The Tameside Whit Friday Brass Band Contest

by Neil Campbell

Stockton loved his wife Q more than anything, she let him drink, even though she hated booze. Because of his love for her they went to the Tameside Whit Friday Brass Band Contest at Bower Fold, the home of Stalybridge Celtic football club.

It was a sweltering day in June, the shimmering storms of the previous few days temporarily abating as though the gods of brass had had their way. The warm sun flooded across the playing fields bathing the football stand punters with their beer in plastic glasses and faces expectant at the prospect of some thrilling tuba action.

Stockton and Q had never been before and Stockton had taken the precaution of having got himself a pint of the Brooklyn Pilsner lager from the club house bar, while Q had a Pepsi. It was good they had Pepsi on because she didn't like Coke. Stockton liked that she was a woman of strong opinions and knew her own mind and it was part of why he loved her, and he knew she was so excited at the prospect of brass bands that she would forgive his drinking. She’d seen a brass band in Hong Kong as a kid and loved them ever since. They’d had some trips to Buxton to watch them on the bandstand and Stockton had had to drive them it was so far away. But for this one they just had to make the short walk up Mottram Road past the tennis courts and the archery place where Stockton had caused the incident.

Sitting in the stands of about a hundred and fifty uniformly white people they waited for the action to unfold. Stockton stared out across the playing fields, opining to himself wistfully how much better it might be to just have a kick about instead. Beyond the pitch and the barbed wire on top of the brick walls on the other side of the stadium, there were banks of clustered trees rising up towards Hough Hill where tiny toy horses stood motionless, silhouetted on the hillside against the fading blue of the afternoon sky. Stockton took a huge gulp of lager, his heart warmed by the beaming smile on Q’s beautiful face as the trombones limbered up.

A young bloke in a high-vis carried a chalk board above his head, with the words Old Glossop and Knight’s Templar quite hard to read because he’d clumsily smudged them, and once he'd walked across the stand from left to right the band followed him, playing what Stockton recognized as ‘Mr Blue Sky’ by ELO. It was only when they shuffled onto the little stage on the football pitch did they get cracking into ‘Knight’s Templar’. And as they did so, Stockton scanned left and saw another brass band lined up, and so it went, for hour after hour, one band played one tune then fucked off and another band shambled across the grass and played their party piece.

It was all going well, and Q was absolutely loving it, but after a while, Stockton, with several beers inside him, had begun to feel that once you have heard one brass band you’ve heard them all, and that they should all just stick their flugelhorns where the sun doesn’t shine. It was only the Brooklyn Pilsner lager that was keeping his intimations of death away. For fuck’s sake, most of the tunes were so fucking maudlin, and these bugle tooting bastards seemed to play one funeral march after another, either that or some military sounding guff, and it was only the occasional interpretation of something a bit more modern that lifted the mood, like when Oldham Brass Band rocked up to play ‘Sweet Caroline’.

The crowd was so old that when they finished their lagers they could have all kept their teeth in the plastic pint pots, it was like a SAGA cruise or a Cocoon cast party, he'd never seen so many old twats in the same place. Stockton was getting wound up, he could feel it, and the only thing he liked about it was how much Q was enjoying herself. But even that began to fade from his consciousness after a bit. It was so fucking boring that when the Bollington Brass Band chimed in with ‘Spice Up Your Life’, it felt like a triumph, and he spilled some of his beer over some old dear in front, jumping up and cheering for the Spice Girls, shouting that they’d always given him, in his own words, ‘the French horn.’

Stockton kept having to go for piss, so he was forever getting up and down, and then other people kept needing to get past Stockton and Q because they were watching young Johnny or whatever, and then when that brass band moved on somewhere else like the Labour Club all the family got up and left again. This one old couple sat down next to Q and the woman said how warm it was but that it was okay for Q, that she wouldn't need any sun cream. This kind of thing really pissed Stockton off, it was the kind of unwitting casual racism that cropped up all the time, giving him an insight into both Q’s life and how moronic older white people could be. This old dear would have been mortally offended to have been accused of racism, and he'd learned from past experience, and how Q dealt with it, that you had to pick your battles. There was no point getting into it with this old trout, she wouldn't hear anything beyond her own voice in defending herself, and then she’d probably cry and make it about her. The sooner these imbeciles died off the better. He’d have liked to shove her fat head into a fucking euphonium.

With the racism shrugged off for the brainless shite that it was, darkness began to fall. As the gentle horses on the hill sloped off and the lights of the stadium slowly emerged, Stockton began to get terminally bored. It had been five hours, something like that, and he was getting sick of the guy in the high-vis walking up and down with a chalkboard you couldn’t really read. In a moment of madness, Stockton ran onto the outfield and rugby tackled him, to great ribald cheers from the crowd, many of whom were also quite pissed by this stage.

As he got marched off the football pitch by half a dozen smirkingly geriatric stewards, and to a mixture of boos and cheers from the crowd, Stockton heard the Ashton Brass Band approaching, playing ‘Seven Nation Army’ by The White Stripes. He pondered the irony of that as he was escorted from the stadium; he loved The White Stripes. As he pissed under the trees at the side of the car park he listened as another band got into ’You Can Call Me Al’ by Paul Simon, the one that had Chevy Chase on all those years ago. It was finally getting good, just at the point he’d been kicked out.

Pulling up his red and white Bermuda shorts he turned to see Q walking across the car park towards him. Any other man might have expected a bollocking, but as usual all she did was smile at him. One of the reasons she said she loved him was that he was never boring, and she never wanted to be bored with a man again. It was the same when he'd gone to the Archery Open Day and fired an arrow through someone’s front window and pinned this poor bastard’s arm to his own couch. Q had just laughed about that.

As they walked down Mottram Road back towards the terraced house they lived in together for so many years, they popped into the curry house for something to eat, the guys there all smiling as usual, and after the lovely curry they went home and fed Dave, their sociopathic ginger cat, then went upstairs to bed for a cuddle, before rolling away from each other and into a mutually blissful sleep. Q wasn’t even bothered about the increasing amount of times Stockton had to get up and go for a piss in the night, she just snored in the dark as he stumbled back and forth with his ageing bladder.

Neil Campbell is a short story writer, novelist and poet. From Manchester, England, he has appeared three times in the annual anthology of Best British Short Stories (2012/2015/2016). He has published four collections of short fiction, two novels, two poetry chapbooks and one poetry collection, as well as appearing in numerous magazines and anthologies. A new collection of short stories, Saying Dirty Things in Regional Accents, was published by Salt in January 2025.