The Pie At Night: In Search of the North at Play

by Stuart Maconie

  According to Thomson Smillie’s The Marriage of Figaro: Opera Explained: ‘One definition of a masterpiece could be a work that delights successive generations and gives pleasure to people of different levels of sophistication. On that basis The Marriage of Figaro qualifies as the supreme operatic masterpiece.’ High praise indeed. There’s a theory in the theatre that Macbeth is not regarded as unlucky because of any supernatural connotations but because of its sheer commercial appeal, and the fact that most rep companies knew it meant it was often staged as a fall-back when another production had bombed and had to be taken off. Hence if you were in a production of Macbeth, you may have just had a flop. If this is the case, then The Marriage of Figaro should be as unlucky as heck.

  Even before curtain up, there’s a bit of drama. A spokesperson comes on stage, provoking a ‘this isn’t supposed to happen’ flutter in the audience, and announced that due to illness, the part of Figaro will tonight be taken by Bradley Travis. An understudy! In the title role! If there’s any disappointment in the audience, I didn’t pick up on it. Indeed, the two ladies behind me were propelled into full Broadway musical mode. ‘An understudy! This could be his big break.’

  This gets me thinking about the whole notion of the understudy, which I find fascinating. In this I am not alone. Tom Stoppard’s brilliant The Real Inspector Hound (another of my am dram triumphs, cruelly overlooked by The Stage) has an extended, freewheeling riff on the nature of understudies, twelfth men, seconds in command and the like, and the secret jealousies that must lurk in the most benign and genial of companies. Sarah Estill, a chorister of Opera North, has actually written, rather wonderfully, about all this in the Opera North blog.

  To the soloist, their cover is both a security blanket and that little extra incentive to keep soldiering on just in case once replaced it turns out the management prefer the alternative. To the cover, the soloist is both their inspiration and aspiration but also a perceived obstacle in the way of their true path to stardom. And whilst most covers don’t go as far as laying trip wires and lacing water-bottles with laxatives, there is always that suppressed hope somewhere deep in their subconscious that wishes for a temporary, deeply debilitating but ultimately recoverable minor ailment to afflict the soloist, even if just for one night, preferably the night friends and family are coming to see the show.

  By now the famous overture, which even an opera refusenik like me recognises, is playing and the curtain is up. La Nozze di Figaro begins with a famous song about measuring up for a bed that is ripe for parody in a Jewson’s advert. Actually, this production doesn’t start like that but with an interesting bit of staging which shows the back of the set and the reverse of the flats and backdrops around which members of the cast scurry giggling. It’s a neat touch, designed one imagines to remind us that what we are seeing is artifice and that what is going on out of sight is crucial to the piece’s farce and frivolity. Nicholas Hytner has said that you could stage The Marriage of Figaro on the moon as long as you put the doors in the right place. No one’s tried that yet to the best of my knowledge, but you get his point. Leslie Travers’ set design, all faded glamour, peeling wallpaper and leaky ceilings, speaks of a world in decay and ripe for change, pointing up the melancholy under all these larksome social gavottes.

  Time and inability precludes me from describing in detail the events of the first half or offering a detailed critique beyond saying that I really liked it. It was sung in English, clear as a bell, and in a terrific translation which was modern enough to be funny and accessible, but without any cringy lapses into dated slang or clunking period references. At one point someone was described as having ‘buggered off’ which went down very well with a Leeds audience, naturally. Plotwise though – and this is one for Mozart rather than Opera North – I do have some very strong reservations.

  If you suspect that your partner is having an affair or that your boss is going to sack you or that someone you trust is going behind your back on some important matter, you have various options open to you. You could ignore it and blithely carry on with life. You could ask around or conduct some investigations of your own. You could, if you’re that kind of person, come straight out and ask about it, mildly or combatively. It’s up to you.

