Where there's brass: Ahead of the East Neuk Festival trumpet virtuoso John Wallace and his father on their shared brass band roots

On this occasion Kiff Wallace is in agreement. “I said to him, when you go out play something with a tune. He shakes his head. "Some of that stuff …”

Kiff (short for Christopher) Wallace is 91 now. For decades he worked as a joiner in the Tullis Hill paper mill. And until the early years of this century he played in the paper mill’s band. But he has retired from both now and the mill is shut.

The man himself, though, is retired but not retiring. A year ago he had a stroke but you wouldn’t know it. “You’re effing indestructible, Dad,” John Wallace says to his father, giving him a hug.

Wallace junior, 68, is in town because later this evening he will go around the corner to a nearby hall to work with the Tullis Russell brass band, which continues to thrive despite the mill's closure in 2015.

Tonight they will be practising a piece for the upcoming East Neuk Festival. De Profundis, a tribute to Fife's mining and brass band traditions, has been devised by John Wallace and will be performed by 60 brass players including members of John's his own ensemble, The Wallace Collection in an old, blacked-out barn in St Monan’s.

John Wallace has had a stellar career as a trumpet soloist, playing with the London Symphony Orchestra, having pieces written for him by the likes of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and James MacMillan, and even performing at the royal wedding of Charles and Di back in 1981. He was principal of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Dance (as was) for 12 years too.

But it all began in nearby Methilhill, Fife, where John Wallace grew up. The Wallace family’s common language is music, and it stretches back through generations. “Nearly every mining village had a band,” says Kiff, whose father, uncle and brother all played in the Coaltown of Balgonie Colliery Band. As a "wee nipper", he would watch the galas and wish he could join in. He later played in the band's junior section.

Then in 1941, he became an apprentice joiner at the Tullis Russell paper mill and joined the mill band. He would spend more than 60 years playing with it.

“My first memories are of my dad playing and how beautiful it was," says John Wallace. "He used to play these slow memories and I can remember being overwhelmed with emotion.”

It was Kiff who taught his son that playing a brass instrument was not about blowing hard. “He showed me that playing a brass instrument is a gentle thing.

“Brass trombones got associated with funerals. They became associated with the voice of God, you know? When I hear a brass band playing softly in beautiful harmony I think, ‘Yes, God’s trying to say something to us.’ I don’t quite know what, but it’s beautiful.”

This is John Wallace’s default position: a soaring engagement with the music he loves. And his father, he insists, always felt the music just as deeply. “My dad could really play a tune. He could play it with the heart. And he could lose himself in a melody. My grandad was exactly the same.”

The UK's brass band tradition grew out of the industrial revolution when bands formed in factories, sometimes supported by the factory owners. By the end of the 19th century, there were around 30,000 such ensembles "in every village in Britain from Saint Mary’s in the Scilly Isles up to Lerwick in Shetland”, John tells me.

During the first half of the 20th century, those bands went from strength to strength (the Tullis Russell band was formed in 1919) before beginning to decline in the 1960s. There are now around 500 bands left in the UK, John reckons.

We associate the tradition with mining communities and that is part of the Wallace family story too. John Wallace’s grandfather was a miner until he contracted silicosis. John can recall his grandad telling him about the strikes of 1921 and 1926. But now the mines themselves are fading into the past, the pit bings, in John's words, “greening away into a distant memory”. It is those memories that Wallace is tapping into in De Profundis.

“I feel very intensely and passionately about that period when I was growing up in the 1950s and the 1960s,” recalls John. “Bomb craters still left from the war, growing up playing in air raid shelters both at the bottom of the garden and up by the sweetie shop. And the closeness of all that to nature.”

Was there a temptation to ask a mining band to play for the festival? “Well, there aren’t many mining bands left. I suppose you don’t need to have a Spanish band to play Spanish music. And enough of them have mining in the family.”

And of course, John Wallace has the Tullis Russell in his. Like his father, he played with the band himself.

Kiff brought his son his first instrument and started teaching him to play. He was something of a hard taskmaster, it seems. “Oh aye," he recalls. "I can remember coming down the stair and my wife said to me: ‘That’s the finish. You’re not talking to my laddie like that. He’s getting another tutor. You’re no getting to do it.’”

“I was only seven,” says John. “I got dumped by my first teacher, my dad.”

Instead, he joined Tullis Russell’s junior band, conducted by Geordie Baxter, who was an electrician and a solo coronet. “If you put down a wrong finger Geordie would whack you over the finger with his pencil … Which helped the fingering.”

“It came easy to him,” Kiff says of his son’s musical abilities. “I don’t know why I was shouting at him.”

“Oh, you still shout at me, Dad.”

John, I ask, when did you know music was going to be your life? “It just took over. I always feel a lack when I’m not doing music.”

