Freckleton Brass Band is a typical village ensemble – amateur musicians of all ranges, with normal lives. But a recent event stuck out like a sore thumb in their regular performance calendar – they teamed up with drag queens for an unlikely collaboration. Dan Moore went along.
Pineapple on pizza. Rick Astley singing The Smiths. Lewis Hamilton driving a Ferrari. These are all combinations of things that people have been unsure about. I had a similar feeling when I heard that there was going to be a drag show backed by a full brass band at Blackpool Tower. So I went along to find out if this fusion of two performance genres was going to be a hit.
It turns out there’s a little back story here. Brass bands started to become popular in the 1800s, particularly in working-class northern towns. But they find themselves at a crossroads today, as their typical audiences are older people who remember watching bands at their local bandstand in the 1960s. Younger people tend to love hearing the warm tones of a brass band, but only once a year at Christmas when they’re passing through a shopping centre. Playing an instrument with friends is still a popular hobby for many people today, but how do you keep your music relevant when the cultural landscape has somewhat moved on?
The music organisation Brass Bands England thought they had an answer, when they launched a new collaborative programme called ‘Elevate’. It pairs brass bands with other artists to create and learn together. The theory was that this would push boundaries by exploring new ideas and ways of performing through a collaborative partnership. This is how we ended up with a drag show with brass band in Blackpool.
One of the many brains behind this quite remarkable evening was creative director Jamie Fletcher, who describes herself as a “proud northern, queer, trans woman working as a theatre director and musician”.
It looked like the performers were merely fulfilling the Blackpool leg of a nationwide tour, not that this was the debut performance of the first ever drag show accompanied by brass band.
Her vision was to take over the iconic Blackpool Tower for an unforgettable evening, celebrating brass bands, drag cabaret and queer culture. To bring her Kinky Toots show to life, Fletcher collaborated with Freckleton Brass Band, drag queen Donna Trump and drag king Len Blanco. And what a night of entertainment it was.
It looked like the performers were merely fulfilling the Blackpool leg of a nationwide tour, not that this was the debut performance of the first ever drag show accompanied by brass band.
To say I’ve never seen anything like it would be quite an understatement. I’ve watched a brass band concert before. This is usually a formal sit-down concert where the audience listens quietly as a band rattle through everything from famous orchestral overtures to traditional hymns. You can imagine the cultural shockwaves when Donna Trump and Len Blanco were stood at the front of Freckleton Brass Band, belting out hits from Queen, Frozen, The Weather Girls and Shirley Bassey, to name a few.
The overwhelming take-away is that it worked. The music, staging and lighting were superb. It looked like the performers were merely fulfilling the Blackpool leg of a nationwide tour, not that this was the debut performance of the first ever drag show accompanied by brass band. The audience lapped it up.
And it would probably shock people if they realised the journey that Fletcher spoke of in her introduction to the show. She described growing up in a northern town, but being forced to stay in the closet and feel shame about her sexuality and gender identity. She cited this largely being due to the implications of Section 28: a piece of legislation that prohibited the promotion of homosexuality, in effect from 1988 to 2003 in Britain.
This was the social backdrop that many of us too young to remember couldn’t imagine living through, as there is a much greater push for equality and diversity in more recent times.
Brass bands have also had their social issues. I remember watching BBC News reporting on the first woman to join one of the most famous brass bands in the world. This was in 2010! So to watch a performance that demonstrated such progress was really quite uplifting. Freckleton Brass Band is a typical village brass band – amateur musicians of all ranges, with normal lives. I imagine this performance stuck out like a sore thumb in their regular performance calendar, which is one of the many reasons it was fantastic.
It was entertaining, funny and completely refreshing. Everyone involved deserves great credit, as I suspect this musical project raised a few eyebrows when it was first announced. To see it through, with the final product being so brilliant, was something every performer should feel extremely proud of.
I’m certainly not the first person to share my experience of people declaring Blackpool ‘a sh*thole’ when you say where you’re from. If you found yourself at university in a very middle-class southern town, like I did, then you might have even felt forced to agree with them.
Recently though, I’ve started to feel like Blackpool is on a positive trajectory in terms of creative arts and culture. Just this week I’ve seen a new museum opening and an art gallery thriving, with more creative projects yet to be realised. Last year, I found myself performing to a huge crowd of people for a themed Oktoberfest at the newly opened Abingdon Street Market with the Leylandhosen Bierkeller Band. The kind of weird and wonderful thing you think you’d only get to experience if you lived in a big city. We nearly took the roof off performing inside Blackpool’s Christmas market by the sea on New Year’s Eve.
As much a politics drives me insane at the moment, a speech from the next Prime Minister of Great Britain (if you believe the current polls) really caught my ears last week. I’d never heard a senior political figure talk about the arts in the way that Keir Starmer does. A flautist in his younger days, he spoke of wanting the arts to be for everyone, everywhere: “There’s no building back without the arts,” he said. “We will work together hand in glove with our creative industries. Together we will place the arts back where they belong – at the centre of a new, hopeful, modern story of Britain and what we stand for”.
We all know from experience that this could be political hot air that translates into absolutely nothing. But I want to believe that we can make great creative strides in the next decade or so. If we do start a new chapter in this country where the arts play a much more prominent role than they have in recent years, then my hope is that Blackpool can continue to be a place where creative innovation happens. People shouldn’t have to move out to big cities to experience arts and culture.
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