When the last coalfield in County Durham closed over 15 years ago, there were fears that the proud tradition of the colliery band would perish alongside it. Yet today the Durham Miners' Gala remains one of the biggest political gatherings in Europe, with over 50 marching bands converging for the blessing of banners in the cathedral. The "Big Meeting" is now augmented with an international festival whose centrepiece this year was a collaboration between American filmmaker Bill Morrison and Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson.

Although performed by the outstanding NASUWT Riverside Band (whose lineage as the Pelton Fell Methodist Band goes back to 1877), Jóhannsson's hour-long composition bore little resemblance to traditional brass band music. Instead, the nave throbbed to an austere, electronically enhanced rumble whose lachrymose fanfares contained echoes of Purcell's funeral music or Monteverdi's evocation of Hades. Morrison's montage of archival images had the utilitarian look of the public information films produced by the General Post Office in the 1930s, but there were some startlingly lucent images, in which flat caps at a mass meeting came to resemble a shingle beach; or a pit-head train was swallowed by a perspective that briefly transformed the vaulting of the nave into a row of vast, stone pit props.

The climax came with a pulse-quickening sequence of charging police horses in which the tactics employed to contain striking miners in 1984 appeared positively medieval.

Morrison and Jóhannsson may be strangers to the region, but it takes an outsider's eye to realise that 1984 was the closest the country has come to a second civil war.