‘A soundtrack to the insurrection’: street music, marching bands and popular protest (original) (raw)

The photograph of the Omega Brass Band is courtesy of the Ken Colyer Trust. The author thanks for Kay and Tony Leppard for supplying it to him, and the Trust for its access. (c) Ken Colyer Trust. Used with permission.

1. Ian Paisley, quoted in Desmond Bell, Acts of Union: Youth and Sectarian Culture in Northern Ireland (London: Macmillan, 1990), p.127; Jennifer Whitney, ‘Infernal Noise: the soundtrack to insurrection’, in Notes From Nowhere Collective, eds, We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism (London: Verso, 2003), pp.216–227 [p.224].

2. Though see George McKay, ‘“Just a closer walk with thee”: New Orleans‐style jazz and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1950s Britain’, Popular Music 22:3 (2003), pp.261–81, and George McKay, Circular Breathing: The Cultural Politics of Jazz in Britain (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2005), Chapters 1 and 4.

3. John Connell and Chris Gibson, Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place (London: Routledge, 2003), chapter 9. Of course, during a demonstration the street is usually already transformed from the everyday, with an entire temporary infrastructure of contention: bodies and barriers, banners and shields, megaphones and surveillance cameras. In certain campaigns, those where the territory or accessibility of the street itself is part of the issue, it is further transformed materially: the lines of loyalist parade routes will be marked with kerbs painted red, white and blue; the TAZ‐ers of a Reclaim the Streets radical environmentalist event cover tarmac in sand for a beach party. It is always only when the music strikes up, though, that people know the action has started.

4. John Connell and Chris Gibson, Sound Tracks, p.193.

5. Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p.13.

6. Paolo Prato, ‘Music in the streets: the example of Washington Square Park in New York City’, Popular Music, 4 (1984), pp.151–63 [p.160].

7. John Connell and Chris Gibson, Sound Tracks, p.193.

8. Paolo Prato, ‘Music in the streets’, p.161.

9. Desmond Bell, Acts of Union, p.55.

10. On punk and ‘street cred’, see George McKay, ‘“I'm so bored with the USA”: the punk in cyberpunk’, in Roger Sabin, ed. Punk Rock: So What? The Cultural Legacy of Punk (London: Routledge, 1999), pp.49–67 [pp. 57–58]. Rock Against Racism quotation is from David Widgery, Beating Time: Riot ‘n’ Race ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll (London: Chatto and Windus, 1986), p.61.

11. Jennifer Whitney, ‘Infernal Noise’, p.216.

12. Susan McClary, ‘Afterword: the politics of silence and sound’, in Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp.149–58 [p.153].

13. John Connell and Chris Gibson, Sound Tracks, p.211.

14. It is not a purely masculine practice though, and the space of the street remains open for gendered détournements of the kind provided by, say, the radical cheerleaders of Portland, Oregon performing for anti‐capitalists. Notes From Nowhere Collective, We Are Everywhere, p.89.

15. Jennifer Whitney, ‘Infernal Noise’, p.220.

16. Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements, p.35.

17. A term used by Victorian critics of street music, quoted in John M. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p.62.

18. Quoted in Prato, ‘Music in the streets’, p.152. Despite this, street musicians have been by necessity interstitial and pragmatic; as David Cohen and Ben Greenwood note of the city busker, when the ‘car has invaded his natural environment, so he has created another one in the Underground stations. When his audiences were stolen by the cinema, he played to them while they queued’. David Cohen and Ben Greenwood, The Buskers: A History of Street Entertainment (Newton Abbott: David & Charles, 1981), p.167.

19. Jacques Attali, Noise, p.74.

20. Dickens, quoted in Picker, Victorian Soundscapes, p.60.

21. John M. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes, p.43, p.79. This xenophobia is overlooked as recently as 1970, when the Tenth edition of The Oxford Companion to Music's entry on ‘Street music’ – ‘probably the first on its subject that has appeared in any musical work of reference’ – still describes the 1864 campaign as one of ‘well‐justified agitation’, John Owen Ward, ed. The Oxford Companion to Music, 10th edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp.986, 990.

