ACFM - ACFM 62: The Beach

Episode Date: August 9, 2026

Nadia, Keir and Jem wonder why humans are drawn to the beach in a weird-left conversation that spans geological deep-time, the birth of surf culture, the politics of faded seaside towns and more, plus music from 808 State and The B-52’s. Find the music and books mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters Follow our playlist on Spotify by searching ‘ACFM’. Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Jeremy Gilbert. I'm here as usual with my good friend Nadia Idol. Hello. And my other good friend, Kim Ilburn. Hello. And today we are going to be talking about the beach. So why are we talking about the beach, Keir?

Because it's damned hot outside. We're recording at the, you know, midpoint in a historic heat wave. And you know, at times like this, people's minds turn to getting in the water, etc. And the primary place that people get into the water in the UK is either shit-laden rivers or shit-laden beaches. And so we thought we'd talk about the beach. It's a nice summer topic. We did holidays last year. We're going to get a little bit more specific this time.

And there's plenty to talk about in terms of the beach, both in terms of it as a material thing. And as a cultural thing, you know, a place of nostalgia, a place of freedom and a place where perhaps the problems of the world also appear every now and then. And what about you, Naudia? Why are you interested in this? Yeah, interesting. I mean, I love the famous situationist's quote, which translates as beneath the paving stones the beach or beneath the streets the beach. I think that's really interesting about how the beach occupies some kind of imaginary of, a future that perhaps we want of some kind of life without work and how the beach exists in

definitely the UK imaginary as this idea of a holiday slightly different for me. I grew up with two seas, the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, which I visited often growing up. So definitely a space of leisure, but not necessarily a kind of untouched idea with the summer holiday per se. But I guess I'm also interested most specifically in, you know, not just the imaginary stuff, but the political economy of the beach, so to speak. So like what is the history of the seaside, specifically in the UK? What does it say about migration and other things as well, especially about coastal towns and the politics and economics of that as well? And also, of course, alluded to by Keir, the beach as a site of protest with, you know, anti-seuage campaigns and another stuff as well. So I think there's loads of interesting topics. Obviously, it is very hot at the time of recording. Thankfully, just past the heat wave. So our laptops and computers are not quite at burning point.

But that's one of the reasons why I think talking about the beach will be an interesting thing for ACFM. All right, great. Well, before we get into it any further, we should. mention that. You listeners can go even weirder and even leftier by subscribing to our newsletter. We've got a lot of subscribers now. Please join us. This is an email newsletter that goes out just once with every new trip, so it's just once a month at most. With bonus content and updates from all of the crew, as I always say, it's like a really nice substack put together by producer Chow. To sign up, go to navarra.commed newsletter. with no spaces.

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And to support us and to keep help us, keep bringing you even more ACFM content from our ACFM Cosmos. Please consider supporting our host, Navarra Media, for as little as one pound a month, by going to Navarra.media stroke support. Let's play Echo Beach by Martha and the Muffins. So Marfa and the Muffins are a Canadian band. I really only had one hit, which was Echo Beach. But I like this song because it really shows the imaginary of a beach as a place of freedom.

We put it like that. A place of freedom as opposed to work as a time of unfreedom, perhaps we put it like that. So the song was written by band member Mark Gain while he was working at a wallpaper factory. It's the first song he ever wrote. And before that, he was an experimental sort of avant-garde bands. The job was really boring. I think it was something like you had to inspect wallpaper, like newly manufactured wallpaper, incredibly boring. And the lyrics reflect that.

From 9 to 5, I had to spend my time at work. My job is very boring. I'm an office clerk. The only thing that helps me pass a time away is knowing I'll be back at Echo Beach someday. The last final tip bit on that is that Echo Beach was not a real place when Martha and the Muffins recorded this song. But it is now. As in, there's a beach in Toronto which is actually named after the song. I know it's out of fashion and a trifle run through. But I can't help me.

I'm a romantic. It's a habit of mine. To watch a sun. go down, watch the sun go down. We wanted to talk about the beach from the perspective of deep time, didn't we? So what have we got to say about that? Well, like deep time, as in, you know, where do beaches come from? Perhaps even where are they going?

And when we think of the beach, we basically, I think what we've got in our heads are like nice sandy beaches. That's what I sort of grew up with in South Wales. Although, you know, there's lots of very famous beaches like Brighton Beach, which is just pebbles, etc. But like, you know, in our imaginary, sandy beaches are probably what takes precedent. Around about a third of the world's coastline is made up of sandy beaches. Most sand on beaches, it's made up of like silica in the form of quartz, basically.

It arrives there through a really long period, a really long process of weathering. You know, you have stones like granite, for instance, gets weathered over millennia, millennia, basically. The other bits of that rock gets sort of worn away, and you're left with like the little quartz bit basically. So perhaps that happens inland and then gets swept down rivers into deltas, etc. That's quite a lot of sun comes that way.

The other way is the way that we normally think about how sand on beaches occurs, which is the movement of waves just causes the weathering, basically, by knocking the rocks together until it just wears away. But then there's another form of sand, which is calcium carbonate, which is basically, if you put it under a microscope, its tiny bits of shellfish and coral, etc. One of the consequences of those is that sand is not a renewable resource, basically.

Not over like a human timescale anyway. You know, we can't make new sand. Well, we probably could make new sand, but it'd be very economically inefficient to do so we can't make sand. And sand is a really important component in building, particularly in concrete, etc. Like there's lots of desert sand, but that's not of the right consistency for concrete. And so as a consequence, one of the things that's happening to beaches, and particularly into tidal zones and then the sand,

which is just beyond the beach, etc., one of the things that's happening to that is that it gets extracted and something like 50 billion tons of beach sand extracted in use for construction every year. That's a non-renewable source, and that puts pressure on beaches. But it's one of the things that putting pressure on the beaches that humans would like to go and swim in. So that's one way in which like deep time

smashes up to human time. That is a really great introduction. And I think partly because it situates the beach in a geological time as, you know, the site of a moving boundary. And as you said, you know, naturally it is, coastlines are not stable. And then they're being made even more stable

by the more unstable, sorry, by the demands of capitalism. So this idea that there is a shift on the edge of, and there is some kind of historically unstable ground, I think, says things both literally and metaphorically about, you know, the territory. So I think that gives us an interesting frame to maybe think about when we're thinking about the politics of the beach and also like the cultures and ideas and imaginaries of the beach, like this idea of, you know, where does. does this start? And if we think about, you know, Jurassic time and we think about the Jurassic coast and we think about the various coastal cliffs in Britain, a geological time kind of gives

us that different temporal knowledge in which to situate some of the things that we'll be thinking about. I've said this sand is like, it's a millennia-long sort of process of formation, etc. But you need relatively stable coastlines in order for it to accumulate. So it's something like, you know, the UK, I think, the coast on the UK has been relatively stable for like 6,000 years, the same of the med, basically. So, you know, you have these ice ages where the coast reduces and expands when the kept on the ice ages end. And we all know that the Holocene, a very stable climactic period, starts about 11,000 years ago, probably linked to the expansion of discovery of agriculture in different parts of the world. You know, we're probably thinking about

those beaches in the UK about like 6,000 years old, that sort of, that sort of thing. One of the interesting things about beaches for me is that like, it's a boundary zone, basically. It's a boundary zone between two different mediums, so like one of which is water, which is why we all go to the beach to get in that, nice cooling water. And the other one is like, well, land and air. That is a medium. Perhaps it's air. Perhaps it's air we walk around on the land, etc.

like boundaries are where like interesting things happen. One of the things I wanted to talk about is this process of life moving from the sea, which is where it started, and like four billion years ago, life starts in the oceans, etc. And it takes until about half a billion years ago before it starts to move on land. That movement of life into land is associated with a huge explosion in like biomass and, like their diversity species, etc. The Cambrian, the great Cambrian explosion of life.

There's an interesting thing there of like, you know, if life began in the sea and it's used to this like water medium, you know, and you know quite a lot of sea, particularly early sea life is, you know, it waits for the sea currents to bring food to it, basically. It's not, it's much less active than like land animals or later sea life. So one of the things is like why was it, Why is such a hostile environment where we don't, we're not surrounded by this medium of water?

Why is life so successful on land? Life on land is 30 times of biomass of life in the sea, even though it's only a fraction of the age that life has been on land, etc. And one of the things, one of the ideas I wanted to raise was this idea of a hypersea. It's like a thesis, basically, by Mark and Diana McMeneman, these two paleontologists, husband and wife paleontologist, who sort of say, look, you know, part of what has to happen. when life comes onto sea is that we have to take the sea with us.

We have to take the sea with us in the form of like circulatory systems. And so there's this idea that like life has to like work out a way to fold the sea inside itself so that all of the functions that used to take place in the sea can now take place within some sort of body. And the mcmememans go a bit further by saying like to understand why life on earth has been, life on land has been so successful, you need to think about it as like a whole, a unified hole, basically. So they have this thesis that, like, what's happened is there's been a new sea created, which they call a hypersea.

