WALK past any of the frequent protests and progressive events in the Cotswolds town of Stroud and chances are you’ll see the Red Band playing.

Refugee support vigils, International Women’s Day celebrations, Pride parties, picket lines, demos against repressive legislation… the band is usually there.

Playing a variety of brass, woodwind and percussion instruments, it has a large repertoire of marching and protest tunes from the labour and civil rights movement.

The band colours of red and green reflect the political allegiances of its members – and the political spirit of Stroud.

Though the parliamentary constituency is narrowly Conservative, the Tories have been kept out of power on the district council for more than a decade by a Labour/Green/Lib Dem alliance and there are no Tories on the Green-led town council.

Musical director Mark Coldrick says: “The band members are a fairly broad church politically but we all sing from the same hymn sheet: we share a social conscience and a dislike of Tory greed.”

Coldrick, a music teacher and professional percussionist, co-founded the band in 2016 with trumpet player Jeremy Green, who had been a member of the London Red Band and wanted something similar in Stroud.

The band has grown to about 45 members – largely through word of mouth and through the founders genially inviting every musician they meet to join the band. Members have been recruited in places as diverse as a canoeing session, a party or a Morning Star meeting.

This open-minded approach to recruitment is echoed in the running joke that prospective members are grilled more on their political leanings – “we’ll accept anyone who’s not a raging Tory,” laughs Coldrick — than on their musical ability.

Coldrick enjoys the variety of teaching and motivating players of varying standards. “I’m used to working with very competent musicians, as well as with people who struggle a bit to get to grips with the music,” he says. “I love that spectrum of abilities; it makes things more interesting for me.”

Band coordinator Green lists some of the tunes from the Tolpuddle set. “The melody of Seven-Nation Army inspired the ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’ chant. El Pueblo Unido is from the Chilean revolution. I Wish I knew How It would Feel to be Free is from the civil rights movement. Can You Hear the People Sing? is a French revolutionary song from Les Miserables.

“Woody Guthrie’s All You Fascists Bound to Lose and Billy Bragg’s Power in a Union speak for themselves.”

Some aspects of the left-wing musical heritage are problematic, he concedes. “There are people who think that the Internationale is a Soviet Communist tune so we shouldn’t be playing it. Yes, it was briefly a Soviet anthem, but its history goes back much earlier than that.

“Bella Ciao was played by East German military bands, but it existed long before that as a song of the anti-fascist movement. And A Las Barricadas/Na Barykady was apparently Lenin’s favourite song, but the tune comes from a Polish socialists’ song published in 1897 and popular during the 1905 revolution.

“I think we’re reclaiming the history of tunes like these rather than celebrating the more creepy aspects of them,” says Green.

What’s most important: the music or the politics? “I love the music for itself but it’s the political message that really defines the band,” replies Coldrick.

He muses how musicians (and creatives generally) often tend to be left wing. “Capitalists are greedy — or ignorant — and don’t have a social conscience, and that doesn’t fit well with artistic expression. Even famous composers have been left-wing. Beethoven, who had aristocratic sponsors, was really bolshy. His attitude to them was ‘sod you’.”

“And Aaron Copland,” interjects Green [Copland’s Fanfare for a Common Man is part of the repertoire]. “He was very involved with progressive causes.”

For Green, supporting protests and social justice campaigns is the primary motivation. But the camaraderie of playing together is important too, and the band doesn’t play only at “political” events.

It has played at Stroud’s raft race and leads the lantern procession at the town’s annual Christmas shopping event, for example.
And the band instigated a quirky horned procession along a suburban street to the pub.

“The street happens to be called Horns Road so we decided to have a horned procession, and pretend it was a revival of an ancient tradition and that the pub was built on an ancient Bacchic temple,” says Green. “It was loads of fun and everyone loved it.”

The band is often assumed to be allied with the Labour Party and was once referred to disparagingly as “Doina’s disco.” This was a reference to Cllr Doina Cornell, leader of Stroud District Council until she resigned from Labour and became an independent after the Starmer regime blocked her from standing as the parliamentary candidate.

Other left-wing Labour councillors followed suit, and what is seen locally as Starmer’s persecution of socialists lost Labour the leadership of the council to the Green Party.
 
While acknowledging the wit of the Doina’s disco comment, Jeremy Green says: “I was proud to support causes Doina was involved with and I was sorry about what happened to her. But we are not a Labour Party band; we’re not associated with one particular party, let alone one individual.”

The average age of the band is about 55, and Coldrick chuckles that when members go for a beer, the scene is “a cross between Citizen Smith and Last of the Summer Wine; a bunch of old geezers in the pub planning the revolution!”

Most Stroud residents love the band, says Green. “We always get a lot of applause and our bucket-shakers collect loads of money when we’re busking for charity. We’ve raised hundreds of pounds for the local women’s refuge and for refugee support, and the Oxfam shop said the £900 we collected for the Turkish/Syrian earthquake appeal was the biggest single donation it received – and footfall increased spectacularly thanks to us playing outside the shop.”

That said, some shopkeepers have grumbled about their doorways being blocked by the frequent protests in the town and the band isn’t popular with the distributors of the conspiracy theory newspaper The Light.

“We do get some negative comments from them,” says Green, who says The Light disseminates right-wing propaganda including climate change denial and anti-refugee, homophobic and anti-semitic rhetoric.

“They appear to think we are funded by the evil global elite overlords George Soros and Bill Gates. And they have objected to our ‘militaristic uniform,’ which is bizarre as we wear T-shirts featuring pictures of musical instruments and most of the band are strongly anti-war.”

Coldrick and Green aspire to help launch sister bands elsewhere (Bristol is first on the list) and like to play outside Stroud when possible. As well as Tolpuddle the Red Band has played this year at May Day celebrations and Extinction Rebellion events in London.

A plan to play on the 2020 Parisian May Day march down the Champs-Elysees, with sister-bands from the International Activist Fanfare network, had to be abandoned because of the pandemic but the band would still love an overseas gig.

“Protest against the capitalist oppression of the working class knows no geographical borders,” says Green. “We could play anywhere in the world and our message would be understood and enjoyed.”