IVOR Novello Award-winning composer Martin Green is making his playwriting debut with a show marking 40 years since the miners’ strikes.
Best known as the virtuoso accordionist in the folk trio Lau, Green has spent the past two years on an odyssey deep into the world of brass bands, culminating in the production of KELI.
It will feature brass band music from Green’s acclaimed album Split The Air. Through collaboration with Whitburn Band, and other local brass bands around Scotland, the new show aims to sustain ongoing relationships with Scottish brass bands and the communities they represent.
The play tells the story of a fiery, sharp-witted teenager in a former mining town. Coal means little to Keli, but the mines left music in the blood of the town.
Touring Scotland in 2025, the show will reach audiences across the country who belong to communities that were hugely affected by the miners’ strike of 1984-85.
Green’s journey into the world of mining town brass bands began by chance near his home in Midlothian. Following a poster advertising Brass In The Park, he discovered a self-sustaining world of music-making that – like the folk tradition – had retained its social function and was part of the warp and weft of the communities that performed it.
His fictional play has evolved from the critically acclaimed BBC Radio 4 series Banding: Love, Spit And Valve Oil which explored the phenomenon of modern brass bands and featured interviews with their members. These interviews have inspired aspects of the characters in the play.
As a member of Lau, Green has won BBC Radio 2’s Folk Award for Best Group an unprecedented four times. In 2014, he received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists in recognition of his talent as a composer. In 2019, he won the Ivor Novello Award for his large-scale installation Aeons which was part of the Great Exhibition of the North.
Most recently, he has gone on to create critically acclaimed work for BBC Radio 4 exploring different communities all over the UK and their relationship with music. These have reached millions of listeners and have been highly commended by the Association of International Broadcasters.
Green is also the artistic director of Lepus Arts, which is co-producing KELI with the National Theatre of Scotland.
“To be making KELI with National Theatre of Scotland and director Bryony Shanahan 40 years on from the miners’ strike feels absolutely right,” he said.
