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Saving Britain’s proud brass band legacy

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. 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.

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.

词句笔记：

outlive:经受住，比……活得长，渡过

knock out：赶出去

echelon：等级，阶层

tuba：低音大喇叭

conductor：乐队指挥

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