shhh! tread carefully, for there are killjoys afoot!
2025 may mark the year loud public displays of expression and creativity begin dying off, thanks to security
asides from more biopics, custody battles between corporates over (the progeny of) ai music, and rip-off ticket prices for purpose-built luxury venues masking the slow mass closure of small independent venues for DIY acts, one of the things to look out for in 2025 could be public spaces as they disappear from view.
i’m sure better people have written about this at length – it feels like Dan Hancox’s territory – but i worry that too few people care about the cultural geographies of urban spaces and fewer still about the implications of privatising them.
maybe you see both organised and spontaneous expressions of creativity in town centres as a threat to orderly patterns of behaviour. maybe you wish never again to be around a flashmob, an open air dance class, kids practising freestyle raps on buses, religious preachers, parkour, skateboarding, or busking if you can help it.
still, a space no one owns outright is necessarily one which everyone must share. and who are we to tell others how to navigate such a space? sure, we need rules to tell ourselves how not to act in shared spaces for safety’s sake; i do not endorse playing random pranks on unsuspecting members of the public. but i will assert that any objections you may have with the aforementioned activities speaks to a mild discomfort at best, which we should prevent from dictating authorities’ reactions to creative expression in shared spaces. otherwise we end up with paid security staff in shopping malls enforcing the will of commercial landlords under the pretence of preserving public safety. this thought was brought to my attention watching one of Lady Leshurr’s recent YouTube video releases.
Set Up Chicks is amongst the latest of a slew of music videos over the past decade in which Lady Leshurr acts out her song lyrics in a single take, often in outdoor spaces as others go about their business. in this episode, she is doing just that in a shopping mall somewhere, giving classic Leshurr energy. however, towards the end of the song, a security guard appears to approach her to try to stop her. she is just about able to complete her performance thanks to the interventions of a person i assume is part of her entourage.
the guard’s actions seem benign, but they left a chilling impression on me, still. i know that they were just doing their job. but what that represents irks me. my grievance is more than a ‘how could you not know who Lady Leshurr is?’ type complaint; i doubt they would have behaved differently if it were a musician they had heard of. it is the total absence of discretion in their actions that i find disturbing.
granted, it is almost certainly because their jobs depend on it. but i view it as the thin end of a repressive wedge designed to limit unpredictable, unusual-seeming behaviours in public spaces, especially loud ones; choreographing Lady Leshurr’s type of performance requires loudspeakers positioned out of camera shot but within close proximity of the performer(s), to sync the official audio (added in the editing process) with the video.
in other words, Lady Leshurr and her team were making a racket. to the shopping mall’s security team, this puts her stunt in the same bracket as the flashmobs, dance classes, freestyle bus raps, religious preachers, parkour, skateboarders, and buskers, that we brits have decided to silence somewhere along the line. in the last decade or so, our political class has successfully repositioned humans making noise as a polluting activity, whether via political protest where it ‘may result in serious disruption to the activities of an organisation carried on in the vicinity or have a significant impact on people in the vicinity of the protest’, or anything else under the guise of Public Space Protection Orders – introduced ostensibly for the purpose of shielding people from anti-social behaviour – which grant local authorities arbitrary powers to shut down over ‘ANY activity which they consider “detrimental” to the local environment’.
that the state comes down harder on noise than it does on exhaust gas emissions is testament to the nature of noise-making as an intolerable side-effect of some unproductive, even anti-productive activity, compared with, say, black carbon, the ill effects of which are a price worth paying for the eternal combustion that fuels modern living. and private security firms enforce these powers because what we would recognise as public spaces are increasingly privatised for the benefit of commercial enterprises. under the ancient british obsession with the sacredness of private property, he who owns the space makes the rules. hence security guards chasing musical artists around shopping mall spaces on the bidding of commercial landlords.
i find it utterly deplorable. deplorable that these killjoy merchants service the latent paranoia of faceless retail rentiers. deplorable that the creative expression of a Lady Leshurr – or anyone for that matter – needs permission to traverse urban spaces with a bit of vim and verve. and deplorable to prioritise sterile ambiences over joyous displays of raucousness. in cities, the absence of unwanted noise is not silence. it is the constant humming whirring and pounding of engines, cranes, diggers, and the like, all in service of some tedious consumer monoculture.
but here we are in 2025, finding more ways to give creative artists outside of the 1% grief about unauthorised live performances, while accepted forms of protests become parades and parades become weak sauce corporatised guff of no consequence to anyone. think of an Ed Sheeran soundalike contest in your local town centre as the only acceptable form of busking left, or a La Senza sponsored bra-burning act of feminist independence outside of one of their stores. in these local environments, mime might be the only interesting type of street act left to us.
this may be the year we begin to notice loud and proud public displays of expression and creativity withering away, thanks to britain’s many private security armies. but we won’t be safe from noise. the dull thrumming of engines, cranes, tinny speakers playing chart pop fodder, and – worst of all – the sound of inane chat on smartphones will still fill the air. and we will be worse off for it. the future of public activity in our outdoor spaces should not resemble that Dom Joly joke!