  What I would definitely not advise you to do is dress up as someone else, or send them a letter purporting to come from someone else, and then try to trap them in some weird tryst in disguise. Try being vaguely honest with them. That, or have a massive row, or anything really. Just try to avoid disguises and messengers. In my experience, it never goes well. It never goes well in Shakespeare (look at The Comedy of Errors and Romeo and Juliet). It doesn’t go well in ‘Escape (The Piña Colada Song)’ by Rupert Holmes or ‘Babooshka’ by Kate Bush. And it nearly goes really badly in The Marriage of Figaro, except that in the manner of these things, it all gets laughed off, and sung off, pretty casually by all concerned at the end.

  The end is still someway off though, and I mull the plot over my half-time G&T in the bar. The Leeds Grand is a beautiful, ornate, labyrinthine theatre, which is lovely to look at but difficult to negotiate when everyone is desperate for a sharpener. Still it gives me a good chance to earwig and eavesdrop. I hear one lady say to another, smoothly and conspiratorially, ‘Well, I do know Eric Knowles a little actually …’

  The second half begins with a good deal of that old staple of comic theatre, cross-dressing. The two elderly ladies behind me find this a hoot. So does the gentleman a row in front, but it seems to set him off on some kind of mild fit which he manages to bring under control but whose legacy is a nagging, repetitive, furtive cough that lasts all through the act and leaves me torn between pitying him and wanting to kill him.

  By the last act, everyone seems to be dressed up as everyone else and I have no idea who has written which secret letters to who or why. There is some baffling business with a dropped pin which I think may be like the stuff with the purloined hankie in Othello but I wouldn’t like to say. I didn’t mind because I was just floating along, buoyed by the nice tunes, wine gums and the gin; I think it all turned out OK. There was some stuff in a torchlit garden at the end that threatened to go a bit Ku-Klux-Klan meeting, but it all sorted itself out. Figaro got hitched I think and Bradley Travis’s rave reception at the curtain call was a really lovely moment.

  So had I enjoyed my night at the opera? My night at the Opera North, to be exact? Yes, I had very much. The production had bags of energy and brio, it was clear and funny and light and smart, everything that I remember my night at Glyndebourne wasn’t. But I have to acknowledge that this may be down to the fact that they were very different pieces as well as smouldering class resentment and dislike of braying. There were nowt of that here. Just people who liked opera and fancied dressing up – no, not like that – and having a night out. It’s not cheap, no. But then again, it is no more expensive than taking the lad to Old Trafford or the Etihad. Lasts longer too.

  The problem is maybe one of perception. Opera conjures up cummerbunds at Covent Garden, a diversion for the idle rich to snooze though. Opera is the rich man’s bed, you might say, not the lusty public entertainment that the Italians have long enjoyed. Opera North do their best to fight those fustian stereotypes while staying true to the spirit of opera. I am never going to enjoy Verdi in the same way that I enjoy The Vandellas, or Vaughan Williams, or any other alliterative example from any of the many kinds of music I enjoy. It’s still too close to pantomime for me and there’s too much shrieking. But if I do go again, it will be to something from Opera North.

  Back out on the streets, Leeds is its usual mad, garrulous self and the Leodiensians are as loud and chaotic and terrible at crossing the road than ever. There is a downside to all this, of course, as seen by the fact that my train is late having ‘struck an inebriated person at Cross Gates’. This news is being hotly discussed on the platform by gangs of blokes, each holding giant foam fingers saying Betway. But eventually it arrives and I find a seat across from a
quirky hipster student girl and a ‘townie’ lad in his twenties who is clearly a) a little taken with her and b) a little tipsy, and is chatting her up in a rather sweet way. He’s telling her about a DVD he’s got in his hand, the movie Northern Soul by Elaine Constantine. He explains a little about the music, which he says is ‘the best’. They chat and she tells him that she’s training to be a barrister. As he gets up at his station he bids her farewell with a cheery ‘see you in court maybe’.

  I won’t go into detail about northern soul here. I’ve banged on about it elsewhere and will do so again, and we’re headed in search of another kind of northern soul music to finish here. But I should say something about that DVD in the lad’s hand because it’s a great film. The evocations of the scene is vivid and spine-tingling and it is the only movie or drama that has ever captured anything of the spirit of the music and the clubs and the nights. Believe me, others have tried.

