Staging England: Brass, Bombs and a Bump on the Head
VALVES: An experiment in Brass
The Commission for New and Old Art
24th October 2024
Editor’s Note
After the gig that is the focus of this review, I received a nasty bonk on the head. I was very drunk, knocked out in Piccadilly Gardens, when someone stole the wallet containing my personal affairs and STAT’s business debit card. The lucky thief spent upwards of £300 in various Tescos and corner shops before the bank caught wind (don’t worry, we got our money back). All of this is relevant, or at least important, because despite a nightly combo of crime and concussion, none of it overshadowed the things that happened at VALVES just hours earlier.
VALVES
“It’s an entirely amateur movement, even right to the top,” Troy Kelly tells me. He’s referring to the British brass band, himself a member of the 25-piece Hebden Bridge Brass Band, for which he plays baritone horn. I’ve never heard the word “movement” applied to brass bands before, to my shame I hadn’t heard much of anything about brass bands prior to my call with Troy, but their apparent amateur nature pricks my ears. “The quality will rival any professional symphony orchestra,” he continues, “but the player will be either there volunteering or [covered] basically for expenses… That’s what makes it so special.” He’s making sense. There’s a distinct and grim perseverance that makes the British brass band, their history so deeply intertwined with that of northern England – the cobbled streets and grey skies. Brass bands are just as much a part of a melancholic northern identity as the mills and mines which birthed them. It is perhaps for this reason that the Commission for New and Old Art chose VALVES as the centrepiece for their show at the White Hotel the other week, and us Lancashire reps decided to review it.
Conjure a valve in your head. It might be the weighty mechanical guts inside an engine, the tight screws of a plumbing system, or even the thumping ventricles of a human heart. Whatever you’re thinking, I’d say it’s unlikely to be the valves of a rousing brass instrument, nor the electrical valves – or vacuum tubes – powering an analogue synthesiser. These are the valves – not of industry, but developed peripheral to it – which an audience saw presented by the Commission as part of VALVES: An experiment in brass.
First though, cheeky Commission-er, Isaac Rose mans the pre-show decks, dropping the needle on The Beatles’ best track: “A Day in the Life”. It’s played loud and develops something of a karaoke atmosphere in spite of its melancholia. Maybe this is a sign of things to come. Following the song’s crash ending, three men take the stage. They read from a shared book, staring eerily through the spotlight and into the middle distance. It’s Shakespeare they’re reading, King John. At one time I was a militant hater of our William, but I do try to hone in, mesmerised by the rhythms of their metre.
The White Hotel is our performance space – a car garage if we’re to take Manchester Mill’s "Proper Journalism" to heart – and a venue I would affectionately describe as quite intimidating, more aesthetically than in what it represents culturally. What I’m trying to say is it’s not generally the place you’d expect to see a brass band.
The Commission knows this, and with the audience eagerly awaiting the next act to the stage, the shutters to our rear slowly rattle open, the rum pum pum of distant band marching echoing down the street. My allegations of intimidation are rendered void. Perhaps there’s an integral element of this grim, northern brass band melancholia that I’d left out: having a laugh. “The Hotel is one of the friendlier venues we’ve ever played at,” says Lydia Phillips, Commission member and performer, “They’re good people who care about good art and they’ve been massive supporters of the Commission from the beginning.” This tracks. From what I do remember of my later wanderings before being carted off to hospital, I recall quite clearly that Austin Collings, artistic director of the White Hotel, at the very least attempted to get me into a cab.
On to the show’s first innings: a classic brass band set, as rousing and wholesome as you’d expect in any town square or Christmas market. The humour continues, beginning with the 20th Century Fox theme, while the band’s conductor makes friendly chat with the audience before introducing each tune. The brass band is born of industry, he notes. The venue in which we stand recalls his own, himself a former mechanic. Though the band feature throughout the night’s proceedings, they stand unaided at both the start and end, sandwiching the more experimental works between them. This in no way diminishes their acumen, but highlights their role as a warm blanket – the reasons to be cheerful. This is made all too clear when they move the room to tears at the close of their first set with movement II from “A Downland Suite”, a beautiful piece by John Ireland, a composer born in Bowdon, not too far from Altrincham.
Chronologically central, but perhaps thematically too, is the most experimental of the show’s loose acts, the “New Art”. Ben Goldscheider takes the stage wearing the shiniest shoes and cradling the shiniest instrument I’ve ever seen. He performs a French horn solo – an instrument notably excluded from the brass band – gently grappling his instrument in a firm headlock. His arm descends into the horn, muffling the outlet in much the same way mechanical valves do further up the pipe. He is both player and part of this musical machine. Goldscheider plays “Sea Eagle”, a 1982 piece by Salford composer, Peter Maxwell Davies, not only a man of immense stature in the avant-garde, but an alumnus of the Leigh secondary school that neighbours STAT HQ. A keen advocate of his discipline and an outspoken progressive in the face of New Labour’s “atmosphere of philistinism,” Davies marched against the Iraq War in 2003.
Davies’ radicalism lives on in the performance that follows. It’s a new work by Oliver Vibrans: “On Pendle Hill”. The subject of the piece, a Lancashire hill from which you can glimpse a near panoramic view of the North West. Noting the proximity to Halloween I wonder about Pendle’s notorious witch trials. “If it is about the witches, it’s not for the sake of spook,” Phillips notes, “but the simple truth that those women were murdered by the state because of religious or political beliefs.” This is no show obscured by concept, but one starkly and necessarily rooted in Lancashire’s material history.