And that new sea is on the land and it's carried in the tissues of land life, we'll call it that. Put it that way. And so it's this idea that, like, you know, there's a huge mass of life on land, which is all about transmitting fluids from each other back and forth. And so, like, you know, we can think about fun game. fungal mats playing a really important role of moving fluids and nutrients around in woods, etc., around plant life, etc., you know, playing the role of the sea, etc., that sort of idea. From the point of view of fluids, trees are these incredible pumps that just pump this huge amount

of water, incredible distances up into the sky, etc., that sort of idea. That's quite a trippy theory. This is quite a trippy theory. I'm into it. I'm into it. I'm into it. I love that the mycelium industrial complex still comes in, even with it. when we're speaking about the sea.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Does the theory say anything about, like, the return of humans to the sea? Because I've got this theory. I have no idea if it's got any precedent or kind of research behind this whatsoever. But I've got this idea that people, when they get older, they retire to the sea because there's some kind of inner calling to go back to where you came from, effectively. When old people get dry and desiccated, they find themselves via osmosis being sucked towards the coastal areas of the country.

It wouldn't work with osmosis because it's salty water, but anyway. I mean, there's another sort of paleoanthropological theory, which is in a way sort of related to that idea, which is the historic aquatic ape hypothesis, which is this idea that was popularised in sort of the 60s and 70s, that the evolutionary story according to which we humans, like evolved on the African savannas was wrong and that it was actually um actually we evolved along the coast where there was lots of easy shellfish easy access to shellfish in particular and that's

why we evolved to be mostly hairless so we can swim i mean it's something that has always interested like people trying to work out some details of human evolution that all the other hairless mammals are aquatic like seals and porpoises and dolphins So the idea that that must be some, or we're not hairless, but we're much less hairy than all the other land mammals. So this idea that like humans evolved in the kind of liminal space between

the land proper and the sea proper, it obviously has, it's quite attractive. And it's kind of really interesting story because the theory was put forward by this biologist called Alester Hardy, but it was really popularised by this Welshwoman, Elaine Morgan, who, wasn't like a scientist herself. She basically just read books about it in the local library.

And she had a sort of feminist agenda whereby she really, she thought that the kind of standard narratives about human evolution, they really kind of prioritised the idea that the evolutionary factors driving human behaviour and human evolution are basically all about what's good for hunting and didn't pay any attention to what was good for like raising children and looking after children and things that she thought would be of concern to women. And it's a really interesting story. She published this book in 72 called The Descent of Woman, which is obviously a reference to Darwin's, the descent of man.

And this is 72. This is sort of a peak moment of early women's liberation. So it's really interesting. And my understanding is that the theory is totally discredited. Like it doesn't match the fossil record. Oh, no. No, I know. I know.

It is discredited as a theory. Although it's also, my understanding is now, it's also not considered right to say that homo sapiens just evolved on the savannah that basically people were moving around between different landscapes like all the time, you know, the pre-human hominid ancestors were probably, you know, they were spending time by lakes and rivers and in forests and they probably did go down to the sea as well. You know, they were almost certainly nomadic anyway. So the idea there was like one place. They just, there's one environment that people we evolved in is that's the idea that's actually kind of wrong.

But it's, yeah, it's an interesting. It is, I mean, it is really interesting and it's really compelling idea imaginatively. I've always found it a really compelling thought, though it is really strange. That we are the least hairy land mammals. And the other mammals, you know, the mammals with no hair,

like are the ones that spend all their time in the sea. So, I mean, that is quite compelling in a sort of imaginative way. I was going to say it sounded convincing to me because like migratory routes when people come out of Africa basically they follow the coast, don't they basically? And I think it's because they follow the coast

or they tend to follow the coast is that Europe was quite, it was quite late when humans or homo sapiens moved into Europe I know the Andetals were there. I was just about ready to sign up and get myself to the sea. This is also a sea country, isn't it?

I mean Britain is like, maritime country who it was one of the features of Britain compared to a lot of other countries is that you're never that far from the coast compared to a lot of places even though the coast is not like the Mediterranean

so famously. Yeah no it's not is it and this is interesting because it challenges actually the idea that Keir opened this episode with which is that you go to the sea to go to the beach to get into the sea. I disagree with that. I think there's loads of places

and loads of cultures and loads of imaginaries and lots of practices where you go to the beach for all sorts of different, you know, amusements, activities, etc., that do not involve getting in the sea. I mean, I've never been in the sea in the UK, because I can't bring myself to, right? But I've got, I've never been in the sea. Absolutely not. No. I'll go to the sea. I love the sea, but I won't get into the sea in the UK. It's very difficult when you come from the Red Sea in the Mediterranean, to be honest.

Well, let me, I'll give credence to your theory, Nadia, because the reason that British seaside culture grew up and became so variegated, variegated, is because you can actually only go in the British sea for like five minutes before, before you get absolutely frozen. So you've got to work out what else to do, which is why you basically have arcades and fish and chips and all that stuff, basically. Which is all good, and we're going to get to talk about some of that stuff as well. I mean, another interesting thing to think about is, you know, for, for, for, for, for, so. smaller countries or provinces or areas where you're basically a smaller island, the geography of where the beaches effectively becomes really important. And one example I'd like to bring up because I find it fascinating and I'm absolutely fascinated with the culture there is that of Bali as an island where inside religiously and culturally

the concepts of north and south and east and west are not used. it's Kylod and Kaja, which is basically sea or mountain. And the sea is actually considered to be the lower, the more impure, the more world-like. And Kaja, which is, you know, towards the mountain is like the higher and the sacred. So if you are speaking to someone and you're looking for a set of directions, you're either going towards the sea or going towards the mountain because there's one mountain that's slightly set to the northeast. but the sea is surrounding you everywhere, right?

So it kind of creates both a kind of, I suppose, a moral and spiritual landscape or a kind of cosmic order that runs from where is the central volcano to the kind of settlement of people and then down to the sea. So in that sense, the sea is the bottom and it's not neutral in terms of where it is in the kind of spiritual hierarchy. And I find that really interesting. Yeah, I mean, the idea of mountains as being like some place spiritually uplifting or perhaps even the home of the gods in like Mount Olympus, etc. The gods living on the top of mountains, etc. That's sort of like quite common, isn't it? But like it is interesting that the sea is like the earthly, which is a bit of a contradiction. But yeah, I can see it more worldly or something like that perhaps. Because it works in that geography, right?

So if you're somewhere like Lebanon or you're somewhere like Bali where, you know, it just takes a couple of hours to get from. the mountain to the sea, right? Both things are in proximity. It creates a different imaginary culturally. So one track I think we should play is The Sea by Morchiba, released in 1998 from their album Big Calm. Morchiba come out of the kind of mid to late 1990s British trip-hop moment, I guess, alongside acts like massive attack,

Portishead and tricky, but they always had a slightly different tone, a warmer, softer, more open, and perhaps less urban claustrophobia kind of vibe. And there's more of a drift sense to their music. They're definitely one of my favourite bands. The band is built around Sky Edwards on vocals and the Godfrey brothers Ross and Paul on production and instrumentation. Importantly for this track, the Godfrey brothers grew up in the Hithe area in Kent by the sea. So while Murchibar, London formed band, there is this real coastal geography in the background of their story. But the sea itself isn't necessarily a literal-based song.

It's more about the feeling of moving towards water as a release away from pressure, away from noise and density. So it fits with the wider late 90s British chill culture, I suppose, the downbeat tempos, dub-influenced bass, the kind of soft focus production, and music designed around atmosphere, I would say, rather than narrative. But what adds another fun layer is how Sky Edwards herself describes her relationship with water. So she's talked about growing up in the 1980s when the jaws fill. was on the scene and developing a fear of what lies beneath the surface. And then later she does

this free diving course in Thailand. And she describes this shift of kind of learning to put her face in the water, hold her breath and not be afraid anymore. The song reminds me, actually. I've got a very specific memory of studying or leaving home actually in Cairo to go to my anthropology kinship and family exam in my third year of university. So it evokes a very important. really specific a spring memory for me, actually. The song starts to feel, I guess, like a movement from distance to proximity in a sense, if that makes sense. So not just about an escape to the coast, but a kind of changed relationship with space and landscape. And there's something about that sound which might explain why it travels so widely. So it gets played

in, you know, coastal festivals, lakeside settings, holiday spaces quite commonly. and so it also becomes part of the environments it evoked rather than just describing them. So that is the sea by Moorceiba from 1998. I suppose one question now about beaches in the world is, are they under threat? What does it mean to say that beaches are going to disappear? Isn't there always a beach?

Is there a difference between a beach and a coast? I think when people talk about that, they mean a sandy beach, basically, a beach which has got sand on it, that you can use for leisure activities. There was a study done which predicted that 50% of the sandy beaches in the world would disappear by the end of the century, basically, primarily due to climate change and also to do with urban development around beaches.

There was another study that sort of disputed that figure because the idea would be that as the sea encroaches onto the land because of rising sea levels, you know, basically because of glacial, melting, etc, these sorts of things, and as the ocean warms, the sea expands, the oceans expand, etc. You know, the other thing with climate change is that you have more frequent, severe storms, which can drag sand offshore, basically, and strip the coast of sand faster than it can be replaced.

So that's something that will put beaches under strain. But like, you know, under normal circumstances, as they sea rose, that the sand would be pushed up inland, I mean to say, so that the beaches would survive. But the thing that counts against that is that, like, beaches are, or sandy beaches are one of the areas in which there's been huge urban development or human development, basically, which traps the beach because there's concrete behind it or a road behind it, etc., which means that the beach can't progress any, which is why people think that, like, large amounts of the beaches will disappear, or more or less disappear by the end of the century.

