Blessed may be the cheesemakers. Or even the peacemakers!

Certainly, when it comes to busking, one of the Rev J. Olly Glum’s pet hates is amplifiers of any kind. So he laid down strict rules from the beginning for those poor souls who were press-ganged into being Wayside Serenaders: an electric cable, a device which had batteries, printed circuits of any kind, just the faint whiff of positive and negative terminals, was enough to put him in a semi-incoherent rage.

Then, in a moment of self-doubt, he wondered if he was being a bit harsh…

Thankfully, a book he was reading came to his aid and convinced him that his original gut feeling was the one to go with.

This is the late, very great art critic, novelist and man of wisdom John Berger quoting his friend Ken on a performance by musical hall artists Flanagan and Allen (Here Is Where We Meet. John Berger – Bloomsbury, 2005):

“The microphone is going to kill their art… They talk across the whole theatre and we’re in the middle of them. If they use a mike, this will stop and the public will no longer be in the middle. The secret of music hall artists is that they play defenceless, like we are. A player with a mike is armed!”

The Wayside Serenaders will remain “defenceless”, just like their audience!