Viewing all that’s passed from the top of the hill, at no point throughout our country’s troubled lifetime have our hands been clean. Our mills were maintained by the oppression of slave labour, and our mines the handiwork of a thousand lives cut short. Today is different, though. We’re much better at washing those hands of ours, though the blood runs greater and greater. Violence is no longer characteristic of the work we do, but it is our main export. You wouldn’t know it from the top of Pendle Hill. The rolling hills are oblivious to those big ol’ war sheds. “People find it hard to actually think about industrial heritage,” Phillips continues. “They think they can. There’s the state-sanctioned pride thing, they can do that. They find the reality of it harder. People don’t know what to do with it.”
According to Commission-er and stage manager, Sam Fairbrother, people are similarly dumbfounded by clogs, and so, removing his blazer, he dons clogs atop a platform stage left, demonstrating his stance in them shoes. To the right is Troy Kelly, baritone horn in hand, and at centre-stage behind a table stand Phillips and Agnes Cameron, piecing together what I assume is their valve synthesiser.
Distinct from the valves of a trombone or trumpet, these ones control flows of electrical current, not air. “One thing I find exciting about technologies is the idea that one can do the same thing in many different ways,” Cameron tells me, the inventor of this bespoke machine. The chosen equipment is “a technology almost entirely superseded by the transistor, abandoned due to its size, cost and practicality more than its actual function, and it works really well.” Cameron considers there to be little difference between the various valves, or indeed between instrument and machine. In the analogue, all are “ways of extending the body, of changing expressive action and movement into sound.” Here, beside the musician, the industrial labourer, too, becomes expressive, responsible for creations which move and affect others.
Sam’s clogs kick into a gentle and sparse rhythm, sputtering alive like a motorbike engine. Though usually impermeable, the rear of the stage is a portal through which we can glimpse the venue’s infamous sunken bar. It is here where Hebden Bridge brass band sit – audible, but out of view. They are no warm blanket now. Edging in and out of the mix, Kelly’s horn is tailed by the harsh buzzing of a synth which grows louder and louder in response. From beyond the stage, the now-hidden ensemble mimics the fleeting sounds of distant winds, occasionally veering nearer to a muffled wail or scream. From our side of this divisional wall, while a single and melancholic brass instrument maintains the illusion of our industrial nostalgia, our frayed comfort blanket, the machines continue hammering under the anxious management of their workforce, themselves in aid of a latent horror, a horror our humble workers play a key part in exporting just beyond view.
Settling into the background, a monologue plays. Ellie Kinney talks from the peak of Pendle Hill. From here you can see a good chunk of the North West, she says, its industry, and how it’s changed. A scar in the landscape sticks out: Samlesbury’s BAE Systems factory. We don’t dig coal or make fabric anymore. That factory manufactures parts for Israel’s F-35 fighter jet fleet, jets currently being used in a genocide of the Palestinian people. Lancashire’s complicity is visible from this hill.
Staging England is among the things this performance has in mind, I’m told by some in the Commission. Considering the weight of history and the spectrum of feelings England inspires, they’ve managed to do this rather succinctly. VALVES demonstrates the concurrent pride and shame we can feel in our industrial heritage. We’ve sympathy for workers who toiled through grim conditions, pride in their class struggle. Today, in spite of change desired, we are the shameful beneficiaries of this exploitation, economically and culturally. The brass band is perhaps the best encapsulation of this. There’s pride in a brass band, in the immaculate uniforms, the discipline of rehearsals and marching, and yet, unlike the classical orchestras far more inclined towards fetishisations of empire, their image maintains a dark humour, a working class amiability in the face of just getting by. The brass band is the underdog – valve escapees of their factory captors, labouring toward a future on their terms.
The other valves, those of the abandoned synthesiser and of Shakespeare’s heartbeat pentameters, I’d say represent lost futures. In England’s recent forays into radicalism (if one can call them that), we’ve lost the modernist flair and compassion of the post-war period in the name of neoliberal efficiencies, and, more recently, our hope in the fluke of Corbynism. Worse than this, and to some extent because of this, is England’s ongoing complicity in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. England is unwell. It continues to be governed by ghouls happy to cheer on mass killing, both in the “labour movement" as well as the ruling class.
As the piece comes to a close, the various valves fading away, a harmonium drones as the brass band shuffles back to centre stage. The space has been rearranged since their initial set, so band members come armed with music stands in one hand and instruments in the other. They edge into positions of suitable size for playing as the previous performers vacate. The slow and hesitant way in which the changeover occurs suggests a lack of rehearsal, but it speaks to a tentative rebuilding of something greater, something good for England.
And so Hebden Bridge Brass Band play a final set including another Beatles’ track, “Eleanor Rigby”, and close the show with a number from the 1996 film Brassed Off. It’s been a whirlwind of a night and, in spite of what Troy says, “amateur” may very well be the last word you’d use.
There’s much to contemplate seeing England “staged.” Lots to mull over, mistakes and possible futures to be made. But as Phillips tells me, there’s more to VALVES than England, “VALVES aren’t the thing themselves, are they? They just let air go in and out, let it change directions; put it on a stage and see what happens.” This seems the essence of the Commission – a group named like some broad-reaching state department that never quite existed. A possible future alongside a particular, celebrated past.
A request repeated across the Commission’s website and, similarly, at the close of VALVES is to “stay connected to the commission.” You can be sure I will. In many ways this echo’s STAT’s message: community in culture. The Commission for New and Old Art, like STAT, is both everyone and no-one, and similarly armed with an agenda:
“New things for everyone can be done. Not without the past or for it, but because back then many things happened, and it’s about time we thought about them. Not because we must, but because we can.”
Well, through the medium of VALVES, we did, and we can.