In praise of… brass bands

Few of Britain's coal mines are still operative but remarkably several of their bands play on. Eleven of them have come together to release an albumFew sounds are as evocative of a place and time in British life as a colliery brass band. By turns magnificent and melancholy, a miners' band sings even now of a way of life in which the disciplines of some of the hardest physical work ever devised by humankind coexisted with the very different disciplines of creating something beautiful and haunting...

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