Go Tell It To The Mountain

The Fallout of the UK Miners Strike on The British Brass Band Movement and The Paths
Towards a Progressive and Symbolic Resuscitation

Jack Goldstein

During the mid-twentieth century, the majority of British towns and villages had an
established brass banding community. Brass banding culture, with its emphasis on
communal and public practice, articulated the tenacity of the working class in the face
of begrimed and exhausting industrial life.

In its present state, the brass banding movement has come to represent a cultural
signifier for the disenchantment and disenfranchisement of working classes. It is now
largely, or at least in terms of mainstream awareness, considered to be a cultural
artefact. Unduly relegated to the ash heap of history; the movement has been
consigned to the vast, figurative void that cultural and ideological objects are
consigned to when they represent form of community which is at odds with, or
impossible within the contemporary political environment.

To believe that the brass banding movement was merely an accessory to the miners
strike of 1984-1985, would be to grossly overlook the fact that musical expression in
working class communities is not solely determined by more diverse and complex
motivations than pure politics, and that hostility towards this form of music is often
politically motivated in terms of denying the right of said communities to access their
potential collective power.

Beginning on March 6th, 1984, the strike saw Grimethrope Colliery Band, as well as
several other bands, performing at pickets all over the country. At the height of its
strength, the strike involved 142,000 mineworkers and was the largest general strike
since the 1926.

In 1989, a travelling exhibition entitled Brass Roots toured the UK, stopping in
Bradford, Edinburgh, Llangollen, Manchester, Salford and London. Author and
Professor in Music Trevor Herbert was one of the driving forces behind the
exhibition, which was comprised of photographs and programmes, workshops and
concerts featuring instruments and band music. The strike, ending almost a year after
it had began on March 3rd 1985, concluded with an NUM vote on whether to return
to work. Thatchers Government had successfully played the miners for time, and
with reports of hunger scabs returning earlier due to the difficulty of affording food
for themselves and their families, the government touted a resolute political victory.

This victory would see the undermining of British industrial relations, the British trade
union movement and the political power of the NUM. However, most of all, behind
each organisation were the communities of workers, families and friends that had
been so fundamental to the uncompromising perseverance that had sustained the
brass banding community for so many decades earlier. Setting out to address 150
Years of Brass Bands, the well-intentioned exhibition came at a pivotal moment for
the movement as it began to look inward upon itself.

Thatchers last hurrah was to implement a widely criticised poll tax. This, along with
mounting challenges to her seat, led to Thatcher standing down in 1990 and John
Major assuming the position of party leader. In 1992, the last coal was cut at
Grimethorpe Colliery. A massive devaluation of the pound would seriously damage
the Conservative Party and would see them succumb to a landside electoral defeat by
Tony Blairs New Labour in 1996.

That same year a film was released that would canonise the movement as an integral
part of British cultural history. Two years after Grimethorpe Colliery was demolished,
Mark Hermans Brassed Off was released in cinemas. The film loosely documents the
struggles of Grimethorpe Colliery Band and their battle to stop pit closures.

Despite its overwhelmingly wholesome tone, the film should be commended for
showing the acrimony of the Conservative government of the time towards the
banding community. This, along with its sympathetic handling of a band members
attempted suicide, shifted the films politics to the fore.

However, despite these positive attributes, the film has complications. Notably, the
comprehensive reach of the film, in popular culture, vastly eclipses that of the
movement. For many, to realise a characterisation of a British brass band would be to
imagine something similar to what is depicted in Brassed Off. Despite providing most of
the funding for Tony Blairs campaign, Trade Unions saw themselves banished to the
bottom of New Labours to do list. The times had changed.

Despite these contradictions, the film benefited Grimethorpe Brass Band immensely.
Eighteen band members were working at the pit when it was closed down. However,
unlike many bands at the time, Grimethrope were able to retain support from the
Coal Board owing to their high profile.

Brassed Off was developed into a stage production in 1998. Paul Allen adapted Mark
Hermans screenplay for the stage and the show became a huge success. There was
uproar in 2014 when it was revealed that theatre chiefs had chosen a police brass
band to portray picketing miners. Marking the 30th anniversary of the miners strike,
Dave Hopper of the Durham Miners Association spoke out negatively about the
decision not to use one of the many miners bands in the country.

Whereas the proceeding decades had seen a media emphasis on actual bands, the
movement was now being utilised as a rhetorical device and was being linked to the
steadfast ideological fibre of the working classes. Evoking a similar reaction to the
chestnut hues of Ridley Scotts purposefully nostalgic Boy On Bike advertisement for
Hovis in 1973, it were as if to affirm the last decade as something that should be
forgotten.

Interestingly, the repertoire actually began to blossom. In 1991, Judith Bingham

composed the powerfully challenging yet widely criticised Prague and the nineties
found composers like Edward Gregson, Nigel Clarke and Elgar Howarth, as well as
conductors like Howard Snell committing their energy to further the progression of
the banding repertoire.

