Saving Britain's proud Brass Band Legacy

The British brass band tradition is under threat from all sides — but a hardy few are struggling to keep it alive.

(The following article first appeared in 'The Times' on 26th February 2010)

Practice night for Carlton Main Frickley Colliery Band, one of the oldest brass bands in Britain. History lines the walls of the Yorkshire band’s practice room: gleaming trophies of past victories, a banner for Best of Brass Champions 1983 and, on one wall, a poster: “The Yorkshire Coalfield — Memories.” It shows a miner, face blackened from the pit, and names every closed Yorkshire colliery.

Only three former miners play for Carlton Main these days; the band has survived without the pit, its ranks swelled by young male and female professionals and five members under 20. This is the typical, new, middle-class face of brass bands. Yet their links to a bygone mining tradition persist.

Twenty-five years after brass bands marched during the miners’ strike, this underground music is in the spotlight again. A new compilation, The Music Lives on Now the Mines Have Gone, brings 11 colliery bands together, including Carlton Main. They will line up against another colliery brass album, by the Dinnington Colliery Band, from Sheffield, the stars of the BBC show A Band for Britain, which follows Sue Perkins’s efforts to save Dinnington. And next month, the Leeds-based Opera North commemorates the year-long miners’ strike with Songs at the Year’s End, a song cycle for brass band.

But what future do these historic groups have? Most brass bands today have outlived their mining communities, and the effects are profound. When collieries and their bands were the heart of a close-knit, thriving village, bands played for pleasure and pride.

The Yorkshire-born Stan Lippeatt, 60, is a former Grimethorpe bandsman who started playing when he was 10 years old. His father played, so did his grandfathers, his uncles and his two brothers. “Bands became the pillars of the village; they turned out to march on Armistice Sunday, they would play the Christmas carols. They were something for villagers to go to when there wasn’t much TV about,” he says. Lippeatt founded the annual Butlins Mineworkers Open Brass Band Championships. “A guy would be on his holidays in Torquay and he’d be proud to boast he came from the home town of a band.”

The Barnsley poet Ian McMillan, who has written the words for Opera North’s Songs at the Year’s End, believes that brass bands still play a role in their communities. “They are an image for how collectivism can survive. And when you have an area that’s had the collectivism knocked out of it [such as Grimethorpe] any image of that collectivism and community activity is a good thing.”

Last week, a brass band played outside the Corus steelworks on Teesside as it was closed down. With the strike of 1984-85, collectivism took on a political edge. Brass bands led marches to London. They led rallies in villages across the mining heartlands, North and South, and they played at the funerals of miners killed on picket lines. A sense of lost camaraderie remains. “Margaret Thatcher didn’t just decimate the pits, she decimated our community spirit,” says the former miner Ray Sykes, the 63-year-old chairman of Carlton Main. “With the closure of the collieries, she’s hurt my band.”

Today, bands are no longer the “glue” of their communities. The infrastructure they relied on — miners’ social clubs, bandstands and so on — has largely disappeared. And though they struggle on, the bands are disappearing, too. From about 20,000 brass bands at the turn of the 19th century, numbers are down to an estimated 1,000 bands. Anecdotally, bandsmen will tell you of ten bands a year folding. Banding’s grassroots are dying.

Why the crisis? The problem is money: both too much and too little. Brass bands compete for points and league places. The best bands are in the championship section, followed by sections one to four. In recent years a footballing analogy has become more potent as sponsorship money has flooded the top echelons of brass banding, leaving the lower bands fighting for survival.

The top bands, such as Grimethorpe Colliery (famously the one playing in the 1996 movie Brassed Off), Black Dyke and Brighouse and Rastrick — all in Yorkshire — and the Wales-based Cory, can afford to pay their players five-figure retainers in addition to concert fees and travel expenses to contests and rehearsals. So players can live hundreds of miles from the band, commuting twice a week to practise. These moneyed bands can also poach from the lower ranks; Carlton Main held on to their hotshot 16-year-old second trombone Ryan Watkins despite a rival offer of £10,000 a year.

Originally, each miner paid a levy — 10p a week — that went towards the band: buying music and paying for instruments, which would be passed through generations of the band. Colliery bands were part of a philanthropic package, which often included a cricket side and football club, providing for workers’ welfare (and keeping them out of the pub). Today, without the mines or the levy, bands rely on sponsorship; with no sponsorship, they depend on concert fees and fundraising, a “sponsored tuba blow” of 100 hymns in an hour, for instance.

