Probably entirely my fault for mentioning Arnold Bennett in the first place! Any comparison is clearly invidious, but to link Bennett and Brian isn't entirely lunatic. Both were born in the Potteries, both came from fairly humble families, and each became infused by currents of thought whose origin and influence lay way outside the parochial nature of Potteries customs and traditions. Both men then forged ambitions that could not possibly flourish in the place of their birth, and to turn their backs on Stoke.
If I propose that between Bennett and Brian we have a great writer and a great composer then maybe all disagreements will cease. And if, in addition, I venture the proposal that Bennett and Brian each made a permanent and more significant mark on our culture than did Captain Smith and Stanley Matthews we shall all be one in the celebration of the former pair!
However I'm not going to give up entirely! There is obviously a lot of the Potteries in the Bennett novels. Many of the books are set in the five towns that now make up the city, and in them we encounter real flesh and blood characters who once you would have met in the pot banks, pubs, and streets of the place. And having been sentenced to live in or near the Potteries for 34 years in order to earn my crust of bread until, gloriously, I got out of it, and having thus developed a familiarity with the culture of the place, I often hear elements of the Potteries in Brian's music. I'm thinking of a certain gruffness, a ruggedness and independence of thought, a jocularity of humour occasionally breaking into a swaggering jollity or else a grim resolute despair, a determination to be his own man and to say what he likes regardless of others, an insistence on his own forms of expression, sometimes immense energy and powers of endurance, a disdain for mere prettiness, a sometimes ruthless bluntness and honesty..... Notoriously difficult to capture in words what we might feel about a piece of music, but aren't these some of the elements that we find in Brian's music? Become acquainted with Stoke and you'll recognise all such elements in Potteries culture and history - however of course in recent years with the collapse of the pottery industry, and mile upon mile of near derelict factories and pot banks, all this traditional culture has disappeared.
