WE'VE all heard someone pipe up - 'music isn't what it used to be; it's all noise now.'

So, maybe we shouldn't be too surprised to learn people were saying it even back in 1953.

Looking Back took a peep into the pages of the Northern Daily Telegraph from more than 50 years ago and found a narrative calling for an end to 'all this modern piffle.'

In an impassioned discourse a Mr A E Shaw contended that the 'present taste of the masses is much inferior to that of long ago.'

And in a theme we are familiar with today, he put the blame for the attitude of youngsters around him squarely on 'home life, the cinema and the BBC'.

He sniped 'what is the reason for this degeneracy? My reply is that today people are so much spoon fed with entertainment that they are mentally lazy.

'This applies particularly to the adolescents who think much of their outward appearance and pay little attention to their intelligence.'

He revealed his generation's opportunities to music were more or less confined to the polyphone, the earphone phonograph and brass bands -- 'and none of them was ever guilty of playing such rubbish as that regularly churned out by some of the present-day, so-called dance orchestras.

'Even yet I would rather listen to the old organette -- a table wind instrument, operated by a turning handle connected to bellows -- than that contraption known as the electric organ!'

For a gentleman who admits that 'for sweetness and delicacy, I think that even today the old musical box would take some beating' one shudders to think what he would make of all the varieties of entertainment available to us in 2004!