And The Band Played On

A meditation on brass bands and low-key English identity.

(Script)

A few months ago I was walking past a village in Northumberland with my dog and I heard some sort of address or sermon being given. Most of the towns and villages in the North East have memorials and statues and plaques dedicated to their own pit disaster and this one was no different.

Mining disasters were so common in the north that the men and boys who worked down them used painted tin bait boxes for their lunch. If the shaft collapsed and they faced slow and gradual suffocation they could at least scratch their names and last goodbyes into the paint of the small metal tubs containing their sandwiches.

In this village was there a gathering of about 30-40 people standing solemnly in a light drizzle. A vicar was giving the address and brass band provided the music. I'd actually tried to do one of my off the cuff outdoors videos but the weather wasnt't really helping me and so I decided to make a few notes and come back to the subject in the future.

Because the fact is the little scene left a deep impact on me and I felt it was one of the most touching and somber scenes I'd seen in a long, long time. The vicar was saying short prayers and then the band would play, then the vicar would continue to address the villagers on their own history and the long story of their little place in the world.

By the beginning of the 20th century mining disasters in the north of England and in Wales were becoming too common and the loss of life too great to be ignored or downplayed any longer. The vicar recounted the various legal battles and formation and organization of Unions which would eventually see something of an overhaul.

He then went on to speak of both world war 1 and world war 2 and the affect it had on the village. Not in a bombastic way. Nor in the crass postmodern memery of the internet today. The wars, especially the first, were an ordeal and a tragedy on the personal level of families before they were grand civilization changing events or geopolitical earthquakes.

And so what this little gathering in the drizzle really represented, without irony or putting on a show or being over the top, in a real and genuine way, was blood, soil and spirit. Even I felt like an outsider and I'm only from a few miles away.

The people in the village had a collective story, history and shared identity. But here through the local vicar it was being retold and reinforced. All of this is the opposite of what is today's norm, which is atomizing, alienating, disconnected and rootless.

But also this sombre scene hadn't been deconstructed and retooled or politicized and weaponized by cynical mind-benders in academia and the media. And what struck me most of all, was the brass band.

The brass band, which is usually associated with Yorkshire, became synonymous with working class movements around labour and unions. When I was a boy we still had jazz bands marching down the streets in full uniform.

I never used to like the music because so much of it sounded miserable and slow. It didn't have the artistry or romanticism of proper classical music, as I saw it anyway.

Brass bands were an activity of working men not maestros and it was encouraged by captains of industry as a way to keep them occupied in something other than politics.

Nimrod, Abide with me and Danny Boy may not have the technical wizardry or grandiose statements of a Beethoven or Wagner, but they do have something, something very special and very British.

The elephant in the room I think I should point to here is of course nostalgia. Nostalgia seems to be built into the brass band style and even seemed so in the past. In fact, even the more militaristic tunes have a tint of nostalgia to them.

On my monthly classic movies streams with Endeavour we often discuss old movies which centre on the wars or the British Empire. Whether Zulu, Man Who Would Be King or Lawrence of Arabia, the brass band gets aired heavily but also mixed in with the local music.

Stories of British men at the far side of the world engaging in acts of daring do, hubris and greatness set to brass band music makes us feel just how far away from home they actually are. The brass band music in that context symbolizes home. It's wet streets, cricket and smokey pubs, the familiar and known juxtaposed to jungles and deserts and people whose ways and customs are alien to us.

More cynically Pink Floyd used brass bands in The Wall and The Final Cut to represent the post-war era and Britain's withdrawal from Empire. Into a more exhausted and broken nation reduced once again to being just an island off Europe. Yet, despite it all the brass band still meant home, even if it was more gloomy now than before.

It seems on a deep level the emotions and feelings which come through in the music resonates with something deep in the native British psyche. I've often been accused of reveling in nostalgia and yearning for a time which is long gone, that I need to be less reactionary and more forward thinking. And there's some truth to that, but the point is authentic British patriotism has always been nostalgic.

But I suppose this begs us to question, what actually is nostalgia? The word derives from the Greek ''Nostos'' which means ''homecoming'' and ''algos'' which means ache or pain. Nostalgia then, literally means a yearning for home which is so intense it feels painful or in someway stressful. Nostalgia is usually triggered by a smell or a song which unlocks distant memories of emotional states. We have the sense of loss at a time which was but is now past.

Over the years I've been highly critical of certain aspects of British identity and patriotism, especially relating to the self defeating narratives to emerge after world war 2. Nobody is really nostalgic for spitfires, bulldogs and Winston Churchill. They may have been once but all are now nothing postmodern symbols which have been colonized by political ideology and utility. They're images or memes to be worn to signal a certain set of view points, it's patriotism as a badge, not a genuine identity to be felt in the marrow of your bones.

British patriotism became a whirlwind of imagery, images of the Queen, images of Kate Middleton, images of redcoats laughing or Bomber Harris or Norf FC or Greggs or Thatcher and it's all hollow, postmodern trash in service to the metanarrative that the good guys beat the bad guys in world war 2 and liberalism and multiculturalism and universalism won out in the end. 

It's pure astroturf and doesn't actually encapsulate anything authentic or meaningful at all. 

And while the mind-benders and propagandists got to work creating this self image of ourselves for us, forgotten about and neglected because it is the wrong form of expression--the band played on. 

This is what I felt when I watched that little memorial in Ashington, that this is real, authentic. 

The demolition job that's been done on British identity in modern times has been so severe and so thorough, the gentle, sombre music of a brass band seems like that shrine in Japan that survived the atom bomb at Nagasaki.

The local vicar has been replaced by the mass media and Big Tech who tell us lies, hate us and then tell us how to think about the lies. It's identity and narrative scaled up to monstrous proportions and then weaponized against its subjects. A truth creation industry which engulfs and overwhelms authenticity and meaning, or genuine human feeling and sentiment.

And this brings me back once again to the question of nostalgia. If nostalgia is a painful yearning for a home which is now gone, it then creates a secondary question. If we're not home, then where exactly are we?

We're in the crisis of postmodernity, a wasteland of broken identity and collapsed forms of meaning. Our ethnic and cultural and even sexual touchstones have become severed and disconnected from ourselves like an anchor which breaks loose from the seabed. We're drifting around on the tide un-moored and without direction.

The little memorial made me realise that our identity hasn't actually evaporated and it isn't something which only exists in nostalgia and memory, vague and abstract. It was right there in flesh and blood and spirit. In fact it was more real than what the shoddy synthetic replacement we've been handed.

And it's ours as well, it's not universal it's exclusive to us, which probably explains why it's been neglected. But it is there, still, like a fly caught in amber.

Like British soldiers of a bygone age trekking through distant deserts and jungles, it reminds us of home.