Sunday 10 January 2010

'Local colour'

Park Lane bus interchange, nearby me in Sunderland, is pumping out music on some sort of PA system audible to all around the station, whether walking through as I do, or waiting for a bus: on the way into town it was some old-time oompah music (even including backing vocalists stating "oom-pahs") and on the way back home it was "Shakin' All Over" by Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. This today, on a blustery, Siberian Sunday in Sunderland. This has been policy for a while now - certainly most of last year - and this extends to buses being 'named'. A friend's bus to Ryhope is now known as 'Drifter', bizarrely. Who decided this? What sort of mindsets and policies were at work?

Very odd indeed, music being piped out (at a not overbearing, but decisively dominant, volume) in a bus station. An attempt to 'rally the troops', to make it a public space in the today's sense: which means constant exterior stimulus and background noise.

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