  Nearly all emphasise the swearing, the grittiness, the grim nature of life in the north in the early seventies, when we were all either unemployed it seems or working on production lines, Arthur Seaton style. Beyond that they get everything wrong, sometimes laughably. In one dire example called SoulBoy, the protagonist has gone to a northern soul night to get off with the girl of his dreams, a ludicrous notion in itself since no one went to northern soul nights to pull. (People did ‘cop off’ but that was a happy by-product of their shared enthusiasm for the music.) However he takes some unnamed drug before taking to the floor with her – another gaffe, dancing was both individual and collective but never paired – and starts to hallucinate. Northern soul was awash with drugs but almost exclusively these were uppers and speed, designed purely to keep you awake, not to send you on voyages into the depths of your psyche. A northern soul dancer would no more drop acid than a Buddhist monk would snort from a Benzedrine inhaler.

  The film Northern Soul treads close to cliché in some of the ‘it’s grim up north’ sections. But then, well, it was. There’s an idea to be pursued, indeed I’ve pursued it often, that the obscure and overlooked soul music of the 1960s was embraced by kids in the industrial north of the 1970s because at some level there seemed a kinship, a brotherhood, a shared experience of life. On grounds of taste, as well as common sense, we shouldn’t push this – no one ever got lynched in Wigan – but both groups were largely excluded from power or the profits of the economic mainstream, seen as outsiders by middle-class central government, and thus fell back on the dramas of everyday life – love, sex, dancing, friendship, the need to make a buck – and enshrined it in the music they love.

  Most great northern soul came not from New York or LA but from America’s brawny, big-hearted industrial cities like Detroit or Chicago, with their factories, mills and car plants. These were cities and lifestyles that kids from Lancashire, Sheffield, the Black Country could recognise and relate to. Though ‘Northern’ songs are often heartbreakingly vulnerable and tremulous with emotion, they are never maudlin, never self-indulgent. Northern soul is a tough and tender music for tough and tender people, people unafraid to show their loving side. You would never call the lads who danced so gracefully and balletically at Wigan Casino ‘puffs’. It was not an insult the culture understood, because it revelled in being different, an outsider, not one of the herd. Also, they would have kicked your head in.

  Twenty years after northern soul ensnared the youth of Lancashire, another underground music from the clubs of Industrial America did the same. This time it was acid house and the parallels with northern soul are many: obscure sides from anonymous artists picked up by cool tastemaker DJs and played at all-nighters to working-class kids taking drugs and escaping the everyday. The heart of this was the Madchester craze, the northern soul of 1990, and centred around The Haçienda Manchester rather than Wigan Casino (which burned down in murky circumstances in 1986).

  The artist Jeremy Deller’s project Acid Brass made explicit the link between two styles of music loved and embraced collectively in the north-west. One of these was acid house and the northern variants of it, and the other was the brass band tradition. At first it sounded gimmicky. But nothing Deller does is ever that, however novel and quirky it may first seem. When Deller asked The Williams Fairey Brass Band of Stockport to perform arrangements of rave and house anthems like ‘Voodoo Ray’ and ‘Strings Of Life’ it was no gimmick but a brilliant, witty yet affecting merger of, as Deller put it, ‘two authentic forms of folk art rooted in specific communities’.

  One of those communities is Dobcross, one of those Northern places like Wingates or Grimethorpe, that many associate immediately and automatically with their brass band. Actually that should be their silver band, a term once used with a certain hauteur, as it implied your band could afford silver-plated instruments and thus were more successful, but now the terms are pretty much synonymous.

  Not so in 1875, when the band formed, or not long after, when the picture I am looking at was taken. Here are the menfolk of the village, young whippersnappers and paunchy stalwarts, captured in their mutton chops and brass buttons, their bowler hats and waistcoats, proudly clutching their cornets and trumpets, looking squarely at you down the long years.

