The Pie At Night

by Stuart Maconie

  Back at Dobcross Band Hall, the Silver band are preparing for a concert in Shaw, near Oldham, that had to be re-scheduled after bad snows last winter. ‘Only half the band got there, and they came skidding down the hill and nearly crashed into the venue.’ A nice lady called Phillippa – D Tenor Horn – shows me the programme she has designed for the event, for which there are eight tickets left. There’s much chat and laughter as the players assemble, pulling off their coats and taking instruments out of cases. They’re a mix of ages and sexes, and many will have come straight from work. As the movie Brassed Off showed so powerfully, collectivity is at the heart of banding. Though the band might now feature a mill director, a hairdresser, engineers, nurses and teachers, there is a fundamental commitment to what we might call working-class values and ways of life. In the old days, if a band folded, it was sometimes difficult if not impossible to know what to do with the instruments, which would moulder in storage. They had often been bought by public subscription and belonged to the village or town, not individuals. As Henry Livings asked, ‘Whose are they but the property of ghosts?’

  In Livings’ book on the band, he also addresses the matter of booze. ‘Many bands resist the idea of having a bar where they practise, and certainly a pint pot under the chair is a sign of a poor band.’ There’s a bar here, but the pint pots beneath the chairs are full of lime and soda and orange squash. The only people drinking are me and my hosts, which we seem to be doing at an alarming rate. (The aforementioned Whit Band Day is one of the booziest days in the social calendar, but the bands themselves take the playing very seriously, at least until the results are in.)

  And then instruments are raised to lips and something wonderful happens. I am not a musical snob or a purist, and I roll my eyes when some bore starts banging on about ‘manufactured music’ since all music is manufactured. Also, if changing your hair, clothes, music and drummer because your manager tells you to isn’t manufactured, I don’t what is. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you … the Beatles. But we hear so much processed music, music of such similar character and sound, a kind of Golden Arches pop that homogenises the world and its differences, smooths out the folds and ridges, that it is thrilling to now and then hear a sound that is totally its own, be it a male voice choir or Swedish folk or dub reggae or Nashville country or Bulgarian female vocal music. A sound that instantly speaks of place and history. That is the sound of a brass band, and as it rings out in that hall in Dobcross it has an almost physical effect.

  The piece is Malcolm Arnold’s ‘Little Suite for Brass’. As well as the versions by the great British brass bands I later quickly find versions by some Japanese teenagers from the Nanyang Academy and the Ceremonial Brass band of the United States Air Force. (Write something for brass band and you can guarantee it will get played.) I have a soft spot for the music of Arnold and you’ll know him even if you think you don’t, either through his famous arrangement of ‘Colonel Bogey’ as part of his music for the film The Bridge Over The River Kwai or his jaunty ‘English Dance No 5’, for many years the tune to a programme I loved as a kid called What The Papers Say (which says a lot about me). The Guitar Concerto is lovely too, and I once saw Arnold, a troubled personality who might now be classed as bipolar, swing Julian Bream’s guitar around his head after a performance at the proms.

  The ‘Little Suite for Brass’ is charming and its highlight is the lyrical second movement. Just as its opening chords begin to drift from the euphoniums and trumpets, a man in a parka dashes in, takes his seat to the left of the conductor, pulls a cornet from his case and proceeds to play the solo melody with commendable grace and poise under the circumstances. ‘He’s come straight from work, that lad. He’s good. You’ll hear the whole band get better now.’ Next they launch into Kenneth J Alford’s stiff-backed military march ‘On the Quarterdeck’, but soon director Tim is slapping his forehead in mock exasperation. ‘This is my favourite march and you lot have ruined it for me in two bars.’

  ‘Sorry,’ comes a reply from the second row cornets, ‘just getting the fingering sorted out,’ and everyone laughs. Brass joke obviously. In the middle of this row sit two teenage girl cornetists in Ugg boots and jeans occasionally checking their iPhones for texts as well as playing up a storm. The Dobcross brass band is a healthy mix, I’d say, compared to the very masculine enclaves of orchestral brass sections, which is perhaps why they have a reputation as being the drinkers of the orchestra, that and the fact that it’s thirsty work. The orchestral ‘fixer’ of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra told me that the brass section pride themselves of being at the bar of the pub next door in less than three minutes from taking their bows.

