NO MUSIC DAY
21 November 2006

Sitting in the greenroom for the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. I’m waiting my turn to be called through to be interrogated by one of this morning’s presenters. I’m shitting it. Still, I’m glad John Humphries is not one of this morning’s presenters.

The Today programme is something I have been listening to every weekday morning for at least the last 30 years of my life. Well, maybe not every morning but every morning that I have spent the night in my own bed. To listen to the Today programme makes you feel you are part of the democratic process of the country without having to do a thing. Whoever holds the levers of power – the Prime Minister of the day, the captains of industry, the great, the good and the bad – are all hauled in and called to account. TheToday programme is one of the few reasons to feel proud to be British, without feeling guilty at the same time.

I got here just before 8.00. I was told I was to be in the slot just after 8.20 but some international breaking news has pushed my fluff item back to about 8.50. This gives me time to collect my thoughts and make some notes.

Today is No Music Day. The second annual No Music Day. Over the past week the idea of No Music Day seems to have snowballed. Scores of requests for interviews have come in from around the globe, most of them asking the same questions and mostly I give the same answers.

What has surprised me is that no one has challenged me about the validity of today being No Music Day. No authority has come along and told me that I have not asked permission, have not filled out the right forms, not paid the subscriptions to whoever is in charge of allotting the days. I mean, I just made up this No Music Day thing. Declared it to be, and now it is. People might disagree with it, think it is a pile of rubbish, a publicity-seeking stunt, but nobody has actually told me to stop it or that I can’t do it or …

And here I am about to go on the Today programme, the To-fucking-day programme, to discuss it with James Naughtie. Yes, it’s true that this year I did put out a press release about it, but I wasn’t expecting to get the response it has been getting. Maybe now there is so much media space to be filled they are all desperate for any content to fill it. But I haven’t launched any sort of campaign. No adverts anywhere. No tie-in events. That last statement is not quite true. Resonance FM, the London-based art radio station, has embraced it and all the programme-makers have been instructed to make programmes for today that don’t involve any music. So I suppose that is a tie-in event.

This morning, before I got the tube to the BBC, I put ‘No Music Day’ into Google. There were more than 36,000 entries. This, for some reason, seems to have hit a bigger nerve than the money burning. I started skimming the thousands of blogs and messageboards where it was being discussed. Out there in webland were countless people who seemed to have more idea why there should be a No Music Day, and what it signified, than I did. Fierce debates, jibes, ridicule, appreciation, thoughts, angles, propositions and people getting their facts wrong. No, I was not the lead singer of The KLF. No, I’m not a music business insider. No, I’m not about to release a CD. There are people out there who seem to be able to argue the case for No Music Day far better than me. They should be in here doing the interview on the Today programme.

Of course I’m flattered by the attention it’s getting, that it’s being taken seriously by some and also as a bit of fluff – a here-today, gone-tomorrow news item.

Last week I added some text to nomusicday.com. These are some of the words:

No Music Day is an aspiration, an idea, an impossible dream, a nightmare.
There are as many reasons for marking No Music Day as there are people willing to observe it – or reject it.
No Music Day has nothing to sell.
There is no mission statement.

As for the thousands of entries on the site, maybe over the next few days I should go through them, pick out some of the ones I like, including some of the ones that lampoon the whole notion of the thing, and add them to the end of this chapter.

Three other people were in the greenroom with me. They were all waiting, like me, to be called through to be interrogated by the nation’s defenders of democracy. One was a very high-flying, academic-looking woman. She spent her time in the greenroom reading and rereading her notes, so that she would be totally prepared for whatever questions were thrown at her. Then there was the man who I was convinced was a member of the Tory shadow cabinet. But he is not. He is in being interviewed now. From what I can make out through the glass, he was abandoned as a child, then abused in an orphanage and now he is campaigning for the rights of young people who are thrown out of such places at the age of 16 to the mercy of our cruel world, expected to survive and prosper while keeping on the right side of the law.

Suddenly No Music Day seems trivial and silly. And once again I am asking myself why I’ve not done anything with my life that matters. Something for the common good. But it is too late now as I am being beckoned through to the studio. It is time for me to justify myself to the nation. Or at least try and put over as succinctly as possible what No Music Day is and why it should exist.