There is something wonderfully organic about playing an old LP on a turntable.
It’s all about the care taken in the process - the enactment of a love interest that sees you perform a deeply personal Promethean ritual to produce life from an inanimate disc of vinyl.
There is nothing quite like it: The tender extraction from the sleeve and faint blow of warm air to remove an invisible layer of dust. The satisfying clunk as the record falls onto the revolving turntable and finally... the unmistakable crackle of static as the stylus gently touches the surface.
It is Heath Robinson meets Dr Frankenstein - technology of a pre-integrated silicon circuit age. It fills your heart with joy.
Retro-culture
After two decades or more of the artificial production intelligence of CDs, the new fad for retro-culture has brought LP playing back from the dead (sale are now booming), and with it, the chance to re-acquaint yourself with the OCD archive of your earlier banding life – and your storage boxes of LPs in strict alphabetical order complete with sub-sections of genre and style.
There is no greater sense of personal satisfaction in being able to know exactly how to find your Black Sabbath from your Black Dyke without recourse to a browser button on an i-pad.
That’s why this 1969 LP from the Watney Silver Band was the first to be extracted - like a lost gem from King Tut’s tomb.
There is nothing notable at all about it musically - yet it tells you everything you need to know about the market place for brass band recording in the pre-decimal age of the UK.
Red Barrel
The Watney Silver Band was originally formed in the 1930s as the West London Silver Band. In 1959 the Watney Mann Brewery (purveyors of ‘Red Barrel’ - one the iconic beers of the 1960s and 1970s, and the explosive home-keg ‘Party Four’ and ‘Party Seven’) started sponsoring them - rising through the sections to reach Championship Section status in the process.
By the time of this stereo recording they were conducted by Albert Meek, a former Bandmaster of the Regimental Band of the Royal Scots, and were looking to make a name for themselves. On this recording they tried to do it by bolstering their ranks with a string double bass and three French horns. The result was mixed to say the least.
Mrs Mills
Easy listening tastes in the late 1960s were eclectic: Not everyone was buying The Beatles or The Rolling Stones. Comedian Ken Dodd had four top 10 hits, whilst the Ruebensian honky-tonk piano player Mrs Mills actually sold more LPs in her career than most well known pop bands of the time.
And so, in that era Watney Silver Band were signed by Saga Records of Kensal Road London W10 for this release, and marketed with a strap line of: ‘Think of a Brass Band... Think of a Brass Band PLUS... and you have the wonderful ‘New Sound’ of the Watney Band.’
New Sound
That ‘new sound’ consisted of ‘Marching Trumpets’ and ‘Edelweiss’ mixed with Rossini’s ‘Semiramide’ and Malcolm Arnold’s ‘Galop’ from his ‘Little Suite for Brass’, a brace of quite eye-wateringly vicious approaches to ‘Tabarinage’ and ‘La Mascarada’ and stunningly clunking arrangements of ‘Sounds of Sousa’ and ‘The Cock O’ The North’ played with a gusto that can be best described as ‘enthusiastic’.
There is a spirited ‘Lazy Trumpeter’, but the sense of swing on ‘Trombola’ and even ‘Mellow Mood’ hits you in the spleen like left hook from Henry Cooper in his prime. It was perhaps not helped by the record cover itself - which seems to endorse under-age drinking from jubbly pint glasses tapped from a barrel the size of the Ark Royal.
So did this ‘New Sound’ take off? No.
Penalty shoot-out
By 1972 Watney’s sponsorship was cut (the company had turned their attention to sponsoring the equally short-lived Watney Cup football tournament – which gave British football the first ever penalty shoot out) and the band struggled for a few more years before folding.
The company itself was eventually swallowed up and is now a historic footnote of the Diageo Drinks conglomerate.
Thankfully though, the LP still survives - so raise a pint glass in celebration.
Iwan Fox
Programme:
Side 1:
1. Marching Trumpets
2. Edelweiss
3. Tabarinage
4. Trombola
5. Overture - Semiramide
Side 2:
1. Sounds of Sousa
2. Mellow Mood
3. La Mascarada
4. Lazy Trumpeter
5. The Cock O' The North
6. Galop (from Little Suite for Brass No 2)
