Many of the formative years of my childhood were spent in south-east Lancashire - I was born in Chorley and lived in Horwich for a time. Brass band music always evokes that time for me - days when we'd walk across the fields up to Rivington Pike, or roam the Chinese Gardens on the Lever estate, or build dams and swim in the river Douglas. Horwich, in those days, was a grimy, sooty little red-brick mill town - much changed these days.

Before my great-grandfather broke the tradition by becoming a locomotive driver on the railway, all the male members and male relatives of my father's line - and some women - were miners. My y g-g-g-grandfather was in the pit at 10, pulling "corves", or coal carts, graduating to a coal hewer when he was 16 or so. Child labour in mines was stopped by law in 1849.

I've got mixed feelings about the mines. The miners' strike broke communities and screwed up the lives of many thousands of hard-working folk - and yet, and yet, what a hard life it was.

The music's great though, andthe skill of the works musicians inthose days was astounding.