However, this stretch of compositional progression was comparably short lived. The
pieces were dense, complicated and far removed from the traditional repertoire that
would usually make up the set-list for most brass banding events. Similarly, the
complicated nature of the pieces meant that few lower division bands would even
attempt them (thats if the players even took an interest in playing such styles).

This presented a paradox. To seemingly elevate the movement from its working class
orientation and into the cannon of progressive bourgeois music required the affiliation
of an outsider representative, someone working in the dominant bourgeois ideology.
For this to happen, the pre-existing repertoire by composers such as Bingham would
have to be performed, perhaps pointlessly, without a platform.

Perhaps the most interesting piece around this time was the conceptual artist Jeremy
Dellers Acid Brass project. It was an early work of Dellers and came hot off of the
heels of Brassed Off in 1997. The piece was accompanied by a preliminary diagram
piece entitled The History of the World, 1997. Deller saw the preliminary piece as
justification to realise Acid Brass, mapping, as it does, the socio-political ties that bind a
contemporary musical movement (Acid House Music) with, what is perceived to be, a
comparatively antiquated one (Brass Bands).

Deller collaborated with the Williams Fairey Brass Band, under the direction of
Howard Snell, and the British orchestrator, Rodney Newton, arranged the music.
Dellers intention was to put into practice the concepts analysed in The History of the
World, 1997. Acid Brass was well received and was performed by Williams Fairey Brass
Band all over the world.

As the movement continued into the 21st Century, its assimilation into the rust and
grit of British culture outgrew its potential to blossom beyond its own microcosm of
internal adjudicating, reporting and commissioning. The movement is revived in
popular culture on occasion but is bled of its social and political history. Instead, it
would have a sepia-tinted nostalgia transplanted into where a vibrant and political
heart did once beat.

Neoliberalism, the current policy model of social studies and economics where
freedom can only exits when it coincides with the freedom of the market, determines
the power of trade unions as a thing of the past. We must then also accept that the
institutions that are so closely linked to them on a cultural and political level must be
relegated into history as well. Therefore, the question becomes how could the brass
band movement rejuvenate, with not only a reinvigorated musical voice but also a
culturally pertinent one as well. The current social and economic climate allows for
the proposal of an approach in which a path towards a progressive and symbolic
resuscitation could be readily realised.

In 2010, after thirteen years of New Labour and following the election of a hung
parliament, the Conservative Party entered into a coalition with The Liberal
Democrats. In 2014, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne would come
under fire from critics within the banding community for not offering brass bands a
similar tax relief to that of orchestras.

However, an article would appear in The Guardian on March of 2015 explaining

that, after the uproar, the Treasury had reassessed the rule and that it would, indeed,
be possible for brass bands to benefit from the same relief as orchestras after Osborne
succumbed to pressure.

Later that year, after months of campaigning by leadership candidates to follow Ed

Milliband as Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn was elected in a first round victory
that dwarfed the landslide mandate for Tony Blair back in 1994. Corbyn is a left-wing
democratic socialist who had made it onto the ballot paper thanks to a large surge in
austerity discontentment. Interestingly, Corbyn had gone against the party leadership
in the eighties and had shown full support with the miners and their fight to avoid the
total destruction of their jobs and communities. He appointed John McDonnell, the
finance chair for the GLC at the time of the strike, to the position of Shadow
Chancellor of the Exchequer and Seumas Milne, who had authored one of the
definitive books on the miners strike, as his Executive Director of Strategy and
Communications.

Forties years on from the implementation of neoliberal interventions in Britain by a

right-wing government, Corbyns rise to power has arrived at a crucial period in
history. His values only appear out-dated because no longer compatible with
neoliberalism. Market mechanisms, technocratic solutions and the shift towards a
centrist political model cannot solve social problems. Corbyns election demonstrates
an ideological break with this convention and shows that the British public, for the
first time in forty years, are no longer content with the status quo.

This is a moment of political and ideological flux that the brass banding movement
should take advantage of. Once the movement concedes its own position in popular
culture, claiming ownership of its political history, it can begin to utilise that history in
a forthright and progressive way.

The British brass band must be viewed as a simulacrum. A simulacrum is a

representation or imitation of a person or thing. In post-modern culture, society has
become so dependable upon simulacra that we have, in fact, lost touch with the real
and, in its place, have supplanted so much that we now find simulacra end up turning
into their own reality.

The brass band can be viewed in a similar way. Its dematerialisation into history is not
self-inflicted. It is part of the cultural and political subversion that results in the
incremental eradication of the left-wing labour movement and all of the cultural
components that go with it. This conscious political attack must be recognised before
resurgence is possible.

