To this day, the biggest problem I ever have as a promoter is with the guy mixing the sound out front. In my opinion, probably 70 percent of the engineers are still disrespectful; they listen to the bands because they are paid by the bands, but they don't listen to what the audience wants. The sound that you hear out front is quite often appalling, and for a while, concerts got too loud.

I spend my whole life fighting front-of-house sound engineers, who do not respect the audience at all. We got to the point where for this very reason we wouldn't work with certain sound companies. I kept telling them that if they didn't start taking this matter seriously, they would no longer have an audience, and then they would be out of a job. I became quite renowned for having terrible fights with sound engineers. I had one banned from Wembley Stadium because he was just insolent; he just couldn't give a f**k because the act told him to mix it as loud as possible. People outside started complaining. I said 'look, if this sound is so loud inside, it's going to be loud outside, and if people complain, we won't get a licence to do the show'. It's pretty simple logic, but people still don't understand it today. We have a terrible problem with bass rumble, which I think is terribly dangerous. It's all down to engineers not giving a f**k about their audience. They are effectively telling the punters 'this is what this band should sound like', but it's a turn off. If it's too loud and the sound breaks up, they can't hear it.

Clearly rock'n'roll is about tension and making an impression. People are always saying to me 'oh, you're an old fart, what do you know about anything?', but the fact is you have to respect your audience. I am convinced that one of the key reasons why people started to jump up and down at gigs was because then they wouldn't get the full force of the bass and the top end, which is where the damage is done. You jumped up and down to escape the noise — that's my theory — although other people will tell you something completely different. I promise you that nobody ever asked the audience whether they liked the sound or not, and they still don't care.

The sound companies are their own worst enemies, because all they want to do is suck up to the artist and they don't think about what they are there for. They are there to give the artist a sound, but they are also there to give the sound to the audience; if they spent a bit more time worrying about the audience, they would be more successful. Clearly, there are some very good sound companies; there are also some very bad ones. A sound company's reputation is purely dependent on the guy mixing out front. You can have the most sophisticated control equipment in the world at your disposal, desks the size of Pink Floyd's with 72 or 144 channels, but unless that guy's mixing it for the audience as well as the band, it's a disaster. And sound is all important.

I think the latest Steely Dan shows at Wembley Arena were a good case in point. There were thousands of complaints from the audience, because they went there to hear a particular quality of sound that the band were always known for, but they couldn't hear it. Everyone blames certain venues for being crap, and blames everyone else, but it's nonsense. If a sound engineer really knows what he's doing, he will come into a venue and tune it perfectly. Barbra Streisand's sound engineer [Bruce Jackson] came into the venue on one show we were promoting, and he spent a whole day in there devising a sound system and the equipment that he needed, including baffling and all the rest of it, to suit Barbra. The sound in there was immaculate. The fact is that if they take the care, it pays off; I often suggest to sound people they go down to the venue first.

Bob Dylan was another classic case of someone actually getting it right. When we did Earl's Court with him, the sound was incredible, and Pink Floyd always sound wonderful, but I've had acts in there and it's been crap. People will say you can't compare Bob Dylan with Barbra Streisand or Pink Floyd with Def Leppard or whatever, but you can have loud sound and not have it going over the top where it distorts to the point where you can't breath. You don't have to have this madness that U2 and Prince seem to endorse, where there's horrible bass rumble because they want to reproduce a rave or a kind of club sound. I remember going to see an MC Hammer concert at Wembley Arena as a punter, and I wanted to thump the sound engineer. I went over to him and said 'this is not my show, but I'm Harvey Goldsmith, and this sound sucks. Here's this act doing a great show on stage, and half the audience are going home, because they can't bear it. And whose fault is that?'

Among Harvey Goldsmith's concert promoting credits are such musical extravaganzas as Live Aid, Tribute to Freddie Mercury, and Masters of Music.