A brass band with acid house bangers? Hold on to your flugelhorn

Maribyrnong locals are probably accustomed to hearing the strains of community brass band Western Brass’ Tuesday night rehearsals – 25 brass instruments make quite a noise, even from inside a hall – but in recent weeks they might have noticed a change of pace. For the past few weeks, the band has been learning works for this month’s Rising festival. These are not your standard brass tunes.

Along with four other local brass bands – Merri-bek City Band, Glenferrie Brass, Victorian State Youth Brass Band and the City of Dandenong band – Western Brass members have been learning classic acid house bangers for Acid Brass, a collaborative art project devised by British conceptual artist Jeremy Deller in which dance anthems are re-scored for traditional brass ensembles. Squelchy bass beats beloved of ravers on party drugs meeting the melancholy timbre of traditional brass music? Hold on to your flugelhorn.

Acid Brass uses all brass instruments to interpret electronic dance music.

The unlikely fusion was born in 1997, after a conversation between Deller and some mates at the pub about the similarities between pre- and post-industrial Britain and the social and political connections between two seemingly disparate musical genres.

Brass bands sprang up during Britain’s industrial revolution, often as a social activity for workers from factories and coal mines, while acid house is associated with the rave culture of the late 1980s and early ’90s. They’re seemingly poles apart, but Deller, who won the prestigious Turner Prize in 2004, saw parallels in the two genres: rave culture provided an escape from the realities of Thatcher’s Britain, while brass bands had long provided entertainment before the advent of TV and radio. Both offer escapism and a sense of community.

He created a diagram, a “thought process in action” called The History of The World. It outlines the connections between the two periods and explores 20th-century Britain and its change from being an industrial to a post-industrial nation. Deller describes the diagram as “the visual justification for Acid Brass”.

“It was just a chat and it was meant to be funny,” Deller tells me over Zoom from London, “but I saw beyond the humour. I suppose there’s humour within any sort of musical adaptation or slightly odd idea.”

There is some absurdity to the concept, he says, but it’s much more than that.

Jeremy Deller with his work The History of the World.Credit: AP

Western Brass musical director Jared McCunnie was already a fan of Deller’s project, and even composed his own dance track arranged for brass band. Manchester uses EDM (electronic dance music) and was inspired by his time studying in the city. He says many people’s ideas of brass bands are outdated.

“The general public assume the brass brand idiom to be Salvation Army types playing marches and hymns – there’s still sacred aspects of a lot of the contest performances, but there’s also so much new music that is secular and contemporary,” he tells me at the first rehearsal I sit in on. While most Western Brass members aren’t familiar with the tracks they’ll perform at Rising, everyone is open to the idea.

“We’ve got a few traditionalists in the band,” says McCunnie, who at 26 is already an experienced tuba player, composer and arranger. “But we’ve done contemporary songs before, and Rising festival is a chance for a whole new audience to see what we do.

“I’m not much of a raver, but I can see its place,” he says. “I love the crossover of things, and that’s what excites me.”

Deller’s work has always been less straightforward than many of his peers in that he’s known for facilitating “events” in collaboration withartists and social groups as well as creating traditional art “objects”.

In 2001, he staged The Battle of Orgreave, a public re-enactment of the violent confrontation between police and miners during the 1984 UK miners’ strike, bringing together almost 1000 volunteers. In 2016, to commemorate the centenary of the Battle of the Somme, his work We’re Here Because We’re Here had 1000 volunteers pop up all over the UK in World War I uniforms. Silently appearing at train stations and shopping centres, each soldier represented a man who had fallen at the battle.

Alan Collard, City of Dandenong Band’s oldest member, who is 85, and Mikey Waugh, who at seven, is the youngest.Credit: Simon Schluter

But Acid Brass was the first time he’d approached strangers in the hope of collaborating. A couple of months after creating his diagram, Deller asked the Williams Fairey brass band from Stockport in Manchester, whose members worked for the Fairey Aviation Works, if they’d be part of his experiment. In his 2023 book Art Is Magic he describes this first collaboration as liberating.

“When I first approached them, it was a phone call and I was quite nervous because, you know, the music, or some of it, has … a big association with drug culture - but that wasn’t my line of interest,” Deller says. “So I chose my words carefully!” He didn’t use “the A word” in that first conversation, instead calling it a new commission for brass bands “involving contemporary dance music”.

The band manager was intrigued by the idea. “He said, ‘Well, we’ll just do it and see what happens.’”

Deller chose a handful of his favourite tracks from the acid house and Detroit techno genres, among them DJ Fast Eddie’s Can You Dance, KLF’s What Time Is Love? and A Guy Called Gerald’s Voodoo Ray. Band conductor Rodney Newton transposed the tracks for brass instruments.