  The picture is on the back of That The Medals and the Baton Be Put On View: The Story of a Village Band 1875–1975, produced for the band’s centenary by the playwright Henry Livings. It’s a charming, slim volume, beautifully written with tenderness and a roguish wit, and is as much about people and place as music, since the one flows from the other. If I thought that wandering around the north musing about work and play made me unique or pioneering, Livings soon disabuses me of this notion in the sweetest of prose.

  As the goatherd’s pipe, the mother’s lullaby or the herald’s fanfare are natural products of a useful activity, so is a brass band … our lives may be split in two by the need for wages, may be artificially split into labour and leisure in a way that a farmer or a mother hardly understands, but we heal the cut when we make music, because we belong to a place.

  Dobcross is one of those places the north has been keeping to itself for years, and with good reason. One of those places that we in the north didn’t know how lucky we were to have come from and to live in, until we’d been strap-hanging on the Central Line for a few years, or breathing in exhaust fumes on the M25. It is beautiful, but in an entirely different way from the soft loveliness of a Cotswolds village. There’s a hardness here, a darkness to the stone, a shadow to the skyline, what Auden called ‘the oceanic whisper’ of ancient geologies and industries. I could live here. Who couldn’t, I think, as my taxi pulls up to the village square from Uppermill in the dusk. Below me I can see the snaking lights of a traffic jam that has brought that village to a standstill, as the whole place has turned out for the funeral of the pub landlord. That tells you a lot about these kinds of places. That and the headline in the local paper: ‘Dobcross Village Blocked: Traffic blocked on both sides for over an hour as the 184 bus unable to pass the wagon in Dobcross Square.’

  No such drama in the square tonight as I get out of my cab and into the Swan, where there’s already a pint on the bar for me thanks to a small welcoming committee. Each in their own way is something of a local legend. Mike Sweeney’s distinctive Salford drawl has been heard on records and airwaves for decades, either with his punkish band Salford Jets or as a broadcaster. In the 1980s, he came here on a Piccadilly Radio charity broadcast, fell in love with it and bought a house here. David Morris is the World Whistling Champion, and former principal cornet and musical director of the Dobcross band. Peter Young is the man who invited me to Dobcross. He’s a marketing man for Lancashire County Cricket, and tireless organiser and fundraiser for the village in general and the Dobcross band in particular. His son joined Dobcross Youth Band 25 years ago, progressed to the senior band, and he still plays for the famous Grimethorpe Colliery Band, who he’s travelled the world with ‘so I owe Dobcross Silver Band a few favours I reckon’.

  Peter contacted me to ask woul
d I play a ‘gig’ in the pub for their fund for the band’s Menin Gate trip mentioned in the last chapter, and I readily agreed, asking as a fee an invite to a band practice in the band hall, which is where we’re headed after our classic northern tea of cheese and onion pie, chips and beans – something of a specialty of the house and bloody gorgeous – and oh, go on, just a quick one then.

  Sated, we wander up the lane to the band hall, a compact building on the edge of a floodlit bowling green, about which David tells me a story that is entirely unrepeatable. Inside, we have another pint, obviously, and I’m introduced to some of the other band officials, the treasurer and musical director, and of course the band, who are assembling in the big room next door.

  The musical director, Tim, is a young percussionist who comes over the Pennines from Wakefield. The prestige of playing for the top bands is such that bands like Black Dyke and Grimethorpe have players who live as far away as Wales, and who make huge round trips for twice weekly practice. These are Coldplays and Beyoncés of the brass world, and they are justly famed. The second ever single released on the Beatles’ own Apple Records in April 1967, was a track called ‘Thingumybob’ by the Black Dyke Mills Band. It was written for them by Paul McCartney, and reflects the Fab Four’s love of a good brass band. Dobcross are not quite in this league, but they are well respected, resurgent even after a period of decline, and flourishing on all fronts with a youth band and a group called the Brass Monkeys comprising adult beginners who are picking up their tubas and trumpets late in life.