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Very jolly evening listening to the music of Lloyd Webber recently. Real trip down memory lane with a few lesser-known tunes thrown in. LW writes everything from feisty to gentle, from robust to sentimental, from mind-blowing to heart-stirring. He has the skill of creating a tune and developing it over and over so that we become captivated by it. Mozart did the same, with a different genre of music, but the underlying seduction was almost identical.

It should have been more fun than it was for two reasons. It is self-evident that the performance of such music must be sensitive both to the subject and to the melody if it is to work its magic fully. Unfortunately, this did not happen.

Everything from Superstar’s “I don’t know how to love him..” to the tender Pie Jesu from the Requiem Lloyd Webber wrote for his father was belted out at full throttle and without any sense of feeling. If we’d been on the highway we’d have killed someone. As it was, only the songs got murdered.

But I am not playing the role of critic and my complaint is mainly for the other reason the evening was spoilt – volume. Of course, sensible people now take ear-plugs everywhere, as do I. Not many people remember, however, and I wonder how they can stand the pain of the volume – because it does produce real physical agony. When I enquire, I am told that the young lose their hearing so early that only massive beat and noise can penetrate their battered ear drums.

Excessive noise increases deafness, the volume has to be turned up and so the cycle perpetuates itself. Now we have evidence of a further cause of youthful hard of hearing – cigarette smoke. A study of over 1500 US teens aged 12 to 19 suggests that secondhand tobacco smoke directly damages young ears. The greater the exposure the greater the damage.

There is a legal limit to the amount of noise we can make but it is regularly flouted in public places, restaurants, clubs, discos and elsewhere. Noise makes people aggressive, partly because to deal with it they have to shout, an act of aggression in itself, and partly because it increases adrenaline, which is, of course, why it is done. One of the prime causes is the personal music player. Plugged into your ear it cuts you off from worries; turn it up and the outside world seems to disappear.

The time has come to tone down the volume, to relearn the sound of sensitive melody, to hear the music of words spoken beautifully. In a voicemail the other day I mentioned the soul. You will not locate it if the equivalent of a pneumatic drill is pounding your hearing much of the time.  Let us complain about excessive noise wherever we hear it. Let us demand a reasonable volume level in places of entertainment. If we don’t, nobody else will.

That or invest in a hearing aid. It’s your choice.