The idea might have seemed gimmicky at first – it was derided by one reviewer as a “dodgy (and condescending) concept” – but the band members were open-minded.

They performed Deller’s track listing in front of an audience in Liverpool, and the show was recorded for the album Acid Brass (the five Melbourne bands will play tracks from this album). They had only had one rehearsal and nobody knew quite what to expect – certainly not that the projectwould still be going more than 25 years later.

Members of Western Brass getting to grips with classic acid house bangers.

“It became a really big deal for them,” says Deller. “You know, they were on the TV and the radio a lot and there were concerts that were sold out to young people and so it was really great for them.”

Since that first performance, the Williams Fairey band has performed tracks from the Acid Brass album at dozens of UK festivals (and to a crowd of 25,000 in London), at the Louvre in Paris, in Berlin and even on match day at Manchester’s Etihad Stadium.

As Deller discovered when he created the project, brass bands are always looking for new material, and to attract younger audiences.

At the Western Brass rehearsals I attended,the players ranged in age from teenagers to 75, people who might not otherwise encounter each other outside of banding, as it’s called.

In Maribyrnong’s draughty old RSL hall, it doesn’t matter how old anyone is or what they do for a living. It’s just about the music.

Bass trombone player Greg Keane has been playing for 44 years but never studied music. “I make an OK sound, but I just do it because I love playing music,” he says. “Music is a great de-stressor – if you’ve had a crap day at work, you come to rehearsal, we’re amongst friends, we’re inclusive, we don’t care [about] your background – we’re here to play music.”

Members of the Victorian Youth Orchestra rehearsing for their Acid Brass performance.

He hadn’t heard the dance tracks before the rehearsal began. “It’s very different; it’s not what I would normally listen to, but there’s some good stuff in there.”

Baritone horn (a half-size tuba) player Lindsay Paterson is the band’s second-oldest member. He plays several instruments and has dabbled in jazz-rock, having arranged a piece by Australian band Sky for brass band. But dance music? Not so much.

“I’m … aware of it,” he says with a laugh. “But I’ve tended to ignore doof music if I can help it.” Paterson is the band’s unofficial historian, and he regales me with the history of brass bands, and different instruments.

It puts me in good stead when I cross town to sit in on the City of Greater Dandenong brass band’s Wednesday night rehearsal. I can now tell the difference between a tuba and cornet.

At a community hall in Keysborough, musical director Jamie Lawson, who seems to have worked with every brass band in Melbourne (there’s a lot of crossover among Melbourne’s banding community) and is a six-time Victorian Cornet Soloist Champion, is warming up the band. For their Rising performance, they have members of the local youth band joining in as well, and their youngest player is Mikey Waugh, who is just seven. He’s on drums and triangle, with his mum, Robyn, helping out.

Lawson is still deciding which tracks they’ll play, but isn’t concerned. “Look, it’s um … repetitive, and the music wouldn’t be hard to memorise,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean it’s boring!” Playing this music in front of a crowd, he says, will also be different.

“That elevates the band as an ensemble above what people expect, which is old people. We’re definitely not that.”

He adds that while the songs themselves haven’t been too challenging, “the challenge will be to get people to come out of their skins a little bit. We don’t want a bunch of guys just standing there; I think people want to see them moving a little bit – like brass sections in rock bands.”

Given this band’s reputation for marching and entertaining moves, Lawson is confident it’ll come together.

Even its oldest member, Alan Collard, 85, is on board. “I hadn’t heard these songs until last week, but they have good rhythm – and we have our own timekeeping with the drums and a rhythm section,” he says.

Collard, who has been playing cornet since he was seven years old, says band members are used to playing to all sorts of audiences; they don’t, he says, only play traditional tunes. “We do a cabaret every year at the Springvale Town Hall and we all get dressed up, and have a different theme every year.”

They recently covered the Bluey theme in a gig.

Back in Maribyrnong, Western Brass are into their third week of rehearsing Acid Brass tracks, and while not everyone is entirely convinced, their rendition of Can You Dance is joyfully infectious. (And yes, it’s a bit repetitive.)

As Deller says, part of the joy of the project is the communal aspect. Rehearsal is one thing, but once these guys are out on the street – outside the Melbourne Town Hall, the State Library and near the Metro Tunnel on Swanston Street – there’s no doubt it will go off.

“Brass bands often play in the open; you don’t pay to see or hear them, you just come across them or they just perform for free,” he says. “It’s a lot of people, it’s quite visual as well and it has a kind of civic, communal feel to it.”

And importantly, you can dance to it. “It has a rhythm to it, it sounds strong and powerful, it’s danceable, some people would recognise some of the songs …”

Bottom line, Deller says, is that it’s great music played by bands that are always very adaptable musical units.

“There’s a real celebratory feel - and people love it!”

Catch Acid Brass at Rising Festival.