Gordon in the morning: Now with Francis Rossi

The story about doctors recommending neck braces for headbangers has got Gordon Smart all annoyed:

IT’S enough to give heavy metal fans a headache.

Health and safety experts want to pull the plug on headbanging – the skull-shaking dance craze which started at a Led Zeppelin gig in 1968.

He's so angry, he's called in Francis Rossi to join him in an anger-swamp:

WHEN I heard that experts are advising headbangers to wear neck braces, I thought it must be a joke.

That, Francis, is because, erm, it was a joke. It was a bit of fluff for the Christmas edition of the British Medical Journal. They weren't actually seriously suggesting that you wear neck braces to heavy rock gigs. It was meant to be lighthearted...

[T]he nanny state would have had a field day with us.

There have been so many times that we’ve nearly decapitated each other by swinging our guitars around our heads.

Even if they weren't joking - which they were, and you're getting all annoyed about something meant as a joke - they're university researchers and not part of the "nanny state", and were only making suggestions, not prescribing rules. But it was a joke anyway.

[T]here’s a difference between taking care of yourself and being totally paranoid in life.

What, you mean like being so paranoid someone writes a tongue-in-cheek article for a Christmas edition of a magazine and you're so blinded by belief that people are trying to do you down that you write an opinion column for a national newspaper? That sort of paranoid?

Not so long ago, RICK (PARFITT) twisted his ankle on stage from rocking out during a gig. What did he do?

He carried on playing and sorted it out afterwards.

If health and safety had been there, no doubt they would have carted him off on a stretcher and kitted the rest of us out with protective bodywear.

Yeah - damn health and safety and their nannying ways, theoretically trying to stop Rick Parfitt from having a nasty injury which might have caused him mobility problems in later life, if they'd been there, whoever "health and safety" might be.

Some people even look on a sore neck and ringing ears the morning after a gig as the sign of a good night.

I wonder if Pete Townshend might like to take Rossi to one side and explain exactly why that might be an especially dangerous thing to say. Somehow, Rossi has managed to take a joke and turn it into something that could potentially persuade people to put their hearing at risk. You'd have thought that Gordon might have had the wit to remove that line.