  Next is a British light classic called ‘The Arcadians’, or as David introduces it to me in the compressed vernacular of the north ‘Th’Arcadians’. I love these formations, especially when the word is an unusual one, as in when you hear people talking of ‘having a walk up t’hill to th’obelisk’. Things seem to going be fine to me, but Tim waves them to a halt.

  ‘Come on guys, there’s a fine line between “swagger” and “slow” and we have to get it bang on. More bass, less youth, Tom. Are we OK on there? We seem to be having a bit of trouble.’ A bald man throws his hands up in self-rebuke. Then there is a debate about the score, ‘What do you make of that? It looks like a trill to me.’

  A chap called Andy joins us after a few numbers, sitting at the back with our pints, and tells me how he got drawn in by his daughter, indicating one of the young female cornetists. ‘She wanted to come and play and I started by dropping her off and then I got reeled in, I suppose. Now I’m chairman and treasurer and events organiser. It takes more time than my actual job and we’re all voluntary, but it’s just a nice place.’

  Andy’s daughter is in the trio piece which is up for rehearsal next. The three cornet players, the two girls and the late comer, take their music stands into a corner and play as a trio of soloists, with accompaniment by the band. The tempo is brisk and the arrangements are light and speedy. They fluff some bits but josh each other and giggle. It is, in every way, a lovely thing to see.

  Then, the whole band go over the end of ‘Arcadians’ again to get that warm, major chord resolution right that will send the audience home smiling. Dave Rowntree, drummer with Blur, learned his musical chops as the drummer in a big military brass band as a teenager, and he once told me that nothing he’d experienced in a major rock band in the arenas of the world could match the musical thrill and the sheer sensory delight of sitting in the middle of that full and enveloping sound. Even as a listener, sitting with a pint in a village hall on a weekday evening, when the band mesh and ‘kicks in’, it’s an amazing sound, full and dazzling. I think about the Sydney Smith quote about heaven being ‘eating caviar to the sound of trumpets’. Caviar is, of course, horrible. But if he’d said bhuna or steak pudding or Roquefort, he might have been on to something.

  When the lady flugelhorn player finishes her solo bit, everyone applauds, which is delightful. I wonder if brass bands work a bit like a football team, second desk players acting like holding midfielders or playmakers, setting up the star soloists. The lad in the check shirt and his fellow euphonists and trombonists are certainly working hard, sweating and pumping away at the heart of it. I bet the trombone takes it out of you, and you get an inkling why brass players are the bibulous, big-hearted rough diamonds of the orchestra.

  There are more pints to be had down the hill in the Swan, and I ask Dave about the world champion whistling title. He travels the world in competitions and has shared stages with bands he rather splendidly refers to as ‘T’Foo Fighters’ and ‘T’Kings of Leon’. You may well have heard him on adverts too, ‘Mini, BMW … oh yes, the Golden Eagle has shit all over me, lad’, a new expression on me but one I take to mean business is good.

  The evening being late and the pints downed being numerous, Dave is persuaded, with not too much effort, to do a spot of whistling for us. It’s not at all what I expect, no
t the fussy, warbling Roger Whittaker stuff at all, but more like a theremin or, well, a cornet, soft and diaphanous, bright and melodious. At the end of a lovely rendition of a selection of film soundtracks, Peter takes a sip, thoughtfully, and says ‘I whistle too … in the bathroom but I don’t keep bloody going on about it.’ We all laugh and, if memory serves, which is far from certain, order another pint.

  CHAPTER 10

  TRYING SOMETHING A BIT DIFFERENT

  Zombies in the Trafford Centre, ghosts in Clitheroe and gags in Manchester’s Studentville

  As anyone who has walked along Blackpool’s Golden Mile will attest, the north loves a novelty. In fact, we took the very word for ‘new’, for ‘innovation’ and ‘invention’ and we turned ‘novelty’ into a word for plastic dog poo, a rubberised David Cameron mask and a flashing illuminated cutlass. These are what northerners call ‘novelties’, and there is a whole warehouse full of them in Blackpool called SuperFunStuff down on Amy Johnson Way. I mention this in case you could do with a new inflatable pterodactyl.

