“I’m still down there where the seams are deep
Digging a hole, away in the coal, go down…go down”
Ewan MacColl, The Big Hewer
The opening of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s latest album features the sound of a church organ playing huge, slow, mournful chords, rising in volume as if asking a question in increasing desperation. The call goes out into a huge and seemingly empty chamber, echoing and gradually falling away into a dark silence. After a few minutes, it finds an answer, a two note response from a solitary trumpet, initially hesitant, but gradually growing in strength. Still here. Still here. Still here. The church is Durham Cathedral, and the brass is provided by members of what was once the band of the nearby Pelton Fell Colliery. The Pelton Fell Colliery was sunk into the hill in that locality in 1835, and the men of the village served it until 1965, when the mine finally fell silent forever. The colliery was a prop for the whole village, and when it snapped, much else came down with it: the Miner’s Institute, the working men’s club, the two pubs that the miners frequented, and the entire livelihood and social fabric of the village in a foreshadowing of the events of the early 1980s. Read the rest of this post over at The Liminal.
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