Public Entertainment Licences in Glasgow

All over my twitter stream and Facebook feed Glaswegians are up in arms about the council's implementation of a change in the Public Entertainment Licence laws whereby the Scottish Parliament has devolved power down to local authorities to decide whether or not free events need to pay for an Public Entertainment Licence. Originally the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982 had the text:-

In this section, “place of public entertainment” means any place where, on payment of money or money’s worth, members of the public are admitted or may use any facilities
for the purposes of entertainment or recreation...

But now the Criminal Justice and Licensing (Scotland) Act 2010 has removed the bit about payment of money. According to MSP Nicola Sturgeon, its up to local councils' discretion as to whether to charge free events and event modify which sorts of events are except, not the
Scottish parliament.

I think the idea behind it was to enable councils to clamp down on free 'raves', which is kind of twenty five years too late

Anyhoo, I'm a bit far away from the action, but with a a few spare minutes I went through the websites of all the unitary authorities in Scotland and put together this google docs spreadsheet indicating which only require events where the public has to pay to have entertainment licences and which ones require all events.

Its thrilling stuff, I'm sure you'll agree.

Of the 32 unitary authorities, only three make reference to the change in legislation, 19 of them only require a licence for events where the public has to pay.

As a side note, quite a few of them use EUGO the European Union point of single contact to administer Public Entertainment Licences.

And also a great chunk of the councils have just cut and pasted the text from the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982, as can be seen from the use of the phrase "on payment of money or money’s worth", but some change it to "monies" which is incorrect and a minor point of pedantry. A swath of the one's which use EUGO have copied and pasted the text from EU website "If your premises are used as..."

What if... The Stone Roses

So, the other night I read that The Stone Roses are set to reform and play a series of shows next summer. Being from the appropriate era, I felt the urge to listen to their songs, and cued them up on my knackered iPod, and spent my entire nine hour night-shift listening to four songs, Waterfall, This is the One, I Am the Resurrection and Love Spreads.

My mind started boggling a wee bit with ideas.

How about a campaign to get The Foz to be Xmas Number One? It's this discordant secret track at the end of their Second Coming album, just them messing about in the studio, never released a single, but it would be so perfect compared to the currently mooted campaign to get Smells Like Teen Spirit re-issued.

Anyhoo, so I was listening to those four tracked that I happened to have on my iPod, on repeat cos the pod's broken, and I had a thought about what the reunion tour would be like.

Would they be playing just their twenty year old hits and an obligatory new song? Would Brown and Squire be playing any of their respective solo tracks? Would The Stone Roses start writing new songs and have a new album?

There's this story about when Oasis played Knebworth, Noel Gallagher got John Squire up cos he wanted to show him what The Stone Roses could have had if they hadn't imploded.

Undoubtedly the reformed Stone Roses could draw a crowd like that now, but how about if they just played it as though The Stone Roses hadn't split in 1996? If the band in the studio just carried on where they left off, Squire's Seahorses songs remixed, rewritten, respun as the Stone Roses, with Ian Brown, Reni and Mani, doing vocals, drums and bass. What if Ian Brown's FEAR, Corpses in their Mouths and My Star were respun with the rest of the Stone Roses playing.

Sure, we accept that The Seahorses and Ian Brown's Solo stuff was successful in its own right, but what could it have been, Could it now become?

And then, once the sins of the past have been atoned for, The Stone Roses could carry on forward with their fourth album, and so on becoming Rolling Stones-like institution that never ends.