  The novel is what we do, and we’ve being doing it in the more respectable and scientific sense for centuries. In the scientific societies and universities of Newcastle were born the aeroplane joystick, the iPod Nano and the electric lightbulb. Derbyshire gave us the hot dog, Swarfega and Lara Croft. Liverpool was home to the railway tunnel, orthopaedic surgery and Citizens Advice Bureaux. Rutherford split the atom and Turing invented the computer in almost adjoining buildings in Manchester, and now next door they are working on a substance Manchester scientists discovered in 2004 called graphene, one atom thick (a million times thinner than a human hair) and a hundred times stronger than steel, and set to revolutionise our world. In a nice mix of science and art, the musician Sara Lowes is working on a commissioned composition to celebrate it.

  Our northern zeal for technology has been entrepreneurial as well as academic, as seen at Blackpool illuminations and Belle Vue Speedway. And from the bearded lady to the ghost train, if you can make it something ghoulish as well as novel, a real shock of the new, then all the better. No one knew this better than Louis Tussaud. When his flagship Regent Street Waxworks burned down, which is surely about the grisliest fate than can befall a waxworks, he relocated to Blackpool, opening there in 1900. For a century, there was fruitful tension between Louis’ company and his great-grandma’s, Madame Tussauds, equally famed for its wax creations, and which eventually took over the Golden Mile wax museum in 2010. With little familial loyalty, the Madame Tussauds website explains:

  For the last 80 years Louis Tussauds, up until 2010, was situated on Central Promenade, entertaining and often frustrating holiday makers and customers with their many unrecognisable celebrity figures.

  Visitors often thought they were entering the world famous and original Madame Tussauds, only to be disappointed by the unrecognisable celebrities, lack of interactive fun and restricted access to their figures – a very different experience to that of the original Madame Tussauds that is now in over 12 different countries.

  When I was a kid, the most popular part of the Louis Tussauds Waxworks on the Golden Mile was the Chamber of Horrors. The most popular part of that, surrounded by eager gawpers and even a few saucer-eyed little kids who’d snuck in underage and under dad’s overcoat, was the car crash tableau. A bloody assemblage of metal and gore and severed limbs and dead children, it pictured the aftermath of an M6 accident. Nice, eh? We are such redoubtable folk that we will turn anything into fun, however dark, however gory, however melancholy.

  I think about this on the night the zombies invaded the Trafford Centre. I don’t mean this as some plonking satire on the emptiness of consumerism. No, I mean actual zombies; the undead, hollow-eyed and rapacious, moaning and lurching and pawing at you, intent on making you one of their hideous, cadaverous brood. Well, to be honest, I don’t mean that because there are no such things as zombies obviously. If you think there are, I have to say to you now, pull yourself together. But I am fascinated with how they have become a ‘thing’ as you young people say, a trope, a meme.

  You can watch films on them and play games featuring them. You can buy books on their habits and physical make-up and how to survive an attack by them. You can partake of an entertainment whereby you pay 30 quid to get chased by them around a massive warehouse in Stretford. I know this, because that is what I and several hundred apparently normal people did for fun on a frosty autumn night in late 2014. In the manner of the young women who greet you at the door of a Harvester, I feel I want to ask you, have you ever been to a Zombie Apocalypse? No. Well, there isn’t a salad bar.

  A few of us made our way here from another northern innovation, the BBC’s MedicaCity based in Salford. Being unsure what to expect myself, I was gratified that some of my workmates were also a little dubious about it. I’ve always felt uncomfortable among overly gung-ho people and I don’t really like being scared. One of my colleagues asked, a little weirdly, ‘Will I get punched?’

