Brassed Off
Writer and director Mark Herman
The genesis of his film, Brassed Off, came in 1992 when filmmaker Mark Herman was driving through the small Yorkshire town of Grimethorpe in northern England. The vibrant and close-knit community he had known in the 1980s was now just a cluster of stores and homes, most of which were boarded up and abandoned.
Grimethorpe had been built to service its principle industry, coal mining, and when the mine (or "pit") closed down, the town followed. Herman was shocked by this rapid and unheralded decline.
"I couldn't believe that that had happened without it being in the media," he says during a recent visit to Detroit, and his intense emotional reaction became "the spark of the story."
The closing of the Grimethorpe Colliery (the coal mine and its buildings, equipment, etc.) might be seen by American audiences in ecological terms, as the result of a shift away from fossil fuels. In England, Herman explains, the systematic shutdown of the coal industry was in large part motivated by politics. The coal industry became nationalized in England after World War II, becoming the National Coal Board, and the miners became part of a powerful union.
"The [coal mine] closures I think were a result of the society not wanting any one union having that much power that they could hold the country to ransom, which they did in the late 1970s," says Herman. "So [Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher] invested in nuclear and other energy sources which have their own unions. In the end it just meant the death of the coal industry because they didn't have that power anymore."
The miners affected by the closures were offered a bulk pay-out (called redundancy) but the towns where they lived were doomed. "The film never says whether it's right or wrong to close the pit," Herman explains. "It may well be right economically, I don't know. What was wrong was the effect, not doing anything about the communities."
A fierce and bitter miners' strike in 1984 was well-publicized, but the media and the public eventually grew apathetic toward the miners, Herman says, partly because the conflict seemed to degenerate into a personal "playground spat" between Thatcher and the head of the union.
When the conservative Tory government "started closing the pits in the early 90s," he continues, "they didn't just say, 'All right, we're going to close 40 pits' because then people would pay attention to it. The government just closed two at a time, so it didn't become news. It was rather cleverly done."
Herman, whose own politics are decidedly Labour, was looking for a way to tell this political story in more personal terms when he heard a radio report about a brass band "in the northeast of England which had to pack it in because of unemployment," he says. The point of the report was that "once the band goes, then the whole community's gone."
Brass bands, he continues, "have always been connected to the unions and the industry in the north of England. At all the protest marches, there's always local brass bands following up the back. It's very passionate music as well, which gets people going."
So Brassed Off (British slang for I'm mad as hell and not going to take it anymore) examines the ramifications of mine closures — the loss of a community and a way of life — through the story of a brass band in the fictional Yorkshire town of Grimley.
Mark Herman, who wasn't a fan of brass band music before he wrote the script and then directed Brassed Off (1996), found himself hooked. He was surprised by the range of music that brass bands could play, including both popular and classical pieces. People not familiar with the brass band tradition, Herman explains, "think it's um-pah-pah music. This film has actually opened people's eyes — or their ears — to what brass bands actually play."
To find a stellar brass band, Herman had to look no further than the town that inspired the film. The Grimethorpe Colliery Band, one of the top brass bands in England, had survived the closing of the mine and near shut-down of Grimethorpe itself by securing sponsorships and turning semi-professional.
In addition to recording the soundtrack, members of the Grimethorpe Colliery Band appear onscreen alongside actors Pete Postlethwaite, Ewan McGregor and Tara Fitzgerald as part of Brassed Off's band. When they represent their town in the national brass band competition at London's Albert Hall, "every other band thinks Grimethorpe are all movie stars, so they tease them about that," says Herman with a smile.
Grimethorpe also served as the film's primary location. "We had to dress Grimethorpe up to make it look better," he says, adding that sometimes the crew's work prompted a few double-takes from residents. "The scene in the film where the pit does close and the signs are up and there's a wreath up there — 'We fought and lost' — there were some people coming out of the pub and they thought they'd stepped back ten years."
As for Herman's own career, Brassed Off has been a particularly rewarding comeback after his 1991 farce, Blame It On the Bellboy, was savaged by critics and ignored by the film-going public. Brassed Off, despite having three strikes against it — the unpopular subject matter of politics, miners, and brass bands — has become a bona fide hit all over Great Britain, fueled by positive word of mouth. As a Yorkshire resident, Herman imbued his film not only with that region's concerns but its sensibilities, throwing in a healthy dose of "humor as a defense mechanism."
"Even though it's very miserable now in a place like Grimethorpe," says Herman, "they still use that humor to fight against it and I think that's almost uniquely Yorkshire. So I didn't think this film's [mixture of comedy and desperation] would travel even to London, but it has."
In England, he continues, "they're not interested in political cinema," and the work of filmmakers like Ken Loach (Land and Freedom, Hidden Agenda) don't become box office hits. Brassed Off was able to garner its audience in large part because the very politicized subject matter was expressed through music.
"Say if Ken Loach was doing Brassed Off, in those union meetings, you would have heard every word," explains Herman, referring to a scene that begins at a band rehearsal and carries the music over various scenes of labor negotiations. "You don't need to hear what they're saying, you just need to know that they're arguing. It becomes almost like a ballet. It's Busby Berkeley doing a political film."
The recent elections in Great Britain brought the Labour Party (albeit a more middle-of-the road "New" Labour Party) back to power after almost twenty years of Tory dominance. Mark Herman sees Brassed Off as fitting right in with his country's political shift.
"I think this film came at the right time in England," he says. "That mood was already there and this film was just a sort of confirmation of what happened in the past, those things that we want to change."
© 1996, Serena Donadoni. All rights reserved.