Clubs

Clubbers like it that way; we feel that we’re more involved when the volume’s cranked up, living more intensely in the music and the moment. And like a drug; the more you have, the more you want. DJs are often prime abusers, whacking the dials up to 11 before they even start. The fact that this may lead to hearing aids (or comedy ear trumpets) decades before you dreamed that such signifiers of senility were your due is alarming. And wrong.

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Personally I blame The Stone Roses, the Beastie Boys and Moby – in his techno days at least. Because when I photographed them performing live, the only place to do it was to right in front of the speaker stacks, and when The Stone Roses played at Spike Island in 1990 those stacks were about 15 metres high. But I blame other people too, like the ‘mates’ who shout and scream into your lugs. The one person I forgot to blame along the way was myself: why didn’t I get earplugs and protect my hearing? Don’t I want to be able to hear music (and other people) properly anymore? Trouble is, back in the ’80s we were more paranoid about catching AIDS than hearing aids…

I’ve been aware of the dangers for years, and I never felt like Neil Boorman (aka DJ Shoreditch Twat), so used to it that ‘if my ears weren’t ringing all the way home then I hadn’t had a good night out.’ When I went to Harder! Faster! Louder!, a noisecore night run by Matthew Glamorre (of Kash Point) in ’97 I wore earplugs, just as the signs told us to. Mr Glamorre did too but, he laments, ‘The reason I’m half-deaf in both ears is that I forgot mine one night and I had no time to nip to the loo and make earplugs from toilet tissue. That was it for me: no clubbing for 18 months. The next club I did was a classical music night.

‘The music may be harmful but the worst thing is people shouting,’ he adds. ‘I tell people to quieten down because anything that they’re telling me is not worth going deaf for. You should never, ever go out without earplugs.’

Still, if I don’t always practice this approach, I can still preach. My nephew is an up-and-coming drum’n’bass jock (DJ Swindle!) so naturally we talked earplugs because every D&B fan knows that dedicated soundsystems like Valve are probably the loudest around. Uncle Dave’s Google search led to the excellent site, www.sensorcom.com, and he, being younger and wiser than me, followed it up and went to Beckenham to have moulds of his inner ears custom made. This 15-minute process costs about £80 for the moulds and filters which can be used to reduce specific frequencies, usually centred around 4khz (the high-middle range), the area of the hearing spectrum which typically gets damaged first. Alternatively, a pair of attenuating Music Safe earplugs (one size-fits most shell-likes), is about £20. Hidden Hearing, at 71 Duke Street, W1, offers similar services in the centre of town.

Richard Frankson, manager at Sensorcom, admits that people working in loud environments may not suffer hearing damage. ‘It’s a bit like smoking. Some people can puff 60-a-day for years without apparent damage but most can’t.’ If you do lose your lose hearing though, you really can’t buy it back, which is why many DJs and musicians have custom-made earplugs. Ben Watt got his five years ago (probably prompted by the screaming crowds at Lazy Dog) and reckons he uses them 80 per cent of the time in clubs.

‘It’s All Gone Pete Tong’, the cautionary tale of a DJ who goes deaf due to long-term exposure to loud music, ‘scared the life out of DJs’, according to its star, Paul Kaye. ‘They’re very aware now that they need to take care.’

This quote, along with many more celebrity citations from Danny McNamara of Embrace to Moby, is included in the Royal National Institite for the Deaf-run campaign, ‘Don’t Lose The Music,’ working in conjunction with Sensorcom. Their site (www.dontlosethemusic.com) is well worth checking out if my cautionary tale has struck a chord. Because you don’t want to lose the music, treat yourself to an ear trumpet or be shouting ‘Sorry, I can’t hear you!’ for the rest of your life.