Ties out, chaps, we've got some stranglin' to do

The final throttling of Top Of The Pops' twitching, broken body is only to be expected. The Suits have had their ties out ready to strangle music for some time now.

David Cameron slammed hip hop for encouraging knife and gun crime, which is a predictable return to Michael Howard's covert racist agenda. Cameron said you have to say these things even though you may get "a lot of bricks thrown at you". Now there's an idea.

>Soundalike Aphex Twin

So the Tories are going to ban black music. Shocking things are afoot in the House Of Lords too - Lord Beaumont is trying ban the use of muzak and TV in public places. The tellybox I can cope without, but piped music is an artform in itself. The best kind is when the CD sticks and you're bobbing away to a soundalike Aphex Twin in the middle of Nando's.

Public music can grate, but only when trendy young things play wonderfully-produced r 'n' b through mobile phone speakers at the back of the bus; one of these days, a sound engineer is going to stab their ears off.

>Artistic arms

Thank goodness we have Sometimes Records and their Volume events. They recently stretched their artistic arms around the whole of the Green Room.

So Simon DJed Weezer and Marie DJed Duran Duran (probably - I wasn't listening, sorry). One art group had decked out a side room with Norman Mailer and Jack Kerouac books set neatly beside a beautiful selecton of hats.

TheyBreakInPieces used binaural mics, which go in your ears, to transmit a mesmerising symphony of ping-pong balls, scrapes, echoes and body movement. Sam from Sam And The Plants played accordian and guitar alongside short video pieces of leaves and forest junk set to gun shots and explosions.

Drunken Chorus introduced us to The Friend We Never Knew in a theatre piece that was warm and funny. And Dan Amos got pissed and treated us to a karaoke run-through of his Thunderheart album.

>Bloody awful

Maybe we are approaching the day that music dies. Personally, I thought that happened when Madonna did that bloody awful Don McLean cover. But in an age where the Man is doing his best to throttle good music, may people like Sometimes Records continue to be a neck brace in a world of stranglers.

I may need to rethink that metaphor.