Pop your collier
Top brass: Hackney Colliery Band
Hackney conjures up images of multiculturalism, cutting edge nightlife and general urban sprawl. Collieries bring Yorkshire, coal and terraced housing to mind. Not a natural marriage of visions then, but one that manifests itself in possibly the most talked about and singular beat combo in the borough: Hackney Colliery Band.
A nine-piece made up of two drummers and a startling array of horns, from alto sax to the gargantuan sousaphone, they play a mixed bag of hip hop, funk, pop re-rubs and ‘Balkan-tinged’ originals, all with a British marching band influence.
An entourage with so any appendages has a predictably large presence on stage and their live shows are the stuff of legend – the band can cite Gilles Peterson and Lauren Laverne among their fans.
Since forming in a Hackney kitchen in 2008, the nontet have played shows and festivals all over the capital, including Proud Galleries and Jazz Cafe in Camden, Dalston’s Land of Kings festival and Lovebox. Now signed to independent label Wah Wah 45s, pickings should be ripe for a band which can offer an alternative to the generic indie and electro outfits that are the preserve of so many gigs in the capital.
Describing the origins of the band, tenor sax player Tom Ward said: “It initially started with a couple of us who were friends from playing in the Warwick University Big Band. After we moved to London we happened to check out a Youngblood Brass Band gig and were totally blown away by the possibilities of the line-up. We knew the line-up we wanted, so we brought people in to fit.
“Nowadays the band has grown far beyond the initial seed, and we run it as an informal collective, with everyone having as equal a say as possible.”
With the personnel sorted, the group needed a name and the one they settled on was almost the result of serendipity. “The name was just kind of a joke – it was just a funny idea of an urban colliery,” Tom explained.
“We’d been setting up the project, like any new band we had lots of different ideas for names, and it happened to be the name that got put down when we did our first gig. We’re quite affiliated with Hackney. A few of us live here, we normally rehearse here and a quite a few of our gigs have been here – so it made sense for it to be Hackney.”
The mining connection is more tenuous, although there are two Yorkshiremen in the band and as Tom puts it: “a lot of us were children when the miners’ strikes were going on, and it’s deep in our cultural memory somewhere.”
After a successful first gig at the Spitalfields Music Festival in 2009, a turning point came when they did a show for Dom Servini at Vibe Bar on Brick Lane in January of this year.
“It went down amazingly well, and he pretty much signed us up straight away to put out the band’s first single,” Tom said. “We’d already done a bit of recording which we had ear-marked as a demo, but Dom was so impressed with it that it ended being the single.”
The band’s habit of re-working pop songs in a brass band style has its roots in the current popularity of ukulele karaoke nights in the capital and acts such as Williams Fairey Brass Band‘s Acid Brass project and the Soul Rebels Brass Band, whom Hackney Colliery Band count among their numerous influences. Other acts such as MF Doom, Madlib, Stevie Wonder, Reel Big Fish and Boban Markovic have also shaped the Hackney Colliery Band sound.
The band are about to go into the studio to record their second single, which Tom describes as “an amazing cover of Toto’s Africa arranged by our sousaphone player”. With an album also in the pipeline and bookings already rolling in for next summer, the Hackney Colliery Band is marching into 2011 on a high note.
The new single is set to be released on January 24, 2011 – launch party date tbc.