Most players today own their instruments (though brass doesn’t come cheap; a tuba can cost £7,000). The catch is that the better you get, the more it costs. Carlton Main compete in the championship, pushing running costs to about £30,000 a year. Attending one contest can cost £3,000, for coach hire, the conductor’s fee and the sheet music (at least £100 a pop). Carlton Main’s players pay their own hotel costs and for travel to rehearsals. Self-sufficiency has replaced collectivism; how very Thatcherite. No wonder there is resentment about the big boys.

“It is galling,” says Sykes, who has played with Carlton Main for 57 years. “We’ve got to go on stage and compete against these bands. They turn up in a massive coach and everything’s paid for.”

This isn’t just sour grapes. It goes to the core of what a brass band is. Competitions were the source of pride for a band and its community. But if the mega bands can buy in players from outside the locality, where’s the heart? Many bandsmen — of the old and new guard — feel the character of brass banding is changing for the worse. “People are playing in brass bands now for the wrong reasons; they’re playing for financial gain, not for pleasure,” Sykes says, adding that there are players who aren’t members of any band but will freelance for the right price. “We call them mercenaries.”

Carlton Main still practise in their old band room, a dark brick 1910 building. On the walk from South Elmsall station, you pass empty ground where rows of terraced miners’ homes have been demolished; one or two, whose owners refuse to move out, stand alone. The site of Frickley colliery, closed in 1993, is farther up the hill, now regenerated as a country park.

After the closure, Carlton Main were down to six players — that’s when the first women joined — but they’ve steadily grown with local players, returning to the championship ten years ago. While the band sells out concerts “down south”, Sykes tells me their local gigs are almost empty. “It’s only a few ex-miners who are still interested in the band,” Sykes says. “Sad, ain’t it?”

If you ask a bandsman what is at the heart of a brass band today, he’ll answer: the music. But ask him why he plays, and the motivation gets more complex. Is it for the memory of the mines, for the lost bands? Or for the joy of making music? “It’s good music and good experience as a player,” Watkins says.

Becky Lundberg, 27, a music teacher and solo trombone, has a different take. “It makes a difference knowing this band is one of the oldest,” she says. “And seeing Ray [Sykes], who’s played in it for 57 years, and how proud he is ... I’ve never seen history mean so much to somebody.”

Public perception of brass bands remains firmly rooted in one thing, Brassed Off. “The cloth cap, beer-drinking image — we’ve been striving for years to shake it off,” Lippeatt says. It wouldn’t matter so much if the cloth cap didn’t obscure brass bands’ musical quality. “We’re seen as second-class musical citizens playing ‘old time’ music,” says Lisa Stonham, 36, who plays with Grimsdyke Brass in North London. Grimsdyke isn’t a colliery band; it grew out of two Harrow school bands. Its members are local teachers, solicitors, accountants — much like modern colliery bands — but where Grimsdyke differs is in what it plays.

Without the ties of traditional brass contest pieces and marching music, a bigger chunk of its repertoire is contemporary brass band music. “New music is important for pushing the genre forwards,” Stonham says. “It can help to make brass bands more relevant.”

The brass band struggle has not gone unnoticed. Jeff Ennis, the MP for Barnsley East and Mexborough, chairs an all-party parliamentary group for brass bands. He wants to see more Arts Council funding for elite bands and help for grassroots community bands to win funds from the National Lottery. In 2007 brass bands received £20,000 from the Arts Council; that, Ennis says, is £1 for every £1,100 it gives to opera. “I wouldn’t want to say there’s a degree of snobbishness, but it makes you wonder why an art form that we founded, that we still lead the world in, has to go round with a begging bowl while some of the ‘higher arts’ seem to get everything on a plate.”

Carlton Main Frickley Colliery Band close their rehearsal with a piece called English Heritage. It tests every player with rhythms, crescendos and a soft largo that unwittingly evokes a passing culture. I’d challenge anyone to hear musicianship as magnificent as this and not be troubled that a slice of our musical heritage is sliding away. If Carlton Main cannot find a sponsor soon, it won’t be able to sustain this music-making. And hundreds of brass bands will tell the same story. The true spirit of brass banding is found in grassroots groups, playing each week up and down the UK. We cannot afford to let them fall silent.

Emma Pomfret