  Well, let’s look at how the organisers bill it. Apparently it is:

  … a new scare attraction like no other … a live immersive, interactive experience which sees EventCity next to The Trafford Centre turned into a safe zone to keep terrifying zombies at bay … Prepare for the biggest challenge of your life, where only the best will make it to the other side. With four hours of terror that will send shivers down your spine at every turn, with only your wits and the might of the Military to protect you, you must be on your guard at all times. The Zombie Apocalypse has begun and there is no escape – it’s too late! They are already here, you are right in the middle of the action! Manchester is being attacked and only the military stands between the Zombies and the Earth’s annihilation. This is the final battle – can you face the fear and be a survivor?

  Excitingly, all this came with a postscript:

  WARNINGS AND DISCLAIMERS

  SCREAM PARK UK reserves the right to refuse entry to anyone. You will be exposed to a variety of conditions including intense audio and lighting, low visibility, strobe lights, fog, damp or wet conditions and at a times a physically demanding environment. We advise that you should NOT participate if you are pregnant, have claustrophobia, prone to seizures, heart or respiratory problems. You will not be admitted if you appear to be intoxicated or are wearing any form of temporary cast, using crutches or a medical brace … If you are of a weak or nervous disposition we advise you to STAY AT HOME.

  Initially, though, our taxi driver is far more worrying than the undead. First he takes us a way that seems to negotiate all of the inner circles of hell, slowly, and via the scenic route. Then, when he asks where we’re headed, he starts making really terrible zombie noises. They are really pretty third rate. But however poor a zombie impersonation is, it’s still fairly disconcerting when your taxi driver is making them. Not getting the desired response of terror or mirth, indeed not getting a response at all other than bemused looks, he desists. Then we pass Old Trafford football ground, illuminated red against the rainy sky. He asks, ‘Do you want me to take your picture here?’ Surprised to learn that we do not, thwarted, and more than a little resentful I think, he goes back to making zombie noises.

  Eventually, he drops us after I’ve talked him down from his initial enormous piss-taking fare and we queue up in a vaporous November drizzle outside EventCity, Manchester, a huge leisure park/venue-type-thing where you can watch a golf exhibition, ski down a massive artificial piste, or, in my case, be chased by zombies. You take your pick really. I could say that EventCity is like an aircraft hangar, but I’m aware that as I’ve never been in an aircraft hangar I’m just using the standard unit of measurement for any large indoor space, just as Wales and football pitches serve this function for outside areas.

  Once inside, there are a great many men in black paramilitary garb, intended to be some kind of future militaristic police force, barking orders and jabbing really quite fearsome looking weaponry at you as they herd you along. This gives me the same though
t that always occurs on the gate at Glastonbury when an officious hairy in a hi-vis tabard is yelling orders at me, namely that if someone from a refugee camp in Darfur were here they would think, ‘You people pay to be treated like this?’

  OK, the premise. There seems to be some kind of mass zombie invasion taking place in a fairground, which is extraordinarily good or bad luck depending which way you view it. It would have been more containable had it happened in a bus station or, well, an aircraft hangar, but less fun to watch. There are hundreds of the aforesaid zombies, dressed in rags and some with really quite upsetting makeup jobs lurching about and trying to grab you. Even though common sense tells you that these aren’t zombies but some theatre studies students from Didsbury College, it’s still quite unnerving. Your natural reaction is to run, even though you’re not sure what they’d do if they caught you, and probably neither are they.

  But here’s the thing. If this happened at your fairground (you’re a fairground manager, did I mention that?), when these zombies start arriving en masse from lord knows where, milling around bloodied and moaning and generally trying to gnaw at customers’ throats or disembowel people with axes, well, you’d close the fairground for the night, wouldn’t you? You’d give the staff the rest of the shift off and lock up. Come back tomorrow bright and early, maybe, but definitely call it a night.

  Not here they haven’t. They don’t even seem to regard the influx of the baying crazed undead as much more than a minor inconvenience, like a burst pipe or some kid being sick on the waltzer (as I once was in Southport in 1975). They are carrying on with things quite normally over at the penalty shoot-out stall (£2.50 a go, three kicks). Naturally, I pay for a go, having my eye on the Messi Barcelona shirt. The man says it’s harder than you think and he’s right. I get one in the target hole but miss the rest. But then I did have a clown with a chainsaw trying to eviscerate me.