His has been a glittering, storied career. And he enjoys telling the stories. In the mid-1960s, aged 15, he joined the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain where he was groomed by the orchestra’s founder Dame Ruth Railton. Railton was married to the newspaper magnate Cecil King who sponsored the orchestra. She wanted Wallace to play a Haydn Trumpet Concerto and put him up in her house near Hampton Court for a couple of weeks for daily lessons.

“They had a butler and I remember being very embarrassed going to dinner," he says. "There were peas one night and I couldn’t spear them. They went flying all over the place. Cecil King was looking at me … He didn’t wear a monocle but he was the sort of bloke who could have.”

His parents had taken him to Markinch to buy a suit. A suit with short trousers. Railton took one look at it and sent John off to Savile Row, where he was measured up by Hardy Amies himself.

“We went on tour and the first port of call was Portugal. We went to play in Sintra. It was live on Portuguese television and who was in the royal box but the president of Portugal, President Salazar who was a chum of Cecil King’s. I was introduced to President Salazar after the concert and I’m not kidding you, I was a small 15-year-old. He had to get on a box.”

Wallace then went to Cambridge where he mixed with the future cream of British classical music – Mark Elder, Richard Hickox, David Atherton, “all of the people who became conductors and singers. And strangely enough, you learnt from your peer group. The teaching was effing awful”.

Kiff and his late wife Annie would often travel down to watch John perform. “We couldn’t afford a hotel,” Kiff recalls, “so we took our tent.”

The memory prompts John to add his own:“My mum and dad took me to the Bayreuth Festival and they stayed in a tent on the campsite and I stayed with them. Then I went to this jugendfestpieltreffen [youth festival] with Pierre Boulez conducting when I was 18. And mum and dad stayed at the campsite. That’s where I learned to drink lager."

This was 1968. The year of the Prague Spring and the Russian reaction to that political upheaval (John Wallace can still remember seeing the American Fifth Army roaring past heading for the nearby Czech border).

By then, the son was already moving in different musical circles to his father. But what, I wonder, did he take with him? How did the grounding in music in Glenrothes set him up for his subsequent career?

“It gave me discipline. My dad gave me discipline.”

“I gave him discipline when we stayed in Methilhill,” adds Kiff. “He went away with boys and crossed the pipe.”

The pipe? “I used to go across the River Leven on a little [water] pipe,” John explains. "All these daredevil things. But my dad stopped me.”

“I just walloped his arse," says Kiff. "He didn’t go back to the pipe after that. ”

John returns to the original question. “I got discipline and a real hunger. You had to go onto that platform. You had to win the contest with the band and if you didn’t win it was like death. So it was like a Bill Shankly thing. Music is more important than life or death," he says, alluding to a famous quote by the legendary Liverpool football manager. "You’ve got to turn up even if you’ve been run over by a bus. Like Roadrunner, you’d have to pick yourself up and go and play.”

He left Cambridge wanting to be a composer, but the phone never rang. Instead, he joined the London Symphony Orchestra where he was Principal Trumpet from 1976 to 1995, touring the world and having pieces written especially for him.

In 1993, James MacMillan wrote the trumpet concerto Epiclesis for Wallace to play. “I did that at the Edinburgh Festival and I tell you, going out onto the stage and playing that at a packed Usher Hall was just like scoring a penalty for Scotland. It was an incredible experience. I was so frightened.”

It is not his father’s favourite composition. John tells the story of one performance when Kiff was in the audience, sitting beside his daughter-in-law Liz and near Macmillan himself. “After the performance stopped my dad turned to my wife and in this huge stage whisper went: ‘What a load of shite.’ And Jimmy’s two seats away. He didn’t hear him but dad can be indiscreet. It’s a fabulous piece, Dad.”

What kind of music does Kiff prefer? “Anything that’s got a tune," he say. "They play all the bad notes in modern music. It’s just disturbing.”

The high point of his son’s career may have been solo accompanying Kiri Te Kanawa at the marriage of Charles and Diana in 1981, playing to a televised audience of 750 million people. Does it seem a long way from Glenrothes to the pomp and circumstance of a royal wedding in Saint Paul’s, I wonder?

Maybe not. “What you get on a day like that is the indivisibility of society," says John. "You’re in the middle of Saint Paul’s. There are millions of people outside. You can just hear the prrrrr of them and you get some idea of the human swarm of what we are. And all these people have got their place in it. Saint Paul’s wouldn’t exist without Glenrothes, without that shed,” he says pointing, “without that apple tree that grew from a pip.”

It is time for rehearsals. We travel around the corner to a local hall where the Tullis Russell brass band are waiting. As the band practice Kiff sits to one side, head nodding in time to the music while his son conducts, positively bouncing up and down to the swelling rise of the melody. They may argue like any family but they are united in the music. They always have been.

And the band plays on.

De Profundis will be formed by the Tullis Russell brass band and the Wallace Collection at The Bowhouse, St Monans on July 1 at 6pm. For more details visit eastneukfestival.com