If you travel around so much of the world now, I mean, it's heartbreaking for, you know, nature and, you know, various different species that effectively have to cross these highways to get to the beach because the main road, the highway, or whatever the equivalent is, is built directly on the beach. So what happens when you get an acceleration of that erosion, right? It takes hundreds of millions of years to create the kind of erosion, which creates the kind of topography, which we call a beach today. If some of these predictions are correct and we will have, you know, the sea will basically, because of ice melting and because of climate change, it's going to move in at such a rate where in 150 to 200 years, it could all change. you might get the sea 200 metres in to where it was before

but you're not going to get a nice sandy beach just move further inland. You're effectively going to get the coast underwater. So you do lose the beach as far as I understand it. Yeah, so there are stuff you can do to protect the beach. And obviously there'll be in really rich countries, they'll probably be importing sand, etc. But you can't just import sand from a desert though, I don't think.

It's not the right sort of sand. So the prospect is that beaches will become rarer. and more under pressure, etc. And it would take more and more resources to try to protect them as places for holidays. A lose-lose situation as the temperatures get hotter, of course. Although, of course, there is good news in that the Atlantic meridian ocean current,

which we also know as the Gulf Stream which brings warm weather up to Europe and to UK, looks like it could be turning off in which place we'll have much colder weather. and it'll be really very difficult to live in the UK. Anyway, enough of these horror stories about climate change. We do like to push the climate hoax. I've just finished reading Ian McEwan's What We Can Know,

which was actually recommended on the reading list of media and the environment, a unit I teach at London College of Communication. in McEwen, it was one of my favorite fiction writers. And I think one of the main reasons for that is because of this kind of impending doom and this sense of macabre you get in the writing, which I think is brilliant. But to do that on a novel that is about climate change, I would say it was very affecting. I'm not going to give the plot away,

but I would just say that there are eucalyptus trees on the South Downs in that novel, which is not as idyllic as you would think. So we couldn't possibly do a show about the beach without talking about the band who are the most obviously, directly and explicitly associated with the idea of the beach and beach culture. And that is the beach boys. The beach boys, one of those real kind of enigmas of modern popular culture in a way. These guys who just see, they know, these very straight, suburban, Californian, white guys with neat haircuts who get popular with their very distinctive style of kind of harmonies.

You know, their music initially sounds like, well, it always sounds like really a kind of experiment. How white can you possibly make music, which still is in some sense evidently derived from rock and roll. How white sounding can you possibly make it? And in a way, it suggests that people from Southern California are kind of whiter than even, you know, British people from British cities ever really can be. Like, whereas you've got people like the Beatles and the Stones, in particular, quite obviously wearing their rock and roll and rhythm and blue, there's musical influences on their sleeves.

The beach boys always sound like they want to get as far away as possible from those kinds of origins. And indeed, their music does end up deriving as much as anything from the European classical tradition. And kind of tradition and a little bits from sort of folk music, little bits from commercial popular music of earlier generations. Their first big hit, the one that makes them really famous, also comes out. It's the anthem of the surf culture craze of 1963.

It's surfing USA. Now the Beach Boys start off as the most commercially successful and the most vocally oriented of the sort of surf guitar bands, if you like, of 1963. But they quickly evolve into quite a different prospect because the key figure in the Beach Boys is their key songwriter and producer, the great musical poputeur Brian Wilson.

Brian Wilson, a kind of real figure of cultural fascination. He ends up having, you know, it's really difficult, mental issues for many years. There's a film, a very kind of moving biopic about him, well made, worth watching, called Love and Mercy. But what is widely regarded as the kind of apogee of Wilson's career, like his great artistic statement, is the 1966 album, Pet Sounds. Pet Sounds really widely understood as like the first attempt

by an American band or American artist. to sort of respond to the extraordinary artistic statement, which was the Beatles album from the previous year, Rubber Soul. You know, it's a bit of a point of contention, I think between British music critics and American music critics, can you really say that the Beach Boys' Pet Sound is actually as great an album as Rubber Soul and or Revolver? The answer is, of course, no.

Don't be ridiculous. But it is a song full of bangers and very, very distinctive sort of bangers that really involves a kind of use of, you know, almost orchestral levels of multi-instrumentation, all kinds of studio techniques, all kinds of songwriting and arranging techniques, some of which, indeed, as we would say, derived from things like baroque music that does demonstrate a kind of extraordinary inventiveness and an extraordinary commitment to the idea that pop music. This really isn't rock in any meaningful sense, most of the songs.

songs on that album. Pop music can be a kind of studio art form which has a level of autistic ambition which you can compare to, you know, the experiments in music concrete that are happening in avant-garde music labs in France and Germany. Really kind of extraordinary. I've spent ages trying to decide which track from pet sounds we should listen to. We could listen to Sloop John B. It's probably my favourite song on the album actually to listen to on a regular basis. But ultimately, I think we have to go for the classic, the seminal, really one of the most affecting pieces of popular music from this period. It's Brian Wilson's kind of energy to the very idea of love and interdependence.

It's God Only Knows. If you should ever leave me, Well, life would still go I believe me The world has shown nothing to me So what good would living do me God only knows what I need without you All right, so maybe we should talk then

More about what the beach kind of means to people Like how the beach fits into Like how historic imaginations I mean, no, do you evoke that famous? a slogan. Sulepave la plage, this French 68 slogan, which you often hear it attributed to the situationists. I'm not sure if that's actually accurate.

I think it was just a slogan on a wall. And then what happened afterwards, all those slogans on the wall, the people sprayed on walls in Paris in 68, they all got, well, there's this whole historical controversy around, basically the situationists got credited with like May 1968 in a way,

which is completely historically inaccurate, just because it sort of seemed to people who didn't really know much about what was going on, that these students had some kind of spirit in common with the situationists, but they weren't really, like they weren't involved with the organisation, and the people actually organising 68 were mostly a bunch of Troctuaryist groups. Maoists. Yeah, and Felix Guattari as well,

who wasn't any of those things, but also wasn't a situationist. But it's a great slogan, isn't it? beneath the paving stones the beach, under the paving stones the beach. Parisian streets were like, or lots of them were cobbled streets, basically. So there was basically a whole series of protests which turned into these huge, huge riots following police repression in May 1968, and then barricades were put up all around Paris, etc, a great Parisian tradition. And, you know, the parakeets were partly made of these cobbles

and the protesters would dig up these cobbles to throw up the police, etc. and as you did that, there was sand underneath. The sand was a thing that held them in. So it's this really quite a nice sort of image. And it's quite a nice, as we move from like the more material aspects of the coast to like the imaginary aspects of the coast. It's like this nice image of there's a beach underneath here. But it's also, you know, if we can throw off repressive society,

we can get to like the freedom that the beach represent, something like that. Yeah, the freedom and the leisure. You know, this was the great revolt against Fordism. that revolved around work, still being absolutely central to people's lives at a point when it seemed like the material and technical prosperity ought to make it possible for work no longer to become the central fact to people's lives. And of course, that's the point of tension between the students in 68 in France

and the workers movement, the Communist Party. Workers movement and the Communist Party are not really interested in a post-work society. They want higher wages. but the students have kind of, you know, they're kind of utopian aspiration for, as we would say now, sort of post-work society. And that's partly why people started pointing to the situation. It's because they sort of thought the situation is to have a similar void. I think it's more than that. I mean, for me, it evokes the sense of, guys, it's just here.

It's just here. Like, it's part of the essence of what is underneath all of this capitalist bullshit in a sense. that's what it represents to me as in like if you remove the crap this is like the essential truth of being is it's easy to live the way we want to live but you know we've got all of these effectively these stones covering up the beach and all you need to do is lift the stones but everybody needs to lift the stones for you to get the beach so it evokes the sense of like immediacy for me as in like it's not difficult to achieve what we want we just all have to kind of do it together, it's literally just here

or it's just around the corner, which I really love. It has that poetry. Yeah. Did I mention this before? I wanted to call beauty in the beat. I wanted to call it under the paving stones. Really? Yeah.

But the beach also, it also speaks, you know, the beach does have that particular place in the French imaginary, which is like even more intense than in Britain. I mean, obviously there's a kind of continuity. and the similarity, but in France in particular, because it's a country, you know, the northern part of which is on the Atlantic and in the south, it's the Mediterranean. And like the idea of the beach, like the idea that the entire country, like, Rilo, Gibbs stops working for a month in August

and goes down to the coast, the beach. It's declined now because that French culture of having, that Mediterranean culture of having the whole of August off has become economically, that is impossible to maintain, and also partly because it's getting so hot. down on the coast that people don't want to take kids down there and stuff in the same way. But the peak of that was that period actually. It was like the late 60s. It was like the 60s and 70s. It was like the absolute peak.

Like everyone in France's idea of what it meant to not be at work was to be on the beach. But that's also true in Britain to an extent. I mean, we talked about this when we did the holiday episode, the idea the beach resort as the place you go on holiday. I mean, when I was a kid, it was still really, it was basically, it was considered like socially weird and a bit dead. a bit of bohemian or strains, like the idea of having a, to have a holiday that wasn't a beach. You know, people with, people with like musly eating, like, you know, parents,

you'd go walking in the late district or something, and that was considered pretty weird. That translates into the package holidays. You know, the big package holiday boomed to the Mediterranean. It was sort of a direct continuation of this idea that the beach is where you do holiday. and the whole coastal economy of Britain over the past century and a half, it's revolved around those two industries like fishing and tourism, hasn't it?

