume on the modern world, causing health problems like hearing damage and raised blood pressure.

“We live in a continuously noisy environment,” he said. “We’re being artificially stimulated all the time in a way we’re not designed to.”

Rodgers, who also writes books on art, history and philosophy, founded Pipedown when he was 38 after becoming frustrated by piped music in a restaurant where he was dining with a girlfriend.