Our Town

Brighouse & Rastrick Band
Conductor: Gavin Lindsay
Soloists: Michael Howley, Stephen Wilkinson, Jonathan Pippen, Scott Quarmby, John Ingman
Obrasso Recordings: CD 921
Total Playing Time: 65.05

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The musical sausage factory that is the Obrasso label continues to churn out its equivalent of turkey twizzlers, chicken nuggets and fun sized gelatine filled buffet pork pies to a music munching public that it appears, can't get enough of them. Who needs wholesome 5 a day fruit and veg when you can stuff your face on this artificially coloured, flavourless, e number enhanced pap?

It seems, according to the Swiss, that brass bands have a glutton's appetite for music of such little calorific value that you would be better off digesting the cellophane wrapper the CDs come in.  Like the stars and celebs who tell you ‘Every little helps', but forget to mention they wouldn't be seen dead shopping in a Tesco superstore, Obrasso stacks it high and sells it – well not so cheap to tell you the truth, in the hope that a policy of getting top class bands chucking enough rubbish at the buying public will result in at least a few of them being tempted to buy their stuff. 

It has got to a point where you wonder what music there is left to be dug up from its grave, given an injection of percussion led steroid back beat and then hung out like a rotting carcase to be picked on by the carrion that is the music buying brass bands of Europe and beyond.

Here with ‘Our Town', Brighouse & Rastrick are the latest in a long line of bands who should know better, but are tempted by heavens knows what, to put their name on a product that does them no favours whatsoever.

Black Dyke, Cory and others have done the same – some to varying degrees of success it must be said, but does anyone really think that a concert programme from these bands include regular items such as these? Playing them to sell is one thing; playing them as some sort of endorsement as Obrasso must think it does, is quite another.

The strange thing is though that a company that does pay some pretty talented composers and arrangers to churn out music on this industrial scale does get it right now and again. However, for every piece of fillet steak that does come from the likes of Alan Fernie, Sandy Smith, Darrol Barry and friends, there's enough pig ears, mutton dressed as lamb, giblets and offal to fill a charnel house full to overflowing.

Perhaps ‘serious' music doesn't pay the bills, but there are numerous examples of high quality ‘light' music from these gents and others that show that Obrasso are perhaps just asking them to churn it out to a very narrow, and for them, successfully prescribed format. Like the top bands, the hard earned reputations of these talented gents are seriously tarnished by this stuff – some should come with a Government health warning. What is the formula for cheesy tripe by the way?

Brighouse under Gavin Lindsay do their very best to make it sound enjoyable, light and breezy (and deserve medals for trying to do so), but its like pushing pigs slurry up a 1 in 4 hill with an afro comb. Try as they might to add a touch of class, even this fine band, playing on pretty good form just can't do it for 16 items.

Some pieces work, but plenty don't, although amid the carnage there are a few that have a touch of class – notably ‘Jubilation' played very well by Michael Howley and Alan Fernie's ‘Jesus Christ Superstar' medley (although it can only be a matter of time before we get a camped up Andrew Lloyd Webber meets Graham Norton version). Also worth a rewind on the CD is ‘Our Town', plus Sandy Smith's neat ‘Here, There and Everywhere'.

The Obrasso people can't as usual be bothered to put in any information about the music (or the performers in some cases) and so you do wonder who on earth this music is aimed at? If its youth and lower section bands wanting something to play that doesn't engage the brains of either the players or those who will have to listen it then heaven help us. ‘Tijuana Taxi' and ‘Zambezi,' which seems to be crossed with ‘Tico, Tico' get away with being almost comically ironic, whilst Keith Wilkinson's arrangement of Sousa's old stomper march ‘The Washington Post' and ‘The Grand Old Duke' are beyond surreal.  ‘Tragedy' is just that.

It was Orson Welles who once said, "In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed but still produced the Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Rennaisance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce ….? The cuckoo clock."

You can now add to that, these types of Obrasso CDs. Truly depressing.


Iwan Fox

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