FOR many years my wife and I, on a weekend, and my friends and I, on Friday evening, would go to Urmston centre for a quiet pint.

Chat about the day and put the world to rights in one of the many great and ever growing pubs we have here. It became a regular thing for us and we would really enjoy our little Urmston pub crawl.

However, now we can’t step foot in a pub without the ‘open mic’ers’ blasting us out! We can no longer talk and end up shouting and going home with sore throats and ear ache. Surely if we wanted to listen to live music we would go to a live music venue!

This open mic craze we are now suffering is not only a nuisance to us ‘regulars’ but it’s also ruining things for local bands.

Bands are no longer getting booked to play at local pubs because the open mic gang have taken over and are dominating every pub! For free!

No landlord will pay the going rate for a band when they can get the rentamob to come along and play for free! Glorified karaoke singers, and lets face it some of them are dreadful and should have given up the mic many moons ago, are ruining the great atmosphere we used to have.

Those with actual talent who are any good, are in my opinion, wasting their time when they could be putting their talents to better use with appreciative audiences in actual music venues. My friends and I unfortunately now have to travel out of the area for a quiet pint.

Please Urmston, let’s kick this annoying open mic click into touch. Give us our pubs back. If we want music we’ll go to a venue, but please leave our pubs alone. Enough is enough. My ears really can’t take anymore.

A very unhappy Urmstonite