

For whom the whistle blows ... the Flute of Shame

I was visiting Amsterdam's Torture Museum the other day - as you do, when it's raining and you've reached saturation point with sex, drugs and the little men selling tulips and asking for money to take your photo - when a fiendish little device caught my attention. It was called the Flute of Shame, a medieval instrument of torture used for the express purpose of punishing bad musicians.

The contraption, which does indeed look like a flute, although you really wouldn't want to try and play it, was hung around the neck of an offender whose fingers would be stuck through the flute, rendering the offending muso unable to play. As if this wasn't enough punishment for the heinous crime of performing an earlobe-bashing melody or - equally punishable - "offending public morals'" the 'orrible little miscreant would also be forced to parade around the streets, where he or she would receive a pelting of rotten fruit and the kind of verbal humiliation with which James Blunt is familiar.

My first response to the device - "What a horrible little gadget" - was quickly superseded by: "What a brilliant idea!" Just imagine what it would be like if we hadn't gone all soft in these cosy, iPod, MySpace and in-car air-con times; if we had stuck with medieval concepts of morality and punishment and had been more vigilant against dastardly crimes against music - were an instrument like the Flute Of Shame still in active use today, prog-rock may never have happened. Phil Collins may have been physically prevented from leaving the drum stool in Genesis to launch that Godawful solo career. Dire Straits may not have been given Money for Nothing. The Darkness might have been restrained from appearing onstage on large rubber sexual organs. Radiohead would never have made anything but entirely listenable albums, and the world need never have even been troubled by the tinnitus-inducing rackets made by people like Sinitta, Avril Lavigne or the 173,908 bands who sound like under-the-counter copies of Arctic Monkeys or Libertines. While our Sunday afternoons are generally spent watching overpaid Premiership footballers in the pub, we could be having hours of much cheaper fun hurling rotten tomatoes at the Kooks.

Alas, the government appears to have far more pressing troubles than reinstating the Flute Of Shame. But while we wait for Gordon Brown to stop dithering over crime and tackle the real criminals - those producing twiddly-twiddly guitars solos or wailing though Stevie Wonder songs in front of Sharon Osbourne - how about some of your suggestions for musicians who should be first for the Flute treatment? Here are some of mine:

1) Pete Doherty. An easy target, maybe, but let's face it, no crack-abusing musician with a silly hat who comes up with such bad druggy puns as Pipe Down should ever escape the Flute Of Shame.

2) Amy Winehouse. Not for her oft-discussed "lifestyle" or, admittedly, top-notch music, but for those appalling combinations of tiny tops, red bras and hideous tattoos, which appear in the papers every day halfway through your breakfast. Truly, an outrage against public morals and boiled eggs.

3) The Mars Volta. If ever a band were invented just to wear the Flute, this is that sorry combo. Twiddly-twiddly solos? Check. Prog-rock orchestral pomposities? Check. Songs about "Toltec bones" and "antlers"? Check. The Flute it is, chaps.

4) Anyone who has ever appeared on The X Factor, ever. Instead of the current format, wide-eyed wannabes should be made to warble before a Flute-wielding executioner and an audience specially supplied with old tomatoes and rotten eggs. If the scheduled song to be sung is by Stevie Wonder or Marvin Gaye, they should just be put in the Flute anyway. As should Sharon Osbourne, Louis Walsh and Simon Cowell, now I come to think of it.

5) Those nerdy, bespectacled electronic music types who call tracks things like pik - Mi -Ar$e676 and usually dream of recording for Warp Records. Go away and never trouble music again, you anally retentive, tunefully challenged, navel-gazing bores.

7) All bands with silly names. The latest in a disreputable line are a new combo We Smoke Fags. Not with your musically criminal 'orrid little fingers in the Flute, you don't.

8) Any musician called Sir who is over 60. Begone you horrible karaoke jukebox former legends, your time was up in 1977... and we still haven't forgiven you for the trousers you were wearing in 1975. Or The Frog Chorus.

9) The Courteeners, for that ridiculous "We're what the world is waiting for" stunt in Q, then turning out to be a Mancunian Arctic Monkeys with a chip shop on each shoulder.

10) Robbie Williams, for being Robbie Williams.