Sorry, I can't feel the noise. Photograph: Sean Smith.
The real story here isn't funky earplugs. During my conversation with the Royal National Institute for Deaf People's Emma Harrison on the Today programme yesterday, it became clear that as well as pushing ear protection, the RNID are calling on the government to establish "a recommended noise exposure limit" at club nights and gigs.
Mandatory noise limits would be a disaster for clubland. What are nightclubs without loud music? Bass and treble both elicit an emotional and physical response, and without decent volume, dance music is toothless. House music has no foundation, dubstep has no dub, and minimal techno sounds like a child hitting a saucepan with a tent peg.
This whole thing strikes me as another salvo in the generation wars. American presidential candidates who took all the cocaine in the world when they were young now vow to squander more billions on the war on drugs; MPs who spent their youth staggering around drinking clubs at Oxbridge now ban happy hours, scrap student grants, bring in smoking bans and will now possibly advocate noise limits. It sometimes seems as if my parent's generation think they used up all the fun in the world and now they have to ration it for everyone else.
What's next? Clubs are dark - why not make everybody wear a miner's helmet in case they fall over? If Justin Timbalike over there sprains an ankle executing a particularly amateur bodypop, should we ban dancing? Staying up late can't be too good for you either. Maybe they could bring back the national anthem at midnight on the BBC, so we all know when to go to sleep?
Mandatory noise limits would destroy the clubbing experience, but they will create job opportunities - a new army of inspectors will be needed to cruise clubland with jackboots and noise meters, checking fun levels. Ideal for anyone too thick for the police or without enough self-respect to be a traffic warden. Or perhaps the task will fall on environmental health officers, currently frittering their time away on real problems, like legionnaires' disease and E coli outbreaks.
I would encourage DJs, and indeed anybody who spends a good part of their lives in nightclubs, to think about getting some earplugs and to protect their hearing as best they can. But it should be voluntary, and the RNID would be better off telling clubbers to go to venues that have invested in clean, well engineered (and yes, loud) sound systems rather than pushing for limits on "da volume", which as any dance music fan knows, should be "pumped up" wherever possible.
