Wiltshire Police: fear of music

Bucks Fizz won acclaim in Europe with the instruction that you gotta speed it up, then you've gotta slow it down.

Luckily, they didn't try to pull that in Wiltshire, as it was the speeding up and slowing down which led a panicked Wiltshire Police to force magistrates to ban Babyshambles from Moonfest:

Police were afraid security was not strong enough to contain the 5,000 set to attend.

They feared the band's tendency to "speed up and then slow down the music" could create a "whirlpool effect" and spark disorder.

A whirlpool effect? Sucking in everything for miles around? You can see why they want to stop that from happening.

It's not, stress the Wiltshire Force, that they're against fun:

Superintendent Paul Williams, of Wiltshire Police, said the application had come following Doherty's solo performance at London's Royal Albert Hall which was marred by crowd trouble.

He said: "It is very unusual for the Royal Albert Hall to have to request police assistance, which on that occasion they did.

"He (Doherty) just whipped up the crowd and there was disorder.

"We are not killjoys and we help organisers with many events throughout the year and some are much larger than this one."

Not, of course, that they have these dangerous whirlpools.

Chief Superintendent Julian Kirby added: "We carried out an analysis of what Pete Doherty and his band does.

"What he does as part of his routine is to gee up the crowd. They speed up and then slow down the music and create a whirlpool effect in the crowd.

"They (the crowd) all get geed up and then they start fighting."

Geeing up the crowd, eh? Clearly, if you want to play Wiltshire, you should avoid making any sort of excitement within the crowd.