'After every gig, my ears would be ringing loudly for at least an hour - ears are particularly sensitive to pumping bass,' says Illsley, now 60.

'As the Straits became more successful we could afford better equipment and the stage sound was more controllable but the ringing was still there after every show. Playing a stadium filled with 50,000 people for years on end was, for me, going to work.

'In the early days of the Straits the sound systems were primitive,' he recalls. 'You had the PA speakers which faced the audience and a monitor speaker on stage for each band member so he could hear the mixed sound that came through it.

'There were no noise regulations as there are now, so all four of us - Mark and David Knopfler and our original drummer Pick Withers - turned up our monitors to the maximum volume, as did every other band we came across.

'I would turn mine up as much as I could because I didn't want to be drowned out by the drums.

'When you consider that, at the time, we were in very small venues where the stage might be just 12ft wide you'd be practically on top of the drum kit anyway, so it's not difficult to imagine the impact this had on our hearing.'

'By the Eighties there was a certain amount of health and safety legislation regarding noise levels and often someone from the local council would be measuring the decibels and trying to edge us down in volume, usually unsuccessfully.'

But it's not just rock musicians who are paying the price for their love of music. The iPod generation, clubbers and festival-goers are unwittingly exposing delicate hearing mechanisms to noise well above the healthy top level of about 55 decibels, the Daily Mail reports.

The latest stats show that 75 percent of under-55s have difficulty with their hearing.

Read more at at the Mail Online.