The introverted gaze of the banding movement is, in reality, a purposeful ideological
destabilising of just one of the cultural supplements heavily aligned with the industrial
stronghold of pre-Thatcher Britain. Simply put, to fully eradicate the working classes
political voice, one must also eradicate the cultural and social voice as well.
Nowadays, mainstream discourse portrays the brass band, largely speaking, as one of
two things. Either it is as the nostalgic bastion for a working class way of life long since
gone (the Victorian cobbled streets of Ridley Scotts Hovis advertising campaign) or as
a signifier for a left-wing labour mandate that is perceived to be out-dated and

irrelevant in a capitalistic Britain fed on neo-liberal policies like free trade

liberalisation, privatisation of state enterprises and deregulation on financial
institutions.

There must be a wholesale embracement of one of these portrayals by the banding

movement specifically the latter. The dense and bloody trauma of the miners strike
must not be forgotten.

It may be argued that the resurgence of the movement relies upon being able to move
away from the political history it is so deeply linked with. It is only after this break that
progression can come about. This is not the case. If we are to acknowledge that the
relegation of the banding movement into nostalgia is one of a purposeful ideological
destabilising, then we must also acknowledge the social and political substance that
goes with it. Simply put, the movement must embrace the leftist perception of the
brass band still evident in popular discourse so as to be able to break with the empty
symbolic form of its current state.

Not everyone within the brass banding movement must adopt an explicitly left-wing
ideological notion, moral or ethical premise. After all, the banding environment has
long since moved on from being an exclusively working-class movement with The
British Bandsman noting, as far back as 1930, that the movement has so advanced in
public opinion that there was now in the ranks a great percentage of artisans, clerks,
shop assistants and the many others who years ago considered the brass band beneath
their notice.

However, there are several concepts that must be universally accepted. The first is a
conscious break with the nostalgic simulation of the brass band as a means of
formulating a credible and authoritative signifier for working-class Britain. For
example, the resplendent Welsh valleys that are so readily utilised for aesthetic
purpose were, little more than a hundred years ago, the setting for anti-Jewish riots
that saw the townsfolk of Tredegar desecrate Jewish businesses and property.

In essence, the banding movement must no longer subscribe to the empty symbolic
expression that is the nostalgic portrayal. It must, instead, embellish upon it and throw
magnification onto the social and the political no matter how heinous it may appear
at first.

Secondly, it must be acknowledged that the current banding movement exists within
the shadow of the miners strike. It is this post-strike movement that has averted its
gaze inward and has arrived at a juncture where it feels most comfortable writing
music for itself, performing for itself and adjudicating itself. The miners strike, as well
as a tangible conflict, was an ideological one and with the physical loss came
enormous emotional and psychological loss as well.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, is the way in which the worker is viewed now in
comparison to that of the mid-nineteenth century. The employers of wage labour
utilised more collective means of coercing workers in the nineteenth century. The
brass band itself would provide a perfect receptacle for factory or colliery promotion if
it were named after the business that was sponsoring it.

The tradition of wakes weeks became popular around this time as well. From June to
September a different town would take a weekly holiday and the cotton mills and
manufacturing factories could be closed for maintenance. The workers were never
paid for these holidays and would, effectively, find themselves on holiday with their
co-workers. This meant that any possibility of mobilisation with workers from other
collieries and factories would be greatly diminished.

Similarly, it could be argued that the sponsorship of colliery or factory bands could be
seen as a lucrative means of keeping workers well-balanced, pre-occupied and
organised again, discouraging political activity of any sort.

The so-called rational self interest of eighties neo-liberalism brought with it a more
objectivist design for worker coercion. It was no longer beneficial to distinctly
galvanize workers on a communal and mass level. Instead, the introducing of
incentivised and competitive initiatives began to become common in the work place.
Effectively, workers could be pitted against one another in an inexorable attempt to
ascertain the highest standard of achievement for the business overall. With this in
mind, the politically divisive reasons for having brass bands are compromised.

What has taken the place of nineteenth century capitalism is an economic ideology
that is no longer compatible with the brass banding movement. The neoliberal
doctrine of all people being independent agents who rationally respond to the
opportunities around them simply cannot embody the communal domain and
working-class companionship that resides within the legacy of banding. The industrial

landscape of the country may have been reconfigured for good but the brass band still
augments the cultural with the political.

This comparison goes someway to demonstrate why adopting the leftist political
perception of the banding movement is the most relevant and conclusive means
towards a progressive resuscitation.

The history of the brass banding movement must not be seen as being exclusive to
that of the political history that engulfs it. Yes, the history was hard fraught and
unquestioningly severe; but, lets remember it so we can progress forward. Whilst the
repertoire might not have kept pace with bourgeois art music for varying reasons and
may not be perceived as being, either thematically or aesthetically, relevant; in effect,
these things are secondary. It is that underlying ideological concept of compatibility
with human capital that actually impacts upon the movement the most. Once
affirmed, the movement can look to new horizons.

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