Community, creativity, the power of music and the importance of brass banding: Martin Green’s play KELI debuts in 2025

Martin Green at the National Mining Museum Scotland, in Newtongrange (Photo: Sandy Butler)

Marking 40 years since the miners’ strikes and featuring a sharp, hilarious script and live brass score by Ivor Novello winner Martin Green, KELI is a gripping show about community, creativity, the power of music and the importance of brass banding. 

In 2022, having immersed himself in the world of the brass band, the communities, the competition and the legacy of coal and Martin Green created a documentary on BBC Radio 4, Love, Spit And Valve Oil, where he explored the world of brass bands, discovered why banding in Britain has outlasted the pits, the picket lines and the closures.  For generations, the self-contained world of the bands has been a refuge, a community-building practice and a source of healing.

Inspired by the conversations Green had with people during the creation of the Love, Spit and Valve Oil series on Radio 4 he created an audio drama, KELI which was released last December, along with an album, Split the Air.

This has now developed into a stage play, with Martin Green making his playwrighting debut. The play, KELI, will be performed by the National Theatre of Scotland and will be touring Scotland during 2025. KELI explores the world of Scottish brass bands and the ex-mining communities they serve, and explores this through the character of Keli, a teenage horn player – a fiery, sharp-witted teenager living in a former mining town. Coal means little to Keli, but the mines left music in the blood of the town. As the best player her brass band has ever had, music is easy. Everything else is a fight. Feeling trapped in small-town life, pressure mounts.

Martin Green is perhaps best known amongst lovers of folk-music as the virtuoso accordionist in the visionary folk trio Lau. He has also written the music for KELI, which will feature brass band music from his album Split the Air. Through collaboration with Whitburn Band, and other local brass bands around Scotland, this production continues to sustain ongoing relationships with Scottish brass bands and the communities they represent.

KELI will preview in Stirling before opening at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh in May and tour to Dundee Rep Theatre, Perth Theatre and Tramway, Glasgow in 2025, 40 years after the miners’ strike of 1984-85 and will reach audiences across the country who belong to communities that were hugely affected by strike.  

Full details from the National Theatre of Scotland’s website.