It wouldn’t be so bad if the piano was actually in tune, some of the off notes that were coming from it really grinded my ears.

I can only suggest ear defenders as a possible alternative to piano induced mania.

OR… stage a special forces infiltration job to snip the piano wires when nobody is looking.

That will make the bastards mime. Still annoying, but quieter.

when i was in central tel aviv, they seem to have no respect in this way. the cleaners come so early and they make so much noise… also once we were living next to a building that was in construction and every morning at 9am (except shabbat) we woke to the sound of drill hitting concrete… was also jarring as well cos when its hot, if you’re asleep u want to stay asleep otherwise ur just really hot and cant sleep

@Chrispydelic 491165 wrote:

Buy a Barnett Pro Diablo catapault and some 9mm bb ammunition and shut the fuckers up!

if they got the piano and wheel barrow from London it might already have been target hardened.

they’ve got it all backwards FFS anyway.

even with traditional London culture you aren’t supposed to have the old joanna in the market at the crack of dawn – it would piss off the market stall workers who would be still hung over from drinking good London porter the night before and have to be up at a fucking stupid hour dealing with carts of fruit what would roll about everywhere if upset, large quantities of live poultry which used to include the skylark (sent over from EA in some numbers for the posh folk up west to eat until the RSPB was invented and put a stop to it), similar quantities of fish of dubious age and storage quality (and associated pong)

Any oaf stupid enough to wheel in a piano and play it in the middle of the market would be lucky only to be pelted with rotten produce, eventually someone would produce a revolver and discharge live rounds at the instrument or even the player as a strong warning to cease and desist from this practice or “sling yer ‘ook” as they would say. (one reason we got gun control in Bllighty in the early 20th century)

The proper place for the piano was at the pub or any other suitable space after work and this persisted into many areas of London – well until the nationalisation of the London Electricity Board and harmonisation of supply which only happened in the 1960s.

Many London homes had electric, but supplies were often direct current and the “leftovers” from keeping the Underground trains going. the voltage was nominally 200V DC but very variable depending how many trains were in use, contaminated by interference from the trains motors, and often thus unsuitable to power high volume amplifiers, as fluctations in current could burn out the valves.

Worse still, getting a audio amp to work on DC mains often resulted in the metal chassis being connected to one side of the mains to provide audio signal grounding, and thus a great electrocution hazard (such as the frame of the microphone alive to 200V!) this finished off more musicians than drugs in the 20th century! So the only alternative would have been be to haul batteries as heavy as a piano and brimming with unpleasant and corrosive acid, even so all the decent valves had been commandeered by the Post Office for the war to build wireless transmitters and encryption kit.

In comparison, the only hazards of piano playing are (other than RSI I guess) being knocked down by a runaway one, or the lid falling down painfully on the fingers of the player. These were far easier to mitigate against than the use of electronic music kit of the era, hence this instruments long popularity in the last century 😉

With a better selection of songs it would have been perfectly Ok if it started at 12:30 (you could then go to the pub and get a decent lunchtime pint of English ale) but from the1logs description it sounds like some of the worst middle class mockney bullshit imaginable and I would actually be complaining to the Council myself if I’d been prevented from sleeping by it.

I was born in SE London, spent a lot of time there and also have family roots in Essex, so much of my culture and accent is from this area, and I tend to speak with an accent which could be described as “Estuary English” (though with slightly more East Anglian influences nowadays). Also the “knees up round the piano” was widely exported (along with the piano) to Malaya as though they did by then have leccy and the “gram”, there wasn’t always reliable power (still the case!) and folk like to sing in this country and still do.

A while back at work I was told by some senior managers that I should speak more “proper English”, they thought sometimes staff from some foreign nations did not understand me (this is more due to the influence of American English on how native Asians learn our language, and that explaining the working of multi site telephone systems isn’t as straightforward as it seems to non technical people, about 90% of people outside mainland Europe don’t realise what the “R” button is for and/or how to transfer calls – (european folk have been able to do that from home phones for about 30 years). So they wouldn’t understand immediately even if I did speak like David Cameron, and I’d also feel like a twat trying to speak like that.

Incidentally the locals have no problem with trying to understand me, except they initialy think I am from some exotic part of the world until I speak and then they just think I am from Chelmsford or Basildon 😥 Communicating with foreign staff is less of a problem these days, probably due to them watching TOWIE…

@General Lighting 491161 wrote:

I don’t know if Daft can actually play piano or knows someone who can – even if he doesn’t I’m sure that asking amongst the Jewish folk around where he lives would surely unearth a suitably talented person (my cousin can play piano and is Jewish but is usually busy at weekends) but I would be inclined to obtain a suitable piano (even if its a smaller keyboard on a VST) and use loudspeakers to outplay this idiot.

Incidentally every time I hear the piano instrumental in Aeon of Revenge by Andrew Rayel it makes me think of Daft and his mate trying to give away a piano (which seems apt in this situation)

Alternatively Daft who is a real Londoner could write a letter to the Council about how he came to stay and the poorly tuned piano kept him awake, hurt his sensitive ears etc and that he had travelled from London specifically to get some peace and quiet and would actually be in breach of their license as they have caused distress and it wasn’t culturally appropriate etc…

You’re a wise old owl GL, respect man!

the whole fiasco of the piano playing in the first place – it was supposed to represent some allusion to London culture but was completely inaccurate on so many levels…

If Hove is full of Londoners they have probably only come there to get away from outdated stereotypes of Londoners in the first place…

@General Lighting 491343 wrote:

the whole fiasco of the piano playing in the first place – it was supposed to represent some allusion to London culture but was completely inaccurate on so many levels…

If Hove is full of Londoners they have probably only come there to get away from outdated stereotypes of Londoners in the first place…

It’s not that full of Londoners to be fair, it’s just they seem to be the only ones with enough money to be able to buy in Hove! Trouble is, there are so many different stereotypes of Londoners these days that by the law of averages, a few of them will ring true. Stereotypes, for all the negative attention they receive these days, (unless of course the police do it & then they call it profiling – fkin Orwellian double speak!) are borne out of the fact that a (predominantly) large number of people in any social group / race / religion etc will exhibit certain common characteristics / traits that are then used to ‘tar them all with the same brush’ so to speak.

PS: this is the track with the piano bit (from 2:25 onwards) what makes me think of DF and his mates playing a piano in the street (I don’t even know if any of them can play piano lol)

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