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Oliver Cross: Woodhouse Festival 2010 and brass bands
Woodhouse resident and YEP columnist Oliver Cross talks brass bands and Woodhouse Festival 2010.
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Culture grows in Woodhouse
Lynne's idea of organising a cultural festival in Woodhouse is developing very fast, with people, initially encouraged by the tiniest mention in my (ahem) well-read column, rushing to join up – did you see The Commitments?
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So far the Woodhouse Festival 2010 has a kind of organising committee (obviously not formalised yet because this is Woodhouse, not Far Headingley, and we're bohemians, us), and huge amounts of contacts and venues, with ideas flying around like the Flags of the Nations from a bad magician's nostrils (or worse places, in the case of burlesque acts).
Bad magicians are the sort of thing which would be welcome at the festival, which has a very liberal definition of culture but aims to go well beyond music, which is already exceptionally well-served in Woodhouse, and on to all sorts of writing and poetry, comedy, juggling, performance art (or playing up, as I call it) visual arts, dancing...ooo, I could go on if I knew more about what I was talking about.
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But unfortunately I'm not too hot on culture or on organising either, so Lynne's decided I should take a kind of back-seat role in the festival preparations, or maybe, so as to avoid further embarrassments, sit in the boot.
Incidentally, did you see the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain on the BBC Proms on Tuesday? I ask because I first brought them to Woodhouse's attention when they called in the Chemic Tavern a few years ago.
It's a surprisingly cultural place is Woodhouse; Marc Almond used to live round the corner in Shay Street and there have been so many sightings of Elvis at the Woodhouse Street Londis that nobody takes any notice any more.
Where there's brass, there's class war
We paid a visit to Temple Newsam House on Sunday and listened to an excellent brass band (from Lofthouse) playing outside.
I enjoyed myself very much because I'm a fan of both brass bands and class warfare and it's far too seldom that you see them combined.
Brass bands are, of course, largely products of industry, mining, non-conformist religion and urbanisation, whereas country estates are designed to deny that sort of thing ever existed – as if the view from the Great Hall was really England and not an elaborately faked-up, Capability Brown form of escapism, and as if all that huge wealth came from pheasant shoots and deer parks and not from coming tops in the mucky scramble to share out the proceeds of the agricultural and industrial revolutions.
Mind you, now the aristocrats have decided, out of the goodness of their bank balances, to let the common people pay for the upkeep of their piles (meaning irritating encumbrances rather than, well, irritating encumbrances), it's lovely to go to Temple Newsam on a fine day and forget that you're surrounded by call centres, tower blocks and closed-down pubs.
And having a brass band blasting out with great joy and skill (particularly in the case of the drummer) makes it somehow better; it's class war payback time.
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Weather for Leeds
Saturday 19 May 2012
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