Love, Spit and Valve Oil
Thu 3, 10 & 17 March, BBC Radio 4 Banding: ‘Love, Spit And Valve Oil’ Ivor Novello Award-winning composer Martin Green’s three-part documentary series explores the history, the magic and the human stories behind the British brass band scene, and follows Martin as he writes a new piece of brass music.
Following a poster near his home in Midlothian that read: ‘Brass in the park, this Saturday’, Ivor Novello Award-winning composer Martin Green came across one of the most inspiring social music-making acts he’d ever witnessed. That revelatory, joyous moment reverberates through his new BBC Radio 4 series, Banding: Love, Spit and Valve Oil, a passionate exploration of the culture and communities of brass bands in Scotland, England and Wales, and a blow-by-blow account of his efforts to write a work for one of the ensembles.
Martin has spent the last year embedded in the world of brass bands, surrounded by the communities, the competition and the legacy of coal. At the heart of his three-part documentary is his quest to discover why banding in Britain has outlasted the pits, the picket lines and the closures.
He finds the answer in the human stories that are bound up so inseparably with the music. That unmistakable sound is shaped by the grit of difficult lives: lives spent in darkness at the coalface, in fear of violence at home, or blighted by unemployment. For generations, the self-contained world of the bands has been a refuge, a community-building practice and a source of healing.
As he hones his first work for brass band, Martin draws inspiration from the resilient, creative individuals he meets: a former miner who finally escaped the long shadow cast by a wrongful arrest; a woman who learned self-confidence and discipline along with scales and tunes from an inspirational teacher; and a tenor horn virtuoso whose music helped her overcome painful introversion. He soaks up the anticipation and exhilaration of the National Championship at the Royal Albert Hall. And he decides that these stories deserve the kind of crescendo that only a brass band can produce…
Martin Green comments: “Much of my life has followed a pattern of falling for a type of music and subsequently those humans that make it. Brass banding is a special scene, it’s a self-supporting community music-making system with all the interpersonal drama you’d expect from any intensely coexisting group of people. Add to that its inter-generational aspect, with multiple family members playing in the same bands; the rich social context of mining, trade-unions, industry, post-industry… and there are a lot of stories, passion and magic to uncover.”
His finished work for brass band, titled Split the Air, is one of ten new works commissioned for PRS New Music Biennial 2022. Whitburn Brass Band will give its premiere performance at Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre on 3 April, and it will return to the stage for the New Music Biennial festival weekends in Coventry UK City of Culture (Sat 23 April) and London’s Southbank (Sat 2 July). Celebrating the legacy of banding and looking to its future, the work will be performed by the talented young players of the National Youth Brass Band of Great Britain.
Image by Sandy Butler
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