I’ve always been partial to buskers. I’m sympathetic to beggars of most kinds – except the aggressive rotters, of which there are relatively few – as they enable us to actually show kindness as a daily action rather than merely show off on social media about ‘empathy’. If you can beg and play a merry tune at the same time, all the better.

Buskers are often talented; I met composer Robin Watt when he was a busker, and I’ve often been amazed by the brilliance of the girl singers who frequent Brighton’s East Street restaurant quarter in the summertime. Looking at the state of the Top 20, infested with cruise ship moo-ers like Sam Smith and Adele, I’d say that there’s probably more talent on the streets right now than there is in the charts. So I’m not sympathetic to those people in Norwich who, according to the Daily Mail, are complaining about being bothered by ‘sub-standard and tone-deaf musicians, many of whom crank their amps up too high, drowning out conversations up to 150ft away.’

As anyone who’s ever watched The X Factor knows, really bad singers are terrifically entertaining

What’s wrong with these people? Have they no sense of humour? As anyone who’s ever watched The X Factor knows, really bad singers are terrifically entertaining. I’m one myself; I love to sing as I work at my steaming machine in the anteroom at the charity shop where I volunteer, and when I hear customers tittering, I sing even louder. Hearing a drunkard singing is one of life’s great aural pleasures – and of course produced one of the season’s loveliest songs, Fairytale of New York.

Norwich is, apparently, one of the few places in Britain which doesn’t require street performers to have a licence; now, thanks to the killjoy contingent, they are reviewing this. Those in favour of this move who spoke to the Mail seem a dismal lot; a man who used to run a pet-food stall moaned ‘It is a nightmare listening to them every day. Some only know about six songs, which they sing over and over up to ten times a day each. One only sings stuff by Take That.’ If you can’t appreciate the oeuvre of Take That – one of the greatest pop groups of the twentieth century – then your taste must be right down there with the rancid tang of your pet-food. Some are stuck up. A classical guitarist whined:

‘I’ve been busking less and less and one of the main reasons is a couple of very loud buskers who stay on the same pitch all day and dominate the city centre. We call them “bully buskers” because they force everyone else out.’

I must admit that when I hear the word ‘bully’ these days, I reach for my BS-detector; it’s been weaponised to the degree where most people using it (like those wussy civil servants who complain about being ‘bullied’ by various Tory Home Secretaries) are simply over-privileged poltroons too used to getting their own way and offended when anyone talks back to them.

It’s telling that one of the people the Mail spoke to who is against the curtailing of busking has a name which might indicate that they come from a more repressive country. Jin Lim said charmingly: ‘It is generally a happy sound to have in the background. Some of it is very good and I prefer to have it instead of listening to nothing.’ While a cheerful young professional musician chirped: ‘Norwich is one of the last places in the country where you don’t need a licence. I would like to see it stay like that. I know people have moaned. But the market has been there since Iceni times and it has existed side-by-side with bards, buskers and even prostitutes. If they bring in licences for buskers in Norwich, I will not try and get one. People should be allowed to go out and sing.’

What a lovely, lively, live-and-let-live attitude – unlike the Mail reader who complained online about the ‘rude, disrespectful buskers who turn their amps up so loud that kids in the street are covering their ears.’ If you want to talk public disturbance, let’s talk about ‘kids’ in public places, especially badly behaved brats in restaurants and spoilt little swine screaming their heads off in supermarkets. I, for one, would be far happier if children under 12 were confined to soft play areas and parks – but I don’t demand that they be banned from the watering holes I frequent because I am not an intolerant busy-body. Though I’m 64 and should be getting grumpier, as I get older I find that intolerant people really get on my wick; I’m especially baffled by clowns who move to dirty, busy cities – and then complain that it’s not like Lark Rise to Candleford. Brighton is full of such silly snobs, moaning about people drinking on the beach, dancing on the lawns and basically pursuing any more exciting outdoor option than walking the dog.

There’s loads of great buskers on YouTube; my favourites include the girls singing Prince’s Kiss on a tube train, the one in Berlin joined by Jimmy Somerville to sing Smalltown Boy and a very young Toni Watson, who went on to be the dance act Tones and I. Her 2020 hit Dance Monkey would go on to outsell the previously top-selling single in her native Australia – Bing Crosby’s White Christmas. Of course, some buskers are neither use nor ornament; Billy Bragg, the world’s worst singer, started out as one, and we all know what sort he’d have been – the kind you pay handsomely to stop murdering Streets of London one more time.

But on the whole, buskers are better there than not. The idea of the less appealing ones being banned from the streets of our cities sits uneasily alongside the crank ambition of a growing number of councils to confine the masses to 15-minute compounds, a sinister idea no matter how you slice it. As James Woudhuysen wrote in Spiked: ‘Advocates like to present 15-minute cities as “people-centred”. But we should be sceptical of these claims, given that they only seem to come from high-placed politicians, wealthy institutions and out-of-touch academics. And it was only after lockdowns that the previously unthinkable idea of confining people to their local areas for the greater good was able to gain currency.’

If our musical beggars are decimated, I think we’ll miss them, as we’ll miss everything which is messily human and has been cleansed in the name of ‘community’ – once such a cheerful word, associated with singing and chests, and now redolent of self-appointed big-mouths speaking for people who haven’t been consulted on the matter at hand. Compared to this cold, controlled vision of our city streets, I think that even endless ghastly renderings of Imagine might be preferable.