'Brassed Off": a striking watch for Film Club

Brassed Off, directed by Mark Herman (The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas) and released in 1996, is set in the fictional Yorkshire town of Grimley, during the dying days of the British coal industry. The famous miner’s strike of 1984-5 was the prelude to a major period of pit closures across all the major UK coal fields, leaving whole communities without jobs and hope. The film uses the fate of the colliery brass band as a way of exploring the wider human cost of pit closures, notably how a community which has been built on union solidarity and shared purpose copes when its economic foundations are pulled away. 

Tony B explained that he had chosen this film for several reasons.

• He had enjoyed it when it came out, and it still feels startingly relevant, emotionally resonant and politically sharp

• He and I were living in Sheffield in the mid-1980s, and he remembered driving past a pit picket line daily on his way to work

• He loves brass band music and is reduced to tears by the flugelhorn solo in the film

• The brilliant performance by Pete Postlethwaite, which some say was his best. 

Tony had considered as an alternative The Full Monty, set and released around the same time, about a group of unemployed Sheffield steel workers who become male strippers. Although The Full Monty is probably slicker and funnier, and was a much bigger box office success globally than Brassed Off (£280M compared to £3M), the latter has more emotional range, showing a truly darker side of the effects of pit closures on individuals.

At its heart, the film follows the Grimley Colliery Band, a brass band made up of miners who practise in their spare time. The band is led with stubborn pride by Danny (Pete Postlethwaite), a retired miner who believes in the power of music to give dignity and meaning to lives under pressure. His determination to lead the band to the finals of the national championships in the Royal Albert Hall becomes a kind of last stand for the pit and for the town itself.   This was based on the real story of the Yorkshire mining village Grimethorpe, and of its colliery band, who won the National Brass Band Championships in 1992, four days after its pit was closed. Members of the Grimethorpe band (still going) play in the film as members of the Grimley band - and are absolutely marvellous.

The film weaves together the lives of several band members, each dealing with unemployment, debt and uncertainty, as nicely illustrated by their struggles to pay their band subs each week:

• Danny, the conductor, who has miner’s lung disease (pneumoconiosis) and who has a collapse which lands him in hospital in the run up to the grand final

• Phil, Danny’s son, played in an astonishing performance by Stephen Tompkinson. He has a wife and several children, and as the furniture disappears, the bailiffs come round, and his wife goes back to her mother, he is a man slowly unravelling. Even his trombone is falling apart.  In desperation, he digs out an old clown costume with long flappy shoes and tries to make a go of it as a children’s entertainer, but every gig goes wrong, and his anger and bitterness flash through as he enters middle class homes who can afford the luxury of a ‘professional’ for their child’s birthday party.  Following a final breakdown in the pub, he is rescued just in time from trying to hang himself, in clown’s costume, from the gantry above the pit entrance - a harrowing and emotional scene to watch.

• Andy, a young miner played by Ewan McGregor. We didn’t think he was particularly well cast (too clean cut) but maybe he was a hired as a box office draw. He is torn between loyalty to his community and awareness that there is a life elsewhere.

• Harry (the wonderful Jim Carter) and Ernie (Philip Jackson) who bounce between band loyalties and the exhortations of their wives to keep their money and time for better causes - but see below for comments on the role of the women in the community. When Danny is in hospital, Harry leads the band at night in a moving rendition of Danny Boy under his hospital window. Their music is lit by their miners’ helmet lights, and their switching off at the end of the piece seems symbolic of what is happening around them. Apparently this scene was reenacted by the real Grimethorpe Colliery Band the day Pete Postlethwaite died, in 2011.

The backdrop to the band is the management review of the viability of the pit, and whether the miners will or won’t vote for redundancy. Naturally, in the pub the miners all stand firm, but at home there are pressures and doubts that might lead them to behave differently at the ballot box.

