Ian McMillan: Subtle, glorious, cultured and moving

As readers of the Yorkshire Post know, brass band music is often dismissed as strident and sentimental but we also know it isn’t: it’s subtle, glorious, cultured and moving. After the show we stayed in a hotel nearby. It’s an establishment I’ve been to many times before and I know you always get a good night’s sleep there so that when you wake up the room is full of Zs from your gentle snoring. Not the night after the Black Dyke band. I nodded off easily enough, lulled by the memory of the sound of gentle tubas, but then at just after midnight I was woken up by what appeared to be a slapstick re-enactment of the Battle of Waterloo. I heard screaming. I heard a rhythmic banging on a door. I heard shouting. I heard the rattling of coat hangers in a wardrobe. It wasn’t subtle, glorious, cultured or moving.

It stopped as suddenly as it had begun. I nodded off. It started again and grew in intensity: somebody appeared to playing the bongos somewhere down the corridor and somebody else was screaming at them to stop. I nodded off again. That was the worst bit of it, to be honest. The noise would stop, You’d sleep. The noise would start again. You’d wake up. Noise. Wake. Stop. Sleep, endlessly until the rosy-fingered dawn. The next morning my wife and I gazed at each other with pale, sleep-deprived faces. We stumbled down to breakfast where dozens of young people were sipping fitfully at orange juices and artfully arranging their already artfully-arranged hair. It was like a convention of junior stylists and beauticians. When we walked in they looked briefly at my wife and then looked away as though we were invisible or, worse than that, not invisible enough. In the foyer of the hotel lots of young people were hanging about, pretending to be interested in the fire notices and the plants. We went to the room, got our bags and strolled back into the lift to check out.

An unassuming young man joined us. He looked at the floor and fiddled with the zip of his jacket. He stepped out of the lift and a gaggle of young girls ran towards him screaming with delight. For one nanosecond I thought they were running at me then I realised the young lad was the one they were excited to see. Turns out he was a pop star, an X-Factor finalist and he made those girls very happy as he walked amongst them and signed their papers and their forearms and their coathangers and their bongos. And that had been the noise the night before: people in the hotel delirious because they knew he was there, people outside the hotel shouting to get his attention. And I did some middle-aged tutting until I remembered one Saturday night, decades ago, in Wombwell.

Me and the lads had been to see a band. We’d gone back to one of the lads’ houses and because his mam and dad were away we made noise. Lots of noise.

At one point I went into the garden and played a drum solo on the dustbins. A window opened and a man shouted “Do you know it’s half past two?” and I shouted back “No, but I know White Room by Cream!” We were all noisy once. Pass the coat hangers.