The Matter of Tiddly-om-pom-pom.

There was a popular music hall song back in the dark old days before little baby JJ made his entrance upon the stage to give frown lines an air of credibility. It ran something like.

 

Oh I do like to be beside the seaside 

Oh I do like to be beside the sea

Oh I do like to stroll along the prom, prom, prom

Where the brass band plays tiddly-om-pom-pom

 

I hate brass bands, you know. I always have, and I’m not entirely sure why. I suspect it stems from two of their most prominent features.

The first is that, however sensitively the individual players play their individual pieces, the overall sound of a brass band is about as unsubtle as instrumental music ever gets. It is, as you would expect, brassy. (Male voice choirs come a close second in my book, but that’s another story.)

The second is a cultural feature. Back in the days when northern England was the hotbed of the burgeoning Industrial Revolution, every large industrial town and city had a park with a bandstand. And every Sunday, when the weather was sufficiently clement and the dark, satanic mills fell quiet, a brass band would strike up and play jolly music to lift the poor members of the proletariat briefly out of their dark, unremitting perceptions of the daily grind.

It’s the jollity that troubles me. Brass band music is indelibly associated with the tiddly-om-pom-pom sound, and it doesn’t sit easily with frown lines except to extend them. It’s too naïve and redolent of the days when the working class still willingly tugged their forelocks to the men in charge, and still expected policemen to be their friends and protectors. To a mind made cynical by the unwholesome aspects of the human psyche, this is a problem.

In saying all this, I’m being untrue to my clan. I come from a city which grew like mould on the grime of the Victorian factory system, and part of my ancestry is northern English stock – part urban and part hill farmers, but poor people all. But then, another part of my ancestry is Irish, and traditional Irish folk music is a favourite of mine. I’m even perfectly happy when it takes a jolly turn – which it frequently does – probably because there’s not the slightest hint of brassy tiddly-om-pom-pom about it.