22. Desmond Bell, Acts of Union, p.71.

23. On the operation of the Parades Commission in Northern Ireland in the late 1990s, see Chris Ryder and Vincent Kearney, Drumcree: The Orange Order's Last Stand (London: Methuen, 2001), passim. Since then the social significance of the political soundscape of Ireland has been recognised in the Irish Republic, where, for instance, the Department of Foreign Affairs' ‘reconciliation fund’ has contributed to the establishment of a Cross‐Border Pipe Music Tutorial Centre, bringing together marching bands from north and south of the border. www.communityni.org/index.cfm/section/news/key/21junereconfund [5/09/2006].

24. Critical Art Ensemble, ‘Electronic civil disobedience’, in Malcolm Miles, Tim Hall and Iain Borden, eds, The City Cultures Reader, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004), pp.245–54 [p.246–47].

25. John Connell and Chris Gibson, Sound Tracks, p.220. ‘If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution’ comes from a slogan popular with 1990s environmental radicals and cultural autonomists, a misquotation attributed to the Lithuanian‐American anarchist Emma Goldman.

26. George McKay, Circular Breathing. p.51; ‘“Just a closer walk with thee”’. The wider point is that other innovations in popular music, such as the folk revival or the rise of rock, did not entirely erase the specific usefulness of marching music on protest.

27. Brian Harvey and Capt. Peter Hunter, members of Ken Colyer Trust, personal interview, 19 January 2002.

28. Telephone interview, 10 April 2002. Bowden concluded: ‘We also played fairs, fetes, carnivals. There are a lot more funerals now to play at’.

29. John Minnion, personal interview, 12 December 2001.

30. Mike Westbrook, quoted in McKay, Circular Breathing, pp.217–18.

31. Big Red Band founder‐member Ben Crow, email correspondence, 16 October 2002.

32. Jennifer Whitney, ‘Infernal Noise’, p.216.

33. Jennifer Whitney, ‘Infernal Noise’, p.216, 219, 220.

34. Note that this sum does not count tour dates since they are not listed separately on the INB’s website. A guesstimate for total INB gigs would put the figure around 100. http://www.infernalnoise.org/dates.html [30/09/2006].

35. Chris Ryder and Vincent Kearney, Drumcree, p.2–3.

36. Neil Jarman, ‘For God and Ulster: Blood and Thunder bands and loyalist political culture’, in T.G. Fraser, ed. The Irish Parading Tradition: Following the Drum (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp.158–72 [p.159].

37. Desmond Bell, Acts of Union, p.100. Blood and Thunder bands were also known as Kick the Pope bands.

38. Desmond Bell, Acts of Union, p.115.

39. Neil Jarman, ‘For God and Ulster’, pp.161, 166–67.

40. Theodor Adorno, ‘Perennial fashion: Jazz’, in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 1967), pp.119–32 [p.129]. Consider the argument put forward by Les Back on a ‘syncopated sensibility’ being an anti‐totalitarian movement of the jazz body, for example. ‘Syncopated synergy: dance, embodiment, and the call of the jitterbug’, in Vron Ware and Les Back, Out of Whiteness: Colour, Politics and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp.169–95 [p.193].

41. RAR quotation is from Widgery, Beating Time, p.87.

42. Quoted in Whitney, ‘Infernal Noise’, pp.218–19.

43. Desmond Bell, Acts of Union, p.124–25.

44. Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements, p.36.

45. Jennifer Whitney, ‘Infernal Noise’, p.221; rave quotation from George McKay, Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties (London: Verso, 1996), p.204, n.28.

46. Neil Jarman, ‘For God and Ulster’, p.163.

47. One example of the celebration of carnival from prime TAZ‐er, Hakim Bey (cartographer of the Temporary Autonomous Zone): ‘The musician is a kind of “grotesque”—disobedient servant, drunk, nomadic, brilliant. For the musician the perfect moment is that of the festival, the world turned upside down. […] The festival is nothing without the musician. […] In the intoxication of conviviality in the carnival, music emerges as a kind of utopian structure or shaping force’. ‘Utopian blues’, www.gyw.com/hakimbey/utoBlues.html [n.d.] [21/09/2006].

48. Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements, p.173.