The Futureheads star Barry Hyde on mining’s ‘brutal’ heritage: ‘I don’t think anyone misses the mines’

When The Futureheads singer Barry Hyde was commissioned by Sunderland City Council to create an album detailing the cultural heritage of the northeast coalfields, he started mining local history and unearthed a rich seam of balladry, poetry, folklore and storytelling. He also found a personal connection to a mining tragedy from 1882.

“A friend of mine, Keith Gregson, who is a historian, discovered that some of my ancestors were killed in the Trimdon Grange explosion in 1882. So this commissioned album became even more personal,” says Hyde, when he calls Big Issue from his pub, The Peacock, in Sunderland.   

What began as a three-minute piece of music, then a 25-minute live performance, is now an album. And next, it looks like it’s going to be a musical.  

“Researching the album was incredible,” adds Hyde, who formed The Futureheads in 2000 and is currently working on their sixth studio album. “I love a project – I’m not one of those musicians that can just write for fun. I need some kind of pressure.” 

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The album sits somewhere between The Futureheads’ 2012 acapella album Rant and Hyde’s solo LP Malody – with strong folk melodies and lyrics found by Hyde during his research process. 

“I’d originally thought about Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’ Blood…, a piece of music based around a sample of a homeless man in Elephant and Castle. He looped it for about 35 minutes and wrote an orchestral piece around it. I imagined using found industrial sounds and old movie clips,” says the singer.   

“But I found a couple of books – one called Come all ye Bold Miners by AL Lloyd (1952) and another, Just One Man by John Moreland, who’d written all these great songs. And it felt more organic and authentic to use genuine lyrics rather than words I was trying to make up. So Come All You Colliers is about the formation of the unions. The simple fact of uniting to say we want to work in a less dangerous environ-ment or we need more money.”

The final song on the album, Trimdon Grange 1882, begins as a piano lament, before Barry Hyde sings a song by the famous Pitman Poet, Tommy Armstrong.   

“It was about the Trimdon Grange mining disaster,” explains Hyde. “I wanted to write an instrumental piece for the ancestors of mine who were killed and anyone who’s ever perished because of coal mining.

“Then the track that it leads into is another by Tommy Armstrong, about how we’ve got to look after the orphans, make sure they never cry for bread. There is a beauty in that spirit of ‘we’re all in this together’.”

There is romance and sorrow, solidarity and pride in Miners’ Ballads. This is no nostalgia project – many of the songs dig into the danger of the work. 

“The heritage of mining was brutal. You were basically a slave to the landowners, forced to work underground,” says Hyde.  

“Imagine your job is to stand with a pickaxe in near darkness and break through rock, knowing at any minute you could release a pocket of gas that will explode when it comes into contact with air? It’s like you carry a stick of dynamite in your hand. 

“So I don’t think anyone misses the mines. But they do miss the community spirit that was a byproduct of that type of job.” 

Miners’ Ballads by Barry Hyde is released on 21 March (Sirenspire). The Futureheads are on tour now

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