Punchinello and Other Bandroom Brawls...

This is the story of a third section band, Harden Moss Silver. Harden Moss is a village just west of Holmfirth on the Yorkshire side of the Pennines. The story focuses on two people: Stirling, flugelhorn player, and Horny, solo horn. Stirling and Horny, now somewhere towards the end of their forties, friends since childhood, are linked by three things: their home, friendship and the band. Amazingly, almost all the tales are true, from bandsmen leap-frogging bollards on the bridges over a canal in Amsterdam, to a tooth cut from a blue toothbrush and super-glued into place for a contest. The reader watches the band march on Whit Friday; they play their goodbyes at a funeral; a wife becomes a stripper for one night - for revenge; a dreary concert is salvaged in the most bizarre way; the band, astonishingly, contests at the Royal Albert Hall; there are concerts, contests, a wedding, surfing and brawling, always with a musical twist. The bandsmen talk, drink, grumble, and delight in their music. As the banding year turns in Harden Moss some things change. Horny falls in love and at last he and Annie marry. The band helps them celebrate.
Stirling who likes things to stay the way they are, and who doesn't even like thinking about change, has to take action when the band is invaded by an insidious infiltrator from Lancashire! Ordinary band life continues: contests, arguments, decisions about how to make money for the band, concerts - the usual Saturday concerts in the bandroom and other more impressive venues. One crisis arises when the bandroom is dramatically demolished. And there's The (naked) Calendar, of course. Altogether the band beats the pulse of village life, playing for celebrations, weddings and funerals as local bandsmen have done for over a century