Quiet battle for the sound of silence in UK shops

LONDON: Nigel Rodgers is in hell. A campaigner against piped music for decades, he stands in a shoe shop on London’s Oxford Street which 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 and 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 take off 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 and Spencer cafe a few doors down on London’s busiest shopping street.

Here, he gently explained 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 aged 38 after becoming frustrated by piped music in a restaurant where he was dining with a girlfriend.

The group kept growing and, as well as letter writing campaigns, many supporters now go shopping armed with cards complaining — politely of course — about piped music which they hand to shop workers.

“It’s not just a matter of one or two neurotics — it’s a much bigger problem,” Rodgers said.