In 2023, Westminster City Council in London passed one of the most insane busking licenses I’ve ever seen, made even more nuts because the enforcement area included Covent Garden, perhaps the world’s most famous and popular busking pitch, and jewel of Westminster’s public entertainment.
I did a two month investigation into their proposed busking policy, showing that the council had made numerous errors in their calculations, even miscounting the most basic detail: the number of complaints they had received.
They also misrepresented where their problem hotspots were, straight-up lied about certain details and proposed remedies that have absolutely no chance of improving the situation in the borough, while trying to punish the only people in Westminster actually making things better.
Below are a selection of my findings
Initial report
You can read my 56-page report here (pdf). It’s a dense document about busking policy, so interesting probably to nobody other than a select few 🙂
Accompanying videos
In an attempt to make my research watchable, I created four videos examining the different ways the council’s reports about busking absolutely sucked.
How Westminster City Council Lied
How the council is attacking the Street Performer Associations
Apologies the council needs to make
Why the council’s recommendations will fail
I also made a blog post titled “Westminster City Council’s Lies, Errors and Distortions“, detailing the biggest issues I found during my research.
Then, in 2024, when the council finalised its recommendations for improving their busking program, I created another post titled, “Westminster City Council’s Maddening Suggestions on how to ‘Fix’ its Unworkable Busking Policy“
In defence of Amplification
And finally, I was going to create a video titled “In defence of amplification”, making the case that an amp ban would destroy busking in the borough. Unfortunately, I ran out of time. So, instead, here is the audio file, and below is the transcript:
TRANSCRIPT
Some people claim that amplification is an unnecessary luxury, evidenced by the fact that, “when I was young, buskers didn’t have amps”. This is simply not true. First of all, making money nowadays is not an unnecessary luxury, and buskers have been plugging into amps for at least 80 years.
A quick aside. The moment commercial guitar amps hit the market in the 1940s, the blues buskers at the Maxwell Street Market in Chicago started using them. In doing so, they popularised the ‘electric blues’, the genre that soon morphed into Rock and Roll in the 1950s. In other words, we have amplified buskers in the 1940s to thank for the birth of American rock music.
As for the UK, British Rock and Roll started with Lonnie Donegan’s hit song “Rock Island Line”. That song launched Donnegan to fame, and an estimated 30-50,000 bands cropped up all over the country, trying to emulate his sound. That sound was erroneously called “skiffle” music, and its epicentre was, incidentally, in Westminster’s Soho. There weren’t enough stages to contain tens of thousands of skiffle bands, so vast swathes of them took to the streets to busk in the 1950s and early 60s—and yes, they too were amplified.
Here’s McCartney, Lennon and Harrison performing with amplification in their Skiffle group, The Quarrymen. Other skifflers include members of the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, and the Bee Gees, just to name a few.
Rock and roll, then, was hugely influenced—some would even say invented by—amplified buskers between the 1940s and 1960s. After that, in the 1970s and 1980s, Hip Hop, DJing and Breakdancing was invented and popularised, invariably with the help of amplification, on the streets and in the parks of Harlem and the Bronx. That’s three music revolutions over 80 years at the hands of amplified musicians who were transforming Western Culture by performing in densely populated urban centres.
As for today, it would be a physical impossibility for many musical acts to busk without amplification. Breakdancers obviously can’t dance without music, beatboxers need mics to pick up many of their sounds, live loopers can’t loop without digital technology. But it’s not just modern styles. With amplification, the banjo can be swapped for a classical guitar, or even a harp. Singers can be breathy instead of just shouty. Playstyles can be intricate instead of thrashy. And jokes can be whispered instead of yelled. Amps greatly expand the range and diversity of shows that are possible on the street, which is surely to the benefit of everyone, including local residents and businesses.
Of course, all street performers could benefit from the use of amplification, regardless of performance style. Amps are an equaliser across genders (lower male voices travel further through the air than higher female ones), and they enable people with physical disabilities, or people at the upper and lower ends of the age scale to be heard as loudly as everyone else. They also protect performers from injury. Many older street performers that I know suffer from presbyphonia, that hoarse and raspy quality to the voice that identifies someone who’s been forced to shout their whole life. Amp bans literally destroy performers’ voices.
So, it’s understandable that street performers are so keen to amp up. I asked a local busker called Heavy Metal Pete how many of the Westminster buskers use amplification. “My estimate,” he said, “based on my strolls around, is that it would be virtually all of them.”