For me it started with a sign. Not a thunderbolt from God, but a vinyl banner that read “Brass in the Park, this Saturday”. I went along – and I never really came back.

The sign was outside the National Mining Museum Scotland in Midlothian, which has been my adoptive home for some years now. I walked into that park to find a brass band gleaming in the sun. This great sonorous bath of sound resounding in the centre of the village. That band felt like the giant pulsating heart of the community.

I was transported – though I wasn’t quite sure where to. The reverberation of the brass band is inherently nostalgic: hazy ideas of a half-forgotten time that never actually existed. But it also testifies to some of the harshest aspects of our history over the past two centuries: bent bodies, poisoned lungs and picket lines. I’ve got the Hovis advert in one ear and the Battle of Orgreave in the other.

I stood that day in awe of the musicianship, the spectacle and the visible love these people have for their craft. It reminded me strongly of my own niche genre. I grew up playing English folk music, eventually migrating north to play in Edinburgh folk group Lau. Folk music and banding share many traits: they are multigenerational, inclusive, after-work activities. The social function is intrinsically built in. And, of course, politics. Both have strong links to socialist thinking and action.

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These similarities made me love it even more, and I left that park with brass bands’ barbs firmly in my heart. But life is busy, so nothing happened for a while.

Then, in 2021, with the pandemic still thwarting gigs, I decided to find out more about this place that is now my home, and this music I wanted more of. I started talking to brass players, conductors and teachers. People were so happy to talk; we all had spare time in that little window, and it was wonderful and beguiling.

There have been brass bands like this for about 180 years, and they formed for all sorts of reasons, not just mines. But around me it is about coal, and 40 years on from the miners’ strike, coal is in my mind. I collected stories of the bands in the strike and I spoke to miners and trade unionists. I heard about lives lived in brass bands, from child to grandparent. I heard of heartwarming camaraderie and collective victories, but also of hardship and betrayal, panic attacks and beta-blocker dependency. Out of this research came a series for BBC Radio 4 – Love, Spit and Valve Oil.

That documentary series took me down to the depths of a disused mine with a miner who had been fighting a picket line conviction for 37 years, and to the heady heights of the national championships at the Royal Albert Hall, where I understood for the first time why competition can be so valuable as a point of focus. I experienced the electrifying charge that the contests generate, especially for younger players, and it was thrilling.

When my work on the series finished, I found I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The desire to make something new from all this was overpowering: to write some of this rich music as a backdrop for a fictional work set in my community. The wee towns and villages around me are littered with sculptures and plaques of miners and mining, proud celebrations of an extinct way of life. But the subject rarely came up until I asked.

“People just stopped talking about it,” observed one of the documentary’s interviewees, reflecting on the trauma of the strike, the closing of the mines and the gutting of these communities. So what does it feel like to grow up here today?

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One of the many pleasant surprises was how many young people play in brass bands, and I was drawn to this vision of the future. But what does it mean to play in a band with “colliery” in its name, having never seen one?

Eventually I created a fictional teenager to think that through: Keli. Keli is an amalgam of many amazing people, but two interviewees in particular. One who said, “I was always crying as a kid – always crying unless I was playing the horn,” and another who told me the brass band was the only physically safe environment for her growing up.

Keli became an audio drama about a hilarious, fire-tongued teenage brass-playing prodigy who ends up trapped in a mine with a 150-year-old Marxist.

We recorded the music for Keli with an incredible bespoke brass band in Manchester, and it felt so amazing to hear this music, dreamed up at a kitchen table in lockdown, come to life in three-dimensional space.

It’s hard to describe the buzz from standing next to a brass band. Chasing that thrill, we made an album Split the Air, which is touring now. It’s a full brass band on stage, and I narrate, talking about the amazing people I’ve met intercut with excerpts from the interviews. At the end there’s a cameo from Keli, coming out through the band and addressing the audience. Split the Air is a celebration of the bands and the people that make them happen, and a marker; 40 years on from that epic strike, which deserves to be spoken about.

We’ve done it in a few places now, in Scotland, England and Wales, using local bands each time. And the thing – the amazing, wonderful thing that I didn’t expect – is that people come up to me afterwards and tell me even more incredible stories. People talk to me about their lives in bands, or in the strike. It has felt wonderfully connected in an age of disconnection. The accents are different, but the stories all come from the same place.

• Folk music
• Classical music
• The miners' strike 1984-85
• Coal
• Mining
• features