The seaside resorts themselves then in Britain, they still to this day, they carry with them this vague sense that they're supposed to be places that are like not quite for like normal life. They're not quite places where you're supposed to just have a job. They've got these weird architectures of like playgrounds lots of playgrounds and, you know, fun fairs,

There are these literally liminal spaces where everything is supposed to revolve around leisure for the sake of leisure, even when it's not really clear if anybody still wants to be doing these kinds of leisure. I'd just like to pipe in with the Egyptian example because actually for people in Cairo, I'll only speak about Cairo, not for the rest of the 100 million strong country, but for people in Cairo it was actually very similar, is that you'd go to the North Coast. You wouldn't go to the Red Sea was for the winter. you'd go to the North Coast in the summer. So people, you know, depending, of course, how much money you had,

it is a poor country, but people as much as possible would go to the North Coast and try and spend some of the summer in like Alexandria or Sidi Abd Rahman and these other places on the North Coast. And of course, that's all getting enclosed at the moment, except for Alexandria. Like 30 years ago, this was mostly all, you could, you know, fishermen and you could get to the sea, whereas it's all becoming enclosed. And we need to talk about that. that's a big phenomenon that's happening around the world.

And there are countries that are very strong in the legislation against it. But this has had a material effect on people's experience of holidays in rich countries where, sorry, in hot countries where, you know, you would want to have a beach holiday in your own country. So do you like going to the beach, Nadia? You like going to Egyptian beaches, but do you like going to British beaches? No, no, no, I love going to English. No, I do. No, I do love going to the beach in the UK.

but not swim. But I miss Sinai immensely. I've not been to Sinai for 15 years. And I grew up going to Sinai and had a lot of a hippie teenage lifestyle there. And I miss it immensely, you know, the beach that is next to the Sinai Desert. I have been to the North Coast with my family quite a bit. And I do love going to the sea. I was just in Whistible two weeks ago.

I love going on daytime, sorry, day trips in the UK. to the sea, but it does evoke, I think, something different for me. And my family lives in Morecam now, my long-lost English family. So I've been to Morcom, you know, four times in the last year. And it evokes something completely different to going and spending a long weekend on the beach and in Sinai with your friends in Egypt. It's like diametrically opposed in a way. But I do love the sea.

The place I lived most growing up was Southport. It's a seaside resort in the northwest, like it's south of Blackpool. It's between Preston and Liverpool along the coast. But it's also, like, it's a really mediocre one. It's like the sea only actually comes in there, like twice a year when there's like a sea by high tide. Other than that, there's this beach where you can't actually walk to the sea. I mean, you could be, it's like miles. And just like, you can go just up the coast to Formby, and you can actually

be by the sea you can actually see the sea and there's loads of sand dunes like i lived kind of walking distance from sand dunes so it was really it was like you know it was nice to be able to when as a teenager it was quite nice to be able to go and you know make a spliff on a sand dune and look at the sunset going into the irish sea or whatever so i'd got to say i don't have massively strong feelings one way or another i'm not i'm not i've never been a beach holiday person i get I've tried beach holidays a few times, like both in Cornwall and in other countries, and I do just get bored if there isn't anything else to do but beach.

Doesn't it depend who you're going on holiday with? Who you're going to the beach with, the experience, is going to, you know, make the time boring or not, right? I'm a creature of the forest. I like being with those grass and trees and like fresh water and drinkable water. The sea always seems great at first.

and then you never spend as much time in it as you think you're going to. You like going down the coast, down the gower, don't you? Well, I mean, when I was very young, I lived in Port Albert. If you want a shitty beach, that's right. Port Albert has got like a steelworks, well, hardly it anymore. And I had an oil refinery. I think it's, yeah, I think the oil refinery's gone as well now. We used to live in the Sanfills estate.

It's basically a council estate right next to the beach, a very polluted beach, as it was in the 1970s, 80s. Ows got rated the most polluted beach in Europe one year. Really? Well, I want to see that table. I mean, you know, I was very young when we lived there, but that was sort of like in the summer, after school, every day you'd go down the beach because it's there.

It's 10 minutes walk away, do you know what I mean? But then we moved up the Swansea Valley, and yeah, we used to go to the Gau, and we did used to go for the day, basically. It would be, you know, 20-minute drive or whatever. And then it depends on what beach you went to, but the nicest beaches were a bit of a walk. So it'd be a full day with a picnic, playing football on the beach, rock climbing, swimming, etc, these sorts of things. I absolutely love swimming in the sea because I like big waves.

The other coast that I know quite well is Northumbria, which is a lot colder. You don't go in the sea for very long in Northumbria, no matter what the temperature is, basically. I just like being by the sea, though, and like hearing the waves and all of that sort of stuff. No, I did this. Well, the sonic experience of the sea is something I've always been, I've always found amazing. I mean, sleeping on a hut on the sea is amazing, in a bamboo hut, just on the beach is like, I miss that so much. Not so much a Northumbrian experience, but. Yeah, you're not going to do. No, no, not in Northumbria.

You're not doing that at anic, man. No, but it is, no, I think, and for me, well, actually, I mean, the, you know, it was a really kind of life-changing. experience, you know, taking acid on the beach at Farnboe, the first time I ever did that and hearing the sea. That was absolutely was, like, life-changing. And I became really obsessed with, like, the sonic, the sonics of it. Which is also something, that's something David Mancuso talked about in interviews as well, actually, listening to water.

This is kind of ambient noise made up of lots of discrete little noises, like every little wave that you hear. The sea, as such, is always kind of awe-inspiring. Thalassa, Thalasa, the Great Green. mother of us all, to quote, Bott Monaghan in James Joyce's Udices. Not just the oral thing though, because it constantly looks different.

We used to go to this place in the Gower quite often which had a view of the sea. I'd literally sit there for hours looking at it, basically. Well, it's my friend Owen O'N pointed this out to me once. He lives in Dublin and it pointed out that when you're by the sea, there's this,

you've basically, even if it's a really cloudy day, you're getting kind of light bath. You're getting sort of bathed in light. And that does really affect, you know, it's medical fat. It affects your serotonin levels. And it really, it's really kind of intent. I think that is a big,

I think that is also part of the reason for the beach is popularity, even in Britain, actually. Because in a way, it is a kind of interesting question in Britain. I mean, anyone from Britain knows this. People outside Britain might not know this. But it's an absolute cliche of like British, childhood, like the trip to the beach where it's rainy and grey, and you have to sit in the car eating sandwiches because there's nothing really to do there.

And the weather's always bad. And it is, you know, it is an interesting question. Why does the coast even become sort of so popular as a holiday resort or a destination in Britain? Because the weather very often is bad. And when the weather's bad on the coast, on the Irish Sea or the North Sea or the Atlantic coast, you get really fierce winds, you know. And it's pretty unpleasant. I just think the horizon does something fundamentally to human beings.

And there are a lot of people whose daily lives, I mean, Britain does have green space and it does have more horizon than a lot of places that are a lot more built up. But that doesn't mean that people's lives are intertwined with that, right? There are some people whose lives are very built up, you know. And so being able to get to the beach and looking out into a horizon, Like it does something to your head, right, in the same way that a walk does something to your head. Or, you know, that light bath, as you're saying, does something to your head. Like, I think it's important.

You know, it might not, it's completely inaccessible to a lot of people around the world. But I think when you arrive at it, you kind of know, because it is the edge, in a sense. And there's no mistaking it, you know, unless you're in a very, very crowded port. But if we're talking about the beach, you have that horizon. And it's also because it's accessible. I mean, that's a really important. point about it. We're going to come on to the political economy, aren't we? But beaches in Britain are accessible when green spaces often are, especially in England and Wales. Just on the spiritually

uplifting parts of beaches, though, my absolute favourite thing is when you're stood on a sort of promontory looking down the coast and you can see, you know, lots of beaches sort of in a row, so they've got a series of promontories stretching down on a nice sunny day, etc. You know, as well as the horizon, and it's that sort of, I find it incredibly romantic. And I absolutely love them. Well, that's the Gower, isn't it? Well, that is absolutely the Gower. That's the sort of it, place I grew up.

The Gower of people who don't know is the peninsula in South Wales, which is the peninsula in South Wales, which is near where Keir grew up, and it's near where my sister and her family lives. It's like Northumberland coast. Like, even when it's rainy, even when the weather's horrible, it's still really dramatic. Yeah, I mean, it gets a lot of rain as Wales.

There's no doubt about it. Anyway, we've done how Gower tourist board. Yes. Thanks very much for that donation, Gow Tourist Board. I've just dropped my favorite Sinai Eco Lodge into the chat.

Unfortunately, you won't be able to see it listeners, but it's just an idea of what it's like to have the kind of Sinai Mountain Range coming up to the Red Sea, which is just spectacular. And with no electricity at night, the stars are just incredible. Just of the people who've been to the Gower,

let me say the Sinai Coast looks nothing like the Gower. There's nothing like it, no. But one of the things with, like, the Gower hasn't got, it hasn't got any sort of like the English seaside resort sort of town in it. So I have visited sort of like the rundown seaside resorts like Blackpool and these sorts of places. But like it's a very different sort of beach experience, isn't it? Yeah, well those resorts, those classic English seaside resorts, they tend to be located in places where.

where basically what you've got access to is loads of flat sand. That's basically it. I mean, that's Southport. Like, it doesn't even have the sea. It's just got the sand. And those big flat sandy places, I mean, we're sort of going into the history now, aren't we?

