OUT on patrol in Worcester the other day, I bumped into a certain well-known city musician who down the years has played in any number of venues great and small.

I asked him how the gigging scene was and the answer came back that it was about as quiet as it could be. In fact, he’d never known it so bad.

Yes, there was work of a sorts but it didn’t pay the kind of money that could keep a guitar player in strings, petrol and perhaps a pint of bitter during the interval, let alone make any profit.

We swapped stories. I recalled how, as a youngster, I would play most weekends in workingmen’s clubs. The first set would be country and top 10 covers, then came the bingo, followed by nonstop rock ‘n’ roll.

This was the best bit as my group would do a costume change for this, dressing in teddy boy drape jackets. Yes, they were great days.

More than 40 years later, most of those workingmen’s clubs have gone. They depended on a British manufacturing industry to supply the working people who wanted a few simple pleasures on a Saturday night. A few drinks, chicken in the basket, bingo… and maybe a bit of a knees-up to a live band. But this has all but vanished. British industry has been allowed to decline, many pubs are having difficulty making ends meet, and shows like X Factor concentrate on vocal rather than instrumental prowess.

However, there is one single factor above all other that has caused this catastrophic decline in popular culture. And that is the 2003 Licensing Act, the full effects of which are now being felt right across the country.

Venues are closing up and down Britain and all because of a measure that was devised solely to raise money for the Treasury. The law was tightened up, the levy drastically increased, and the paperwork rendered impenetrable.

It became just too much hassle and many licensees decided to invest in wide screen which didn’t require anything other than the TV licence.

Of course, we have the last government to thank for this. And how ironic that the party which sucked up to any rock star it could slither alongside has now been responsible for the near-death of the greatest popular movement of the last 60 years.

As 1980s star Feargal Sharkey observed in a recent article in the Guardian, the Beatles could never happen now. What a terrible indictment for the country that gave so much to the world.