You sort of know what you're going to get with a traditional brass-band performance.
The players normally know what they are going to play. The audience generally knows when to applaud. And nobody arrives expecting several hundred people to bellow the words to Don’t Look Back in Anger over a sousaphone.
Dizzy Brasscals are about to test those conventions.
This October, musicians whose musical lives have encompassed Grimethorpe Colliery Band, the Hallé, Opera North and the Royal Northern College of Music, are launching Indie Brass Club at Manchester’s Deaf Institute.
There won't be a singer. The band will provide two sets of brass-powered indie anthems. The crowd are going to have to do the rest.
“If you ever wondered what anthems from This Charming Man to Sit Down, and Mr Brightside to Don’t Look Back in Anger, would sound like played by a brass band, then this is the night for you,” says trumpet player Dave Moore.
It sounds like a gloriously unruly proposition: part concert, part club night and part mass northern singalong.
But underneath the novelty lies a serious musical pedigree - and a story about how one of the North’s most important working-class traditions continues to reinvent itself.
Moore and drummer John Watterson have both spent time playing with Grimethorpe Colliery Band, the South Yorkshire ensemble whose history is inseparable from the mining community that created it.
The band was established in 1917 as a leisure activity for workers at Grimethorpe Colliery. Over the following century it became one of the most celebrated names in British brass music, accumulating national titles, making recordings and taking the culture of the pit village onto stages around the world.
Grimethorpe also provided the musical foundation for the fictional band at the centre of Brassed Off, Mark Herman’s 1996 film about a colliery community confronting closure.
The film understood something essential: a colliery band was never only an after-work hobby.
It carried discipline, identity, pride and collective memory. In places where working lives were physically punishing and economic decisions were imposed from somewhere else, music offered both individual possibility and a shared public voice.
Pit closures removed the industrial structures from which many bands had emerged, but the music didn't disappear with them. Brass survived by moving: into schools, concert halls, orchestras, festivals, film soundtracks, community projects - and, occasionally, Manchester nightclubs.
Indie Brass Club doesn't represent a rejection of that tradition. It demonstrates what the tradition has always made possible.
The technical control required to play a march or classical arrangement doesn't vanish when the music changes. It's redirected towards the insistent opening of I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor, the melancholy lift of There Is a Light That Never Goes Out or the communal release of Sit Down.
Tradition remains alive when musicians are confident enough to play with it.
Alongside Moore and Watterson, Dizzy Brasscals brings together trumpeter Adam Bidgood, trombonist George Hardwick and sousaphone player Conall Gormley.
Their collective experience crosses the sometimes artificially policed boundaries between classical, commercial and popular music. As session players, members of the group have performed with James, Shed Seven, Lily Allen and Embrace, as well as working within orchestral and traditional brass-band settings.
The new Manchester night is going to draw on indie music from across several generations: Arctic Monkeys, Oasis, The Courteeners, The Killers, Kaiser Chiefs, James, The Smiths, The Fratellis and Pulp.
These are songs written for stages, bedrooms and headphones that have gradually acquired another function. Played in northern venues, football grounds, festival fields and late-night bars, they've become a kind of shared repertoire.
The lyrics no longer belong solely to the singer who first recorded them. Crowds know where to breathe, when to raise their arms and which lines require more conviction than musical accuracy.
Removing the vocalist takes that communal ownership seriously.
Dizzy Brasscals will carry the tune, rhythm and harmonic weight, but the audience becomes an essential part of the arrangement. Without its voices, the song remains unfinished.
That makes Indie Brass Club feel unexpectedly close to the social purpose of the traditional band. This is music built collectively, intended to be experienced in company rather than consumed politely at a distance.
“We’re giving The Deaf Institute a brass-powered indie makeover,” says Moore.
It's difficult to imagine a more suitable room for the experiment.
The Deaf Institute occupies a Grade II-listed former deaf-and-dumb institute on Grosvenor Street, a short distance from the Royal Northern College of Music where members of Dizzy Brasscals studied.
Its tiered music hall, domed ceiling and enormous mirrorball have made it one of Manchester’s most distinctive small venues.
For one evening, the room will be handed to instruments more readily associated with Whit Friday contests, civic occasions and Sunday-afternoon bandstands.
But Dizzy Brasscals have already discovered that brass can travel remarkably well. Last summer, the group appeared at the Big Feastival on Alex James’s Cotswolds farm, sharing a bill with performers including Faithless, English Teacher and Rizzle Kicks. According to the band, Friday headliner Nelly Furtado was impressed enough to invite them onto the stage with her.
Earlier this year, a performance at Manchester’s Victoria Baths took an unexpected turn when Stockport band Blossoms arrived and joined the proceedings.
The group has also performed at the British Grand Prix and won National Band of the Year at the 2026 Wedding Industry Awards - evidence that the modern working brass musician might need to be equally prepared for a concert hall, racing circuit, festival stage or crowded dancefloor.
That flexibility mustn't be mistaken for gimmickry. Brass instruments can be ceremonial, sombre and precise. They can also be physically exhilarating. A brass ensemble moving at full force doesn't need amplification to make itself felt in the chest.
Indie music, meanwhile, has always borrowed from the behaviour of football crowds, terraces and public chant. Its biggest choruses are designed to be taken over by a room.
Put the two traditions together and the surprising thing could be how natural the combination feels.
There's a tendency to preserve working-class culture by asking it to remain recognisable.
The pit village might change, the colliery might close and the economic foundation beneath a community may be removed - but its cultural inheritance is expected to stand still, safely arranged for heritage display.
Brass music deserves better than that - doesn't it?
Its history matters precisely because it continues to produce musicians capable of carrying it somewhere new. Moore and Watterson’s journey from Grimethorpe to the Deaf Institute isn't a cheerful footnote to the colliery-band tradition. It's part of its continuing story.
The instruments remain. The discipline remains. So does the understanding that music is something people make together.
Only the set list has misbehaved.
On 15 October, a line can be drawn from the miners who formed Grimethorpe Colliery Band in 1917 to a Manchester crowd shouting every word of Mr Brightside in 2026.
It might not be the future they imagined. But it will be loud enough to make the ancestors smile.
Indie Brass Club with Dizzy Brasscals
Thursday 15 October 2026
Doors 7pm; performance from 8pm
The Deaf Institute, 135 Grosvenor Street, Manchester M1 7HE
Standing event; minimum age 14
Tickets: £14
Further information and tickets are available from The Deaf Institute.