But those big flat sandy places, they were like popular sort of elite resorts going back sort of late 18th into the 19th century. But then they became, for whatever, for reasons, well, actually, for complicated reasons. They became more associated with kind of working class leisure. once working class people started to get a day off at the weekend and then whole weekends off

and then weeks off in the early 20th century and actually those rockier places like Cornwall for example with that much more kind of spectacular kind of cliffs and stuff they became more kind of middle class places because they because actually that aesthetic you were talking about here with regard to the Gower I mean what you're describing there is you said it was romantic it's true it's sort of consistent with a kind of aesthetic

of the picturesque, as it was called in the classical, like, early 19th century sense. And so there's already, there was already this kind of divergence. I remember being sort of conscious of when I was a kid, like posh people went to Cornwall. Whereas like, you know, poor people went to Blackpool or places like that. And it was, and it was this sense that, well, if you were more of a connoisseur of the landscape, you would go looking for those spectacular views, like you get along the gower. But if you were just after a laugh with your mates. Exactly.

Or if you just wanted to give the kids an ice cream or a ride on a donkey, you would go, you just went to these places that just have huge expanses of, sort of featureless expanses of sand in which people can do things. Yeah, and I think it's what you've just said, Jeremy, says a lot about kind of where the juncture is almost between the beach and entertainment. And the idea of what is entertainment and, you know, class. And like whether an amazing view and the sound of the sea is enough entertainment or whether there has to be kind of things to do.

I mean, I've experienced both. My dad used to take me to Margate and Blackpool when I was a little kid, you know, and actually I lie. I have been in the sea, but it's a Channel Island. So maybe that doesn't count because it's not a different. It doesn't count. Does not count. And Britain has a spectacular coast, but, you know, as we're going to talk about,

like it is absolutely political. And I think it's really interesting, like how different, people's different childhood experiences seem to be really important in kind of building that picture of what the beach is and where the nostalgia is. Like, is it donkeys, ice creams, arcades, or is it more, you know, or is it rock pools and views and whatever? And there must be a multitude of different experiences as well. But it is something that exists in the imaginary. And I think says a lot about this idea of what, as we started saying a while ago on this show, like what a holiday is or what leisure is.

It's kind of impossible to talk about the beach without talking about all of these things. I think we're talking about the beat today and I'm going to be talking today about quite a bit of music from the kind of golden moment of surf culture and surf music in 1963. But there are also other moments when the idea of the island, the beach, the sea

and indeed specifically the Pacific take on a particular kind of importance in the musical imagination. The Pacific, I mean, I have, you know, I've stood by the edge of the Pacific one time in my life. In Northern California, was I tripping? Actually, I was. It was fantastic. And it is really quite something.

It's not really like being by the Atlantic or the Mediterranean. You do have a sense of these awesome, awesome oceanic presence, extending out into a seemingly infinite horizon. And yet a sense of, kind of, you know, there's a kind of warmth to it. There's a kind of welcomingness to it, which the cold, icy edges of the Atlantic Ocean are never going to quite be able to reproduce. And of course, the Mediterranean is basically just a massive lake in comparison. And that has certainly inspired people. It definitely inspired some really, I think,

some really interesting dance music during the early wave of kind of rave and early house music. One arguably sort of unlikely sort of group to produce a track, which at least in its name, seems to indicate that it's somehow trying to express that particular feeling of blist out freedom. This 808 state, the often, you know, these days often neglected, I think, a Manchester kind of techno outfit from the late 80s. I always say, you know, it's really, you know, one of the many reasons I kind of don't really, I don't even like the Happy Mondays.

never mind, people like Oasis. It's because it leads to everybody just to forget how important Manchester in the late 80s was as a site for people producing proper dance music, not just music for like white boy indie kids to shuffle around to, proper dance music. Of course, this is the moment when a guy called Gerald produced his all-time classic Voodoo Ray.

But this is also, this is a great example. This is 808 state, Pacific State, a real hacienda classic, a Balearic classic, a British rave classic to this day, and an evocation of the idea of standing on the beach, looking at the sea, but also standing at the dance floor, looking over the sea of people that you're sharing this oceanic moment with. Pacific State.

Do we want to talk about Ibiza? Ibiza, the Spanish resort island, which becomes associated with sort of bohemian and hippie culture in the 70s, really. ends up becoming one of the key sites for the kind of formation of European rave culture. As the story goes, in particular, when British, basically British football lads started going over there on package holidays

and experiencing the kind of interaction of a quite eclectic dance music culture with MDMA that was starting to be used in those contexts. There, for the first time, in the sort of mid-80s. and but I've never really I mean I beth like going to I betha was like a huge thing for loads of people like all through the 90s and 2000s like I've never gone I've never wanted to go and I've never really had a close friend who went I've had thousands of casual acquaintances who spent a lot of time in Ibiza but I but I really don't it's not it was not something I ever wanted to do and I would say like back in the 90s there was a bit of tension between the sort of British people's like the free party crew from free party world and the Ibiza world

they were quite different and I and but it's but that tension did partly revolve around some of those situationist or situationist credited ideals actually because I remember the um you know the ideal for the kind of British free party like Raver in the 90s was like

people from DIY sound system would say like you shouldn't go you should never go on holiday you'll miss the weekend your job is to make it happen here you know your job is not to go off somewhere else where it's kind of easy. But of course, they did. Because nearly all the free party sound system moved to the south of France

after the criminal justice, like they did all actually go down to the meta somewhere where they had like right to freedom of assembly so they could do it. I've been to Ibeather. Yeah, you've done Ibiza, yeah. I've done that, yeah,

I went an 1830 holiday there in the 90s. I did a load of E. went to clubbing basically in San Antonio. They were like worst, the most built-up brickler. Did you have a nice time? Had a fucking great time, yeah, it was excellent. You basically can recover on like some beach. You get like a boat out to some beach,

which is like a little bit less busy and all that sort of stuff. It's a beautiful place. We should probably just do the legend, the Ibiza legend, like of Danny Rampling and Paul Okunfold and his mates going to Ibiza in 1987 on a holiday and then go into it's amnesia, isn't it? Yeah, DJ Alfredo playing balleric beats and all this sort of stuff. And then they brought it back and started Schum and all of these famous clubs in 88.

Yeah, that's it. Well, that is the story. But I would say, I mean, from my point of view, they sort of, I mean, I know that Alfredo, who was this kind of legendary DJ, who was already kind of middle-aged by the 80s, I think, when these people started going over, Alfredo D's days at this club called Amnesia like he saw himself in the tradition of David Mancuso in the loft like he saw himself as trying to create

this really egalitarian kind of community and it had this very kind of spiritual hippie vibe and he famously played this kind of very eclectic music it was like the water boys you know that water boys song the whole of the moon was like supposed to be it was like the last track of amnesia like for years and years and then but what they're And then what they created in Britain wasn't really like that.

What they created in Britain revolved around a much narrower sound. Like it was acid house for about 18 months. And then it was what came to be known. I mean, it wasn't really, you know, Balearic has come to be this term more recently that people use for styles of dance music, which is seen as sort of associated with that amnesia tradition. So it's relatively slow, like quite trippy.

It's like music, like you might enjoy listening to you while you're watching a sunset and dancing on a bit. beach but but what people like oakenfold and rambling popularized was much more you know what came to be understood as sort of commercial rave and it also it became you know very cleaky and it wasn't really very hippy and it wasn't very politicized at all there was always this kind of tension as i understand it between a kind of ibeather culture which understood itself as sort of countercultural and really having its roots in this sort of the most actually having its roots in the moment of the end of the fascist regime, the Francoist regime in Spain, the late 70s, and then this British

iteration version of it, which really had more to do with package holiday culture, and a very, a very kind of commercial and really kind of aspirational version of rave culture, actually, whereby, you know, going to Ibiza was part of, you know, being able to go on package holidays to Ibiza was a thing that you got in return for participating in the kind of Thatcherite economic boom and are getting rewarded for that. There's always a tension, isn't there, between that? Because basically what happens when they come back and they start shoom and all that? And then there's sort of like dynamic takes off.

And in 1980, they go in 1987 and 1988, it's called the Second Summer of Love, etc. Well, yeah, the story is they get the idea for like having playing, basically play, for playing like house music and acid house at a club where people can take ecstasy. This guy, Danny Rampling and Paul Okentfeld. And then, and they start this club night. in a sports centre somewhere in London called Shume where Danny Rumpling

is playing mostly Acid House and other kind of Beleric records and it becomes really fashionable and loads of and loads of kind of people from the music scene in London like want to go to it. It becomes really trendy and it acquies this reputation as the sort of year zero

of British club culture but I'm going to say that that story has does as you know, it falsifies as much as it elucidase. The problem with that story is always that it completely ignores the fact there was already a well-established British dance culture at the time in London and Manchester that really revolved around the rare groove scene that was much more black, had a lot more jazz in it, and that people getting into...

