I went down to the Villa yesterday evening to hear the Ramsey Town Band play in the Arcade. They were set up under the glass roof with the black and white floor in front of them, red banners on the stands, and an audience that was largely wandering in off the promenade rather than planning the evening around it.
They were very good. Better than good. Whoever chose the room chose well, because a barrel of glass overhead does something generous to a brass band, and the sound arrived warm rather than loud. You could hear the inner parts. In a hall with a lower ceiling you often cannot.
The band is the brass band for the north of the Island and has been since 1981, though there has been a band in Ramsey in one form or another since the 1880s. A silver band, properly speaking, which is not a description of the paintwork so much as of the plating.
Above them, saying nothing at all, sat the Wurlitzer.
It is worth knowing what is in that wall. The instrument was signed out of the factory at North Tonawanda in New York in November 1929 and sent to England for a cinema in Holloway, where it was judged too small. It went to Leicester instead, and stayed there until 1957, after which a councillor bought it for himself and installed it in underground rooms in his garden in Sedgley. The Isle of Man Government acquired it in 1989. It played at Summerland until Summerland closed, and it now lives in the Arcade, restored, with seven hundred and fifty four pipes and a weight of about ten tonnes. Too small for Holloway.
The concerts are the Arts Council’s Summer Season of Music, brass bands on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and Sunday afternoons through June, July and August, with the Wurlitzer played at lunchtime on Wednesdays. The series started at the Sea Terminal in 1995 and moved to the Arcade in 2009. Last year was the thirtieth. Better than two thousand people came.
There was no ticket and no charge. I put something in on the way out, which felt like the least I could do, and which is presumably the arrangement everybody involved is quietly relying on.
I hear it said often enough that there is nothing to do on the Isle of Man. I have never understood it. There is a great deal on, most weeks, and a fair amount of it costs nothing. What there is not is anyone standing on Loch Promenade telling you about it. You have to look, and looking takes about four minutes.
Charlton Krentz 