For three days every May, Wrexham turns into one big music venue. Focus Wales fills more than twenty rooms across the city centre with hundreds of acts, and it is only the loudest weekend in a calendar that runs all year, from club nights and festivals to the eisteddfod stage. Music sits right at the heart of life here.
Which is part of what makes the next fact so uncomfortable. However loud any of it gets, there is no legal limit on the sound an audience can be exposed to. Not at a festival, not in a club, not at a family gig on a Saturday afternoon. And the people with the most to lose are the youngest ones in the crowd.
Half a generation already shows the damage
The evidence that this matters is no longer thin. A 2025 survey of 2,000 young adults for the hearing charity RNID found that 58% of 18 to 28-year-olds have already experienced hearing loss, tinnitus or both after listening to loud music. Three quarters knew the risk. Over a third still did not plan to use any protection.
Tinnitus UK, in a 2026 report on live music, put it even more starkly for anyone who goes to gigs: 92% of music fans said they had ringing in their ears after an event. One in seven people in the UK live with tinnitus already.
Same night out, two different rules
Here is the odd part. The people working at a Wrexham gig are protected by law. Since 2008 the DJ, the bar staff and the sound engineer have been covered by the Control of Noise at Work Regulations, exactly like a factory worker, with action required once noise passes 85 decibels. The crowd a few feet in front of them, often closer to the speakers and there just as long, has nothing.
David Kilpatrick, a mechanical engineer who has spent forty years reducing industrial noise in factories, is calling for a legal limit on live music volume, set at the same 85 decibels that already protects people at work. His argument comes from four decades of doing the job.
“We measure the noise at work, and we reduce it. A stage or a club is no different,” he says. “The technology exists, and the cost is small. What’s missing is a limit.”
The only figure the UK offers audiences is a Health and Safety Executive recommendation that event noise stays below an average of 107 decibels. It is guidance, not law, and nobody enforces it.
Why it hits children hardest
Young ears are more vulnerable than adult ones, which is why some countries treat them differently. France caps the sound at events aimed at children under six at 94 decibels, lower than the limit for everyone else. The World Health Organization, which counts more than a billion young people worldwide at risk from unsafe listening, recommends that children’s devices are set no higher than 75 decibels. Britain sets nothing, for any age.
The trouble with children is that the damage is silent and cumulative. A loud afternoon does not announce itself. Noise injury is a dose, volume multiplied by time, and the louder it gets, the faster the harm is done. In a typical club or at the front of a gig, the daily safe dose used in workplace law is spent in minutes, not hours. On headphones, the same thing happens on the walk to school.
Dr Shelly Chadha of the WHO once compared listening without any limit to being “without a speedometer in your car or a speed limit.” That is roughly where an audience, and a child in it, stands today.
The damage does not heal
This is the part that makes prevention worth the bother. Once the tiny hair cells in the inner ear are destroyed by loud sound, they do not grow back. Around nine in ten cases of hearing loss are this permanent kind. Hearing aids help, but they never return what was there.
Tim Bricheno, a guitarist who lives with tinnitus after years of loud stages, sums up how easily it gets waved away. “Music makes a nice sound, so volume is all too often ignored,” he says. Tinnitus, the ringing that never stops, has no cure either.
And it reaches further than the ears. The 2020 Lancet Commission on dementia ranked hearing loss as the single biggest modifiable risk factor for the condition, ahead of smoking and high blood pressure. The WHO expects nearly 2.5 billion people to be living with some hearing loss by 2050, up from around 1.5 billion today. Protecting a child’s hearing now is an investment that pays off for the rest of their life.
What Wrexham parents can do
None of this means keeping children away from music. Wrexham would be a poorer place for it, and the fix is far simpler than that.
At gigs and festivals, including the Focus Wales weekend, pack earplugs. The soft ones made for music bring the volume down without wrecking the sound, and child-sized ear defenders are easy to find for little ones. Stand a few metres back from the speakers, because sound drops off sharply with distance, and step out to a calmer space now and then to give young ears a rest.
At home, headphones are where a lot of damage builds up without anyone noticing. Teach the 60/60 rule: no more than 60% volume for no longer than 60 minutes at a time, switch on the volume-limit setting most phones now carry, and keep younger children’s devices near that 75 decibel mark. A free sound level app is accurate enough to tell you when a room has gone too far.
The real answer, though, is the one David Kilpatrick keeps pressing for. France, Belgium and Switzerland already set legal limits on how loud a venue can be, and their music scenes are doing fine. The campaign is asking for the same here: one clear limit, matching the protection workers have had since 1990. A place that loves live music as much as Wrexham does has every reason to want the next generation able to enjoy it too.
Feature image: The Dub Pistols at Wrexfest ’25.
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