Also a house as well in Manchester. Yeah, there was house in Manchester Hacienda. Again, that's the story everyone knows. The story that isn't as well documented is people were kind of, you know, people were putting on kind of house music parties in Moss Side. Yeah, no, that's what I was referring to. Yeah, before they were playing it in the Hacienda, you know. So there was all, there was this kind of black.

Before they were playing it at Shume as well, basically, or before they were playing right. So there was this, you know, there was this heavily kind of black and quite a lot of Asian people as well, you know, involvement in what was called the rare groove scene. It was people coming out of rare groove, really. I mean, the thing about the, the Abitha myth, The reason that becomes so important in the kind of official story of British dance culture in the 90s is because it's really about, like, white men who had previously been made only really into rock music

is about how they got into, like, rave and dance music. And so Shume becomes a big deal, because there's all these people, you were like in indie bands who go to Shume. And so it becomes like okay. It becomes things okay for, like, music journalists, the NME and the Melody Maker to acknowledge, is that this like might not just be completely mindless this sort of dance music.

So this is partly why I'm so uptight about it because I think it's that whole, that whole kind of narration, that kind of Ibitha, Schum, sort of story. It doesn't kind of, it also ignores the fact that people already, you know, they were already, people were taking ecstasy to electronic music

in gay clubs in London, like long before Schum, but they didn't, but it's because it was mostly straight. It was these straight white guys. Went to Ibtha. had a really good time and then wanted to recreate that at home. That gets turned into the story of British dance music

in a way that leaves out the kind of black-dominated warehouse party scene of the early to mid-80s and it leaves out the importance of the gay club scene as well. Speaking that as a white man who went to Ibiza, and went to a lot of ecstasy, in all of those waves, we don't really have them anymore, but in all of those waves, there are these moments where it gets, Things get simplified, basically, and the mass media gets involved. But there are also moments in which you get this huge expansion of the numbers of people involved in that scene. And then following that, you get a new wave of creativity, basically.

You don't get like the free party scene without that expansion, I don't think. Well, listeners will be disappointed to know, even though he set it up so beautifully, that Jeremy Gilbert will not be choosing going to Ibiza by the Venga Boys as his musical choice for, for this episode. Let's force him to sing it. All right, now listen, it's not all fun and games at the beach. The beach isn't just sunshine surf. It isn't just blissing out and staring in the Pacific.

It isn't just having fun with your friends or your family. The beat is a liminal space. It's a space where the land meets the sea, and the sea can be dangerous. The sea can overwhelm you. The sea can be icy cold. The sea can be a place of loss as well as a place of recovery. Standing on the beach isn't just something to do in your swimming trunks

with the sun kissing your golden skin. Standing on the beach is also something people often do at times of hardship, times when they need to isolate themselves or try to find themselves. The beach is, as we keep saying, a liminal space. It can be a space of recovery. It can be a place where you go to get away from things. It can be a place of great danger. And that's why we are going to hear a track today from a band

that is not at all about, you know, having a good time, blissing out, being happy. We're going to hear a track by Husker Do. Husker Doe, I don't think we've ever played on the show before, but they are, I think today they are often, again, they're often unjustly neglected in kind of musical. histories because I think they are one of those bands you can point to and say given how many other bands wouldn't have sounded the way they did without Husker do

sounding the way they did they are really as influential as pretty much any other band you can think of I mean really and I mean really like genuinely this was a view adopted by people like like critic Simon Frith a great British kind of rock academic the guy who was the judge of the Mercury Music Prize for many years, not the judge, but like the sort of head of the judges. Frith, I remember, wrote some kind of academic essay in about the mid-80s saying he thought Husker Do were like the sort of most important rock band in the world at that time. Who are Husker D? They're a punk band, American punk band from Minnesota.

The name Husker do, what does it mean? It's a Norwegian phrase, meaning do you remember? And, you know, it's partly an allusion to the fact that Minnesota has this, large kind of Norwegian heritage population. That's one reason. It's one of the most left wing parts of the United States. Husker do, really important band. They go from being kind of quite intense,

like fast, loud, hardcore band at the end of the 70s to playing this gradually more melodic, very kind of lyrically articulate, quite passionate, iteration of punk stroke alt-rock, going into the 1980s. And they end up being, they're a hugely influential source for pretty much all of the kind of heavy and alternative rock that comes after them. There's a lot of debate around where, where does the term emo comes from? It comes, originally the term emo is supposed to refer to emotional punk or emotional hardcore.

And it's bands like Right of Spring from Washington that get credited with being like somehow the first emo band. I've got to be honest, I think they and their fans have like put a lot of effort into editing. the relevant Wikipedia articles in order to maintain that reputation because when I was a fancy in reading punk, sort of a narco-punk fellow traveller in the 80s, whenever anybody used the phrase emotional punk or emotional hardcore, the first band they would mention wasn't right of spring, it wasn't this other band Embrace that seems to get mentioned all the time these days,

it was most definitely Husker Do. This is a track from their classic, their seminal double album from 1984, Zen arcade. And the song is a song about standing by the sea, not being very happy on the beach. It's called Standing by the Sea. So another interesting thing to talk about or a kind of different frame that we could approach this

is thinking about different cultures around the beach. And so one of them, I think, which would be interesting, to get into is what could be called the medicalization of the sea. So in the Victorian period, especially, you know, definitely before that and after that, and there will be different cultures around the world. But if we look at the Victorian period in the UK, most specifically, this idea of like bathing in the sea and the sea air being associated with some kind of cure, like the coastal cures, and in a way which turns the beach into kind of a sense of, health technology, where nature in a sense you could think of it as kind of is repackaged

as some kind of regulation of the body. So that's one way to understand how the beach perhaps was thought of over history, perhaps predating or, you know, alongside this idea of the beach as kind of leisure and escape, which we talked about in the last section. Basically, the prescription was that it would be the sea air, would it be good for the miasmas, Blow them away. Also, a swim in the sea was like really good as a cure. Like leprosy and like basically skin diseases, I think they were. Doctors was also prescribed people drinking sea water.

I don't recommend that anymore. Be your listeners in the UK. One of the things that wasn't fashionable for a long time was like soaking up the sun, basically. And it's, you know, the obvious answer for why that was, is that having a tan was basically associated with working in the fields. And so, you know, having pale skin was associated. with wealth, etc. And then there's a story which might be apocryphal of the fashion designer Coco Chanel

getting sunburn at the French Riviera in the 1920s by accident and then making tan skin really fashionable, basically. And then you see this process of like women's bathing suits getting skimpier and skimpier. Because I think in like Victorian times they would wear more or less sort of like full body bathing suits and there'd be these beach hats on wheels, what were they called, which got wheeled into the sea and all that sort of stuff, whereas apparently men bathed nude at that point. Yes, that's all true.

I only know the Coco Chanel story, and I've always wondered if it's actually true, but I think it's symbolic whether it's true or not. I mean, it definitely is the case that within really across much of Europe, or at least Western Europe, tanning becomes fashionable as the French Riviera, the French Mediterranean coast, becomes like the most fashionable resort.

I mean, actually, that's true to an extent, but it's not, I mean, the French Riviera was already really popular with the Victorians. Like, it becomes really popular by the end of the 19th century. So something about the way people relate to it does change. I think it's partly to do with it actually becoming gradually more accessible to the sort of middle classes. Like, because you've already got,

there's places like Montaun on the French coast, that I've already got all this kind of continuous history of basically English. aristocrats, like holidaying there, going back to Victorian times. But then I think what's happening between the wars is obviously like working class people can't dream of going to places like that yet. But the sort of middle classes is kind of up and coming and aspirational middle classes can.

So it becomes gradually having a tan becomes a way of showing that you've been able to afford this Mediterranean holiday in a way. So for people whose class status is more ambiguous than those of the kind of actual aristocratic elite. And I think it's at that point that the tan starts to really become fashionable. And Coco Chanel, of course, as a figure, she completely embodies that whole process. Coco Chanel embodies the entire historical process,

but whereby fashion moves from being something that only really exists for the aristocracy to something that high fashion becomes available to, the more, the wealthier and upwardly mobile sections of the middle classes and becomes a way in which people demonstrate their membership of those upwardly mobile social groups and Chanel, I mean, Chanel's entire, I mean, Chanel is just the person who on a global scale basically has the idea that that could happen and that it makes it happen.

Sure, sure, but the exposure of skin for women that, you know, the association of like the tan with, you know, wealth or holidaying or leisure time, etc., comes after the development of society in a direction where women are allowed to expose their skin in the first place. Yeah, for sure. One predates the other. I mean, technically in the night, what Chanel's designs do is actually return to a more conservative kind of longer line in female fashion compared to the 1920s, but still in the 1920s and 30s, you were still wearing stockings, right, at least on your legs. So the idea of having that skin bare to be tanned was definitely not something that people were trying to do. But I don't think, you know, it's probably not as black and white as that as well.

but we can generally go back to that point, which you made in the beginning, which is that in general, the association of darker skin with outside work, effectively peasantry, is something that over history, like people, you know, people tried to stay away from because of what it said about your class. And then the bikini becomes a thing in the 50s, doesn't it? It's 46. 46 it gets invented, actually. Because it's called bikini, because it was launched four days after the test atomic bomb in the bikini atoll. I don't know why there's a relationship there, but that's why I know it's 46.

