The brass band bringing the cracking tunes of Wallace & Gromit to life

A familiar tune is shared among the brass band, with the euphonium and tubas leading the march. The little melody grows in stature with each repetition, stirring cracking memories. When Julian Nott wrote the theme for Wallace & Gromit in 1989 he could not have expected that it would become, alongside the inventor and dog that it introduces, an icon in its own right – a blossoming sound so cheerful it was used to wake up astronauts aboard a space shuttle mission in 2010.

Today it is played by the Fairey Band, an ensemble founded in 1937 by a group of employees at the Fairey Aviation Works in Stockport. Conductor Phil Chalk is seated so as not to block the screen behind the musicians.

The band segues into lounge music as Gromit peruses a picnic guide and Wallace makes the ominous pronouncement that “there is no cheese in the house”. The solution: a trip to that famously cheesy orb, the moon.

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A Grand Day Out unfurls with the soundtrack performed in real time. Chalk perches, alert to the required snippets; the Faireys provide the rocket’s blastoff, the light cabaret as Wallace attempts to identify the mysterious cheese. There are no signs of any seams; if it wasn’t for the fact we can see the brass instruments glinting under the stage lights – and that the music is crisper than usual thanks to Snape Maltings’ clean acoustics – it would be difficult to know this wasn’t a standard cinematic showing.

But, as the robot happily skis down the moon slopes and Nott’s theme is reprised once more, the music takes centre stage. Here, and in the following The Wrong Trousers (1993), that motif is essential: as both the animation and soundtracks become more complex (Top Gun: Maverick composer Lorne Balfe joined forces with Nott for the latest Wallace & Gromit instalment, Vengeance Most Fowl, in 2024) it is the root that reminds us where it all began.

Read more:

• ‘Feathers crashed the party’: Behind the scenes of Wallace & Gromit’s epic Christmas return
• ‘We get communities dancing’: How Bradford’s brass heritage still brings people together
• Earworms are the internal soundtrack of our lives. What’s yours?

Film concerts like these are one way that Fairey Band has adapted from its traditional brass banding beginnings (the group has won the National Championships of Great Britain nine times). The group recently took its Wallace & Gromit double bill to Woolwich Works in London, and performs the soundtrack to Shaun the Sheep: The Flight Before Christmas at Rochdale Town Hall (21 December). A good film score manages to be both memorable and yet somehow not overshadow the on-screen action. If I’m completely honest, I couldn’t recall much of the inner workings of Nott’s soundscapes; in the same way the theme is seared into my memory any time I see a sleeveless green pullover, joyous hand gesticulations or Wensleydale cheese.

This push-and-pull is even more important in ‘silent’ films, where the music provides the only sound. Often it’s entirely improvised – such as Daan van den Hurk’s impressive free-form accompaniment to Zemlya (Earth), the brusquely beautiful 1930 not-quite stills of Ukrainian village life that featured at this year’s Aldeburgh Festival. For 90 minutes van den Hurk played from an upright piano at the right-hand side of the cinema stage, from where he illuminated scenes of sunflowers and suffering.

There is a small, significant revival in this art form. Bristol-based  Minima specialises in giving 21st-century soundtracks to 1920s silent films – the ensemble is currently touring The Phantom of the Opera, adding a new layer of terror to the 1925 classic (Norwich Playhouse, Norwich Film Festival, 3 November; The Light, Stockport, 5 November; Melbourne Parish Church, Derby, 6 November; Farnham Maltings, 7 November; Ultimate Picture Palace, Oxford, 8 November).

Having experimented with Not So Silent Cinema in previous editions, the 13th instalment of Highgate International Chamber Music Festival features Buster Keaton’s 1927 film College – with Stephen Prutsman’s score performed by piano quintet on 5 December. I’ve got a reminder set – to play Nott’s Wallace & Gromit theme. 

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