Into this maelstrom of emotions enters Gloria (Tara Fitzgerald), a young woman originally from the town, and a teenage sweetheart of Andy (‘the love of my life’). She turns up at band rehearsal carrying the flugelhorn belonging to her late miner grandfather, a workmate of Danny’s, who says ‘when they opened him up, his lungs were black with dust’ - and Danny knows that his are the same.   To predictable disgust and ribald comments, she starts to play, and wins them over with a beautiful performance of the Adagio from Joquin Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, known to the band as ‘Orange Juice’, and interestingly composed as the result of a personal tragedy. Although she smartly pretends not to remember Andy’s name, their romance soon rekindles. What he and the other miners don’t know is that she is undertaking a feasibility study of the pit on behalf of the management. Her heart, however, is in the right place, because she knows from her numbers that the pit is viable. She is soon disillusioned with management, though, who tell her that the decision to close the pit had been taken a couple of years earlier, and the ‘review’ is just for show.  The miners vote to take redundancy and the pit’s fate is sealed.

In the end, of course, the band get to the Royal Albert Hall and win the competition, but there are a satisfying number of ambiguities. Danny escapes from his hospital bed and turns up in time to make a moving speech about how people matter more than music, which is why they’re going to refuse the trophy - this gets a lot of publicity but Ernie makes off with the trophy anyway. Phil’s wife is in the audience, but it’s uncertain whether she and Phil will get back together. Gloria sets up a bank account with her £3000 redundancy pay out to keep the band going, but will they take this dirty money? - of course they do. 

The discussion of the film started with the group’s first hand recollections and knowledge of different mining communities.   We agreed that in the 80s and 90s, there was very little discussion of the harm fossil fuels were doing to the environment, but we were reminded just how horrible a job coal mining was, with regular accidents (Aberfan) and predictable lung disease which was not compensated. Pits had received some government compensation in the late 1970s, and coal was sold to power stations at a cheap price. The leader of the National Union of Mineworkers (Arthur Scargill) was very militant - was he too extreme?  In the NE of England, for example, communities were divided as to whether striking miners’ children should receive free school meals or not, despite the fact that miners were always generous at charitable collections. In Nottinghamshire, some pits didn’t strike at all.  The government of the mid-1980s was determined to break the power of the unions, but no provision was made for alternative employment for the 250,000 miners across the UK.  By 1994, the real Grimethorpe was one of the poorest small towns in England, with a high crime rate and a community fractured by who had/hadn’t taken part in the strike 10 years earlier.  Ironically, their famous colliery band became sponsored, controversially, by a mining company, and went on to play the soundtrack for a Disney film about saving pit ponies when their mine closed. In eastern Canada, the collapse of the coal industry coincided in the 1990s with the privatisation of water companies, selling off of council houses, and collapse of the fishing industry. 

We moved on to discussing brass bands - for some, a joy since childhood, for others, a grating on the ear. We agreed that they could play an amazing range of material, spanning a wide emotional spectrum, from the William Tell overture (their piece in the grand final) to the Cornish Floral Dance. Apparently, there had once been ‘silver bands’, a classier south of England option, until it was realised that brass laminate was cheaper and still created the same glorious sound. There had been a history of employers starting a band to encourage discipline and temperance (though the Grimley miners didn’t display much of the latter while taking part in the round-14-village brass band competition), and maybe even to discourage employees from mixing with their competitors.   There seems to be somewhat of a revival of brass bands, with an estimated 12,000 across the UK, encompassing players of all ages.  There is a nice touch in the opening credits of Brassed Off, where the letters for the musical terms p (piano = soft) and f (forte = loud) are picked out in red. 

Finally, we examined some of the key figures in the film. The community solidarity very much extended to the miners’ wives, with women on the picket line, so barely seeing their husbands for weeks on end.  Harry and Ernie’s wives work in a grocer’s shop, and are seen slipping money (no doubt from the till) to Phil’s wife, who is perennially short of cash.  No wonder she has had enough when Phil buys a new trombone – but did Danny chip in? There was an interesting reflection that maybe Danny was so obsessed with the band that he wasn’t a very good father to Phil, seemingly failing to help or even notice when Phil’s life started falling apart.  It remained to be seen whether Danny’s realisation that people are more important than music, extends to his own family.

We agreed that this had been a terrific film, with so many aspects providing another satisfying evening of discussion.