As a fashion item, the bikini kind of goes alongside the new look dress, doesn't it? And you're right, the new look after the war is all about showing you're no longer in a period of austerity. So you've got all these, you can afford loads of fabric. So there's these long dresses and stuff. But at the beach, women are then supposed to wear these skimpy little bikinis. And I've always thought it is sort of shocking, really. It is sort of shocking how rapidly that changes. Because indeed, like the flappers in the 20s are wearing these relatively short dresses.

They're relatively sort of revealing. But at the beach, they're basically wearing clothes that look pretty much the same. This is all true, but also, you know, in the Roman and Greek times, there were women wearing two-piece swimwear, right? So it's a very specific historical line that we're, you know, we were talking about when you come to the Victorians. where, you know, modesty is, there's an obsession with modesty and women shouldn't be, you know, showing their ankles in public, etc. So, so, and there is an argument that's made about war time rationing, apparently in terms of like that relation to the bikini. But, but I think in general, the exposure of women's skin, like, that's a, that's a whole set of anthropological and

political economy in itself, right? Yeah, that's true. That's all, that's all true. I mean, the other thing about beach culture is that British beach culture, have already sort of talked about the resorts, etc. And I do think it is because the sea around Britain is a lot colder than it is down in the med. And so you don't go in the sea for that long. So you develop these, you know, places like Blackpool, you develop all this other cultural stuff. And like, you know, the coast has been this big inventor of entertainments.

Bingo, lettered rock and the helter-skelter were all invented in Morecambe. Yeah, that's really interesting. So Helter-skelter, like the curly, the curvy slide that goes around a column. I love a helter-skelter. I absolutely love it. I absolutely love Helter Skelder. It's one of my favourite things to do. Because that's also a thing, isn't it?

Because both in Britain and in other countries, you know, obviously the amusement part of the fun fair becomes associated with the seaside. And it is, you're right. It is because you've taken the kids there on holiday. But like often the beach itself, it isn't really a thing to do. So you need to generate these new technologies of entertainment.

And also the music hall, like the music hall in Britain is a social historically with these very densely populated urban centres like London first, but then it becomes associated with the seaside. And variety, which I love, I love as an art form. I love that. That's like all of that kind of cabaret-style stuff I absolutely love. And I also associate it partly, not just with some capital cities, but with the seaside.

Yeah, yeah, well, it does. Well, this is Keir's point, actually. I think Keyes' sort of analytical point has a heuristic for this stuff is really useful, that exactly, the beaches become the place, especially working class people go on holiday for about 100 years in Britain from the late 19th century to the late 20th century but most of the time

you know the actual beach experience as such is fundamentally disappointing so they have to invent all these things and it's also the place where amusement arcades are really developed in Britain I love the mechanical arcades like I absolutely love that it reminds me of my childhood like putting the one piece in

which you can still do and I do occasionally like every year and go to a seaside town just so I can put, you know, pence in the arcade and see if I'm going to win a thousand of them, which you never do, of course, but it's still fun. Fish and chips is also, they have a bit of the beach. I know it doesn't get invented at the seaside. It's like Jewish immigrants, isn't it, basically? In London, I think it gets invented.

But like, it's really associated with the seaside. And I just want to raise one other thing, which is very British, which is the naughty postcard, the naughty seaside postcard, which doesn't really exist anymore, sort of risque. postcards, but were massive in like the 30s to 50s. And I think that again, it indicates the sort of seeing the beaches are like the place of freedom, basically, the place where buttoned down Britain, you can relax the, the mores a little bit. Well, sexist freedom. I tried to shut down the bikini conversation and now you've brought it back with naughty postcards. I'm not, I'm not advocating for naughty postcards, although I've got a fine connection myself.

I think, again, you've got to explain to people who don't know what you're talking. about more detail, like what is a naughty postcard? Go watch a carry-on film. Well, it is a carry-on film and cardboard form, yes, it's true. Yeah, so, yeah, they became huge in the 1930s and through to the 50s, basically, and they were sort of postcards with usually sexist jokes on, or risque jokes, you put it that way, basically, and like little cartoons of like usually skimply dressed women in bikinis

or fat mother-in-laws, the two staples of the naughty postcard and the carry-on film, of course. I mean, they're really interesting because they sort of indicate this sort of like relaxation of rules at the seaside, you know, a place of freedom. Ritual of licence. Exactly. There was some academic literature from the 80s. There was quite celebratory about the seaside postcard,

British seaside culture, the carry-on films, as all manifesting examples of what Bakhteen calls the carnivalesque, the idea that these are the... These are the zones of culture in which a kind of freedom is possible. It's not possible in normal everyday life in which there's a degree of role reversal between those with authority and those without it. Although, as Nardia has indicated, the sexual politics are never particularly subversive in any of those cultural contexts.

But it definitely does come to be seen as a kind of absolute sight of for the expression of proletarian vulgarity in a way that is unashamed, that has no shame about about itself. And it does constitute a sort of vernacular culture, which just doesn't really have any relationship to a kind of high culture or a elite culture. It's not even really concerned with subverting it. It's just existing outside of it. And it was one of the things, like the development of that culture was one of the things that people like Raymond Williams and Richard Hogger were kind of noticing in the mid-20th century as marking the kind of emergence of a kind of distinctive sort of proletarian culture. Of course, it was also, they were partly, they were

reacting to and dealing with the fact that people like F.R. Levis and his wife, Queen, Eelivis, who were the most influential figures in English literary scholarship in the mid-20th century, were horrified by things like this. And they saw all this as evidence that actually you absolutely

had to have a kind of Mandarin elite in Sconson institutions like Oxford and Cambridge, telling the rest of the country what constituted authentic culture, because otherwise everything was going to degenerate into a world of seaside postcards. and an endless vulcarity. And now that I'm saying it out loud,

I realize they were actually right. And we probably... I disagree. I think proletarian vulgarity is a great name for a newspaper. I know, but I'm also... We're partly describing kind of what's wrong, you know, sort of Instagram culture in a way.

Yeah, true, true, nice, nice analogy. I like it. Yeah, the reason why Raymond Williams invented cultural studies was because it wasn't an adequate response. to that stuff, either to say, yeah, it's all great, people like it, or to say it's all terrible, they should all just be reading Milton. But neither of those are adequate responses to that situation. That's why he and Hoggart invented cultural studies.

Seen as we've just mentioned the way that their nuclear age crept into pop culture and from pop culture into beach culture, I think we should play something by the B-52s. The B-52s are an old rock band from Athens, Georgia, formed in 1976. and they're a band of a schick and I always like a band of a stick. Their schick is sort of a campy, kitschy mix of loads of elements from 1950s

and 1960s pop culture but perhaps of a heavy leaning on surf rock prominent surf rock guitar through most of their songs etc. But that is all mixed up with a sort of new wave avant-garde art sort of aesthetic and behind it is like funk style

sort of dance music. We put it that way, perhaps. The name B-52s come from a particular type of haircut, a type of 1950s beehive haircut, which the two female singers in the band bore for a long, long time in the early days for the band. A beehive is where you pile their hair on top of your head, so I think of Marge Simpson from the Simpson, something like that. A B-52 haircut is a version of that where, and it's called a B-52,

because the cone on top of your head resembles the nose cone of the B-52 aircraft, which was really well known at the time. It was like one of these big, huge, heavy bombers whose primary role was to carry nuclear weapons. We should play the B-52's first single Rock Lobster, which was originally released in 1978, I think so, like 2000 copies or something like that, and then it was released again in altered form. the year later to accompany the B-52's first album, epitomously named the B-52s.

The song's lyrics describe a beach party. Some of the verses list a whole series of like real and imagined marine animals, dogfish, catfish, a sea robin, piranha, a narwhal, a bikini whale. How relevant. The chorus goes something like this. We were at the beach. Everybody had matching towels. somebody went under the dock and there they saw a rock.

It wasn't a rock. It was a rock. Lobster. Very appropriate for an episode on the beach. One final tip bit. Apparently, John Lennon was inspired to start recording music again after a long hiatus in 1980. After hearing rock lobster and liking it so much. Is that true or not?

Who knows? I mean, it's worth thinking about some other things in terms of those histories of the beach as the liminal space. Sort of contemporaneous with the emergence of the bikini culture, sort of beach culture of the 50s, the post-war period, is the emergence of surf culture. Is the emergence of surf culture? A surf culture has this really kind of extraordinary history. Basically, it's what happens when this Hawaiian practice of surfing, like riding surf. which has this long, like, traditional status within Indigenous Polynesian cultures and has this sort of deeply spiritual connotations.

It gets kind of borrowed by American and Australian people who, partly, you know, they are people who are kind of living, you know, they're living on the Pacific Coast, actually, in different countries, even on completely different continents. And they're becoming aware of a particular way of relating to the fact of living on the Pacific coast. It gets quite intensified by the fact that, some American GIs, and I think maybe some Australian told us, I'm not sure actually end up, you know, they participate in the Pacific Theatre of War doing World War II

and some of them spend some time consequently in the Hawaiian Islands and they get exposed to it. And then by the 50s it's already acquiring in California, it's acquiring this kind of really complicated status surf culture because it has, again, it's a bit like we were saying about Ibiza actually. There are aspects of, surf culture which are just kind of exemplifying a kind of American sort of jock culture, a kind of celebration of a kind of macho, athleticism.

It's not totally disconnected from the presence of military, you know, big military culture in California. It's incredibly kind of sexist, you know, it's about boys doing this heroic things on surfboards and girls wearing bikinis, being very passive relationship to it. But it also does always have this bohemian element as well. lots of people come out of surf, you know, go from being like surfers, to being beatniks, to being hippies, to like being, you know, to living on ashrums and getting into yoga and LSD and stuff. So it's sort of fascinating, I think, formation. One of the really prominent examples of the latter is the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, with this group of surfers from Laguna Beach, basically, who are really into LSD. And he needs to talk about taking acid and surfing as seeing Christ in the curl and that sort of.

stuff and that basically they have this mission thinking that like basically they need to produce a load of LSD and they turn the world on and that's the way to world peace etc and they produce and distribute millions of millions of times of orange sunshine as the famous was isn't it basically?

It's such an amazing story, the story of the Brotherhood. There were this street gang they were a street gang like you weren't even into surfing I think when they were initially and the story is they went and robbed

to some Hollywood producers house and like a holdup and they stole from him a load of money and they stole from him a load of LSD which they didn't even barely know what it was at the time and they took a load of the acid and had this massive trip and like just became completely different people

and they went and apparently they went and returned to the acid and like apologised for robbing the guy and decided that they were I think they were going to get more into surfing and they were going to and also get into spreading the gospel of LSD around the world world. And they really, it was kind of, it's really kind of incredible story. It's really kind of cinematic. It's kind of, it's amazing no one's made a TV show or movie about it yet. As well as talking about

some of the classic examples of surf music today, I want to trace a little bit of that origin, of fascination with the idea of being at the beach, even living like mainly on the beach, that has run through elements of modern music culture, right. back to the late 19th century, which then has its manifestations in sort of balleric music and music, sort of dance music, inspired by some idea of the Pacific. So first I want to talk about the fact that, well, it's very fascinating to observe that in the late 20s, in the very beginning of the recording music industry, there's a huge enthusiasm, especially in the States for Hawaiian music or music, which is supposed to.

supposedly Hawaiian, which is characterised by this very distinctive slide steel string guitar sound. The American historian Michael Denning actually has a whole very interesting book called Nois Uprising, which is partly about why in this early phase of the recorded music industry, there's his fascination with music from islands, music from the tropics, music from Polynesia. If we're thinking about the Hawaiian guitar in particular, that has an interesting history, the invention of the slide guitar technique that becomes associated with Hawaiian guitar is attributed to a guy called Joseph Kekuku

actually his full indigenous name is much longer and very hard to pronounce. A Hawaiian guy who was born, I think, in what was the Hawaiian kingdom in the 1870s before its annexation by the United States, eventually emigrated, emigrated to continental United States. And he's credited with having invented the slide guitar technique

for initially just playing with a Spanish guitar with a sort of metal bolt. It's a technique which obviously captured people's imaginations. And I think may have been partially responsible for 10 or 15 years later the development of the first actual steel string guitars in the early 20th century. guitars with actually steel strings don't really become a thing until the beginning of the 20th century and of course you can only eventually get an electrified guitar using a magnetic pickup because you've got steel strings it's very interesting thinking about this history the guitar obviously a very important instrument in 20th century popular music probably the most important one guitar can be quite a

frustrating instrument to play it has strings but it's technically regarded as a percussion instrument because you pluck the strings, you know, the way a harpsichord strings are plucked, not the way a piano's strings are hit with a hammer. And this means that, you know, you can't, the way the guitar is played, you can't play as many notes as one time as you can on a keyboard instrument. You can't get the kind of glissandos, kind of smooth runs, up and down the pitch scale that you can on an instrument, lots of instruments from the violin to the saxophone.

But the fact that you can, you know, you can sort of play a tune and keep a round. rhythm quite well, the fact that it's very portable, the fact that it's quite flexible in terms of how you play it, you can pick out a melody, you can strum chords, the fact that guitars are generally quite cheap compared to other instruments has all meant that, you know, it's become this kind of versatile, ubiquitous instrument of the 20th century, and still very popular today. But it's also that sense of sort of frustration and has often led people to experiment with new techniques, with new ways. of using the instrument.

And of course, the slide guitar is in some ways that the most radical innovation because that lets you use to slide up and down notes like you can on something like a violin. In a way, which really does expand the possibilities of the instrument. So slide guitar, for example, has become an instrument that's used in Indian classical music in a way you just can't play.

You can't play Indian classical music on a conventional guitar. And it's all traced back to this guy who could, Kuku, but the people who really popularized the sound of the slide guitar as associated with Hawaiian music was a pair of musicians, a Hawaiian guy called

Frank Ferreira. Frank Ferreira that's F-E-R-E-R-A and his musical partner, an Italian-American guy called Antonio Franciini and they have

great success as recording artists. in the late 1920s in particular, playing this kind of music. And I think we should hear a classic bit of this Hawaiian guitar music by Ferrer and Franchini. This is actually, this is from 1920. This isn't even the late 20s. It's recorded 8th of March 1920.

And this is called Wild Flower. I mean, surf music really, surf music, it comes out of people playing instrumental, rock music is kind of influenced by country. It's got some influence actually of sort of Mexican music, I think, as well. But it develops into this very recognizable sound in the early 60s. And it really has a... I mean, there's really one year when it's a big thing.

And the Beach Boys become these massive starts in that same year. This is 1963. It's really interesting to think about what's going on there musically and culturally. I mean, basically, the rock and roll boom has kind of crested. I think Elvis is in the army at this point or maybe, no, he went and served in Korea, didn't he? But Elvis has kind of stopped being a really massive figure. The Beatles have started to record and release records,

but they haven't, they're about to become, like the global superstars they become, but not quite in the world of kind of black American music. The most interesting that's happening, really, is the most interesting thing happening is the development of soul. And so guitar music have done. Guitar music coming out of rock and roll is in a little bit of a lull. It's a little bit kind of uninteresting.

People aren't quite sure what to do with it now. Black people have kind of lost interest in it. And so you get this idea of the surfing lifestyle from California, suddenly representing what seems to be a new frontier of global consumer capitalism, a new frontier of super leisure, a new world of extremely fit, extremely attractive people, living this incredibly luxurious lifestyle with their big cars, driving down the freeways, living near the beach with this fantastic weather. And it's, yeah, in many ways it's quite apolitical.

Of course, the other thing that's happening in popular music at that time is the popularisation of folk music and protest music. So if you're a kind of politicised person really concerned about things like nuclear war, the Cold War, social injustice. Well, you're probably on the other side of the United States, who you're in London, you're in a coffee shop, listening to folk music, singing folk music. In some ways, surf music is the sort of antithesis of this.

And yet it will itself germinate a kind of countercultural sensibility, as we'll see on the show. But let's hear a couple of examples. Everyone will know it, but it's really interesting to think about what's going on with this record. The Surfare's Wipe Out. Yeah, of course, a wipe out is that's supposed to be surface slang. That's what happens when you, I think you fall off your board, you get smothered by a wave, something like that.

It's interesting how kind of rhythmic and what kind of, you know, rhythmic attack there is to that song. You can kind of hear me anticipating in a way, like the turn to, you know, rhythmic funk and kind of funk rock in the early 70s, almost. And then another song which is kind of interesting for its slightly kind of Latin influences. is not a song, a track, an instrumental track, is one that people will know, because it's appeared in, you know, it's appeared in films in particular, it's a Dick Dale and the Deltones,

Miserie Loo, also from 1963. One of the other things we should say about British seaside culture, actually, is that like those seaside resorts have long been associated. of like seediness, not just in the sort of like carry-on side, but like seediness and like the grimacides of life. So the film Brighton Beach, for instance, is an absolute classic of that. I won't talk about that film. And the book by Graham Green, you know, shows Brighton as like this

hotbed of crime and seediness and all this sort of stuff. Today, basically, the seaside town is mostly associated, not Brighton actually. Brighton's probably a success story in this, but most of seaside towns are sort of like associated with like declining grandeur and basically decline and you know basically they become really quite poor areas in most parts of britain so mr stats earlier on told me that neighborhoods on the coast so like coastal towns etc and 42% more likely to be in the bottom 10% of most deprived areas so that they tend to be more deprived crime rates are 12% higher than in other areas. Residents are 15% more vulnerable to premature death, etc.

So it's like why? Why have they entered this such a huge decline? Partly it's to do with some we mentioned before, which is old people going to the coast, etc. So like seaside towns have much older populations. Cities tend to be much younger than periobin areas and periobin areas tend to be more much younger than rural areas and coastal areas tend to be more.

to be the oldest of all, basically, with loads of retired people, and what goes along with retired people is a need for care. So the work that's available in the seaside towns, either tourism or care work primarily. Tourist work tends to be precarious, it tends to be seasonal. Care work also low-paid and precarious, these sorts of things. So unemployment is a big thing in these sorts of areas, which is part of the reason for the decline.

The other reason for the decline, of course, is basically the decline of British tourism, brought about by package holidays, package holidays and then cheap flights, etc. abroad. One of the other thing that goes along with seaside towns is they're full of fucking fascists. No, I mean, it's got, they've, seaside towns tend to be voting reform, basically. They tend to be much more right wing than the most right wing areas of the country, actually. They're not full of fucking fash.

That is not fair to any listeners or any people that are living by in seaside towns, