They look as cool as any streetwise teenager with their low-slung jeans and wary expressions; the only clue is in those slender, gleaming tubes of brass. If you thought that brass bands were the stuff of nostalgia - brave but doomed pit communities, old guys with yellow braiding on their uniforms - then check out the Hebden Bridge scene.
Walking - or to be more accurate, climbing - the steep terraces of the old Yorkshire centre of fustian weaving (corduroy and moleskin), the gentle cadence of a tuba or the piping of a cornet is the only giveaway. In houses with Victorian biblical names, but 21st-century Ikea furniture, players are practising their scales.
They and their friends in the Hebden Bridge junior band are the latest successors to Ben McMahon, once a tuba player in the band and now a professional photographer, who decided to take portraits of teenage brass band members after being teased when he moved to Bournemouth. You were in a brass band? Eeh bah gum, cobbles, whippets, etc. So he came back to prove that it wasn't - and isn't - like that.
McMahon is 23 now, but meeting teenage band members such as Ella Dixon and Sam Woodhead brings back memories of jam sessions, bus tours and the pleasure of learning a skill. "You'd have a concert in York, say, and muck about and be daft, but then it was time to play and it was very disciplined. It's there in the pride these kids are showing, standing there with their instruments. They know they can do something really well."
Not that the roots of the British brass band are anything but northern; bands moved naturally from the military to the factory, and the factories were mostly in the north. Owners encouraged the players out of philanthropy, or to advertise (who would know of Black Dyke worsted cloth if it wasn't for the firm's band?), or to keep them too busy to attend trade union meetings.
Hebden Bridge's senior band won the British Open Championship in 1911. Thirteen words in an old ledger in the town are also culturally precious: "Master H Mortimer is to be provided with a cornet on which to learn." This is the first known reference in musical circles to Harry Mortimer, the most famous brass band player and conductor of all time. As a boy, all he had to do was pass two tests to be allowed to play: be strong enough to pick up a cornet, and have lost his milk teeth (they didn't want child players choking to death).
McMahon remembers a similar test when he was nine and interested in the Hebden Bridge junior band, run by Brian Robinson. "He showed me a tuba and a cornet. I blew on them both and they decided I blew the tuba best." So tuba it was, and has remained.
Today's players have been through the same initiation and found themselves, as McMahon did, in a group of young friends, with the added advantage of learning skills. Robbie Holden-Cooper, 17, a baritone player, says: "You get to realise that you've learned to do something that other people can't. And being in the band means going on holidays as well - Holland, Germany, and last year the Czech Republic."
Jessica Woodhead, 15, adds, "It's not something your friends want to pay to hear, but look how many junior band players have gone on to form their own cool bands. It's because they know how to play."
It helps that the band's repertoire now includes much more modern music, but trumpet and trombone have also made a transition here from traditional brass music to something closer to the national teen scene. "Hebden Bridge has its own version of ska that incorporates brass instruments," says Woodhead's elder brother Sam, 17.
McMahon sounds almost fatherly as he surveys a practice session: "Isn't it different from what people say about teenagers hanging out and doing bad things? But these are ordinary kids, not weird-instrument nerds." Parents in Hebden Bridge agree. Ian Plant chairs the town's award-winning adult band and has two daughters who play. "It's just such a good outlet," he says. "They meet like-minded kids, enjoy music and have a good time."
But in spite of the success in Hebden, the wider brass band movement is currently in decline. After a surge in the early days of the national lottery, there has been a decline in numbers. "We've lost five or six bands recently in Yorkshire," says Ian Plant. The closure of pits and factories has sapped the original strongholds of the bands, as portrayed in Mark Herman's nostalgic film Brassed Off. Their future lies in the hands of young people such as McMahon, and the members of the Hebden Bridge junior band. If they are able to widen the appeal of brass, and if the government comes good on the renewal of music in schools, then more projects such as McMahon's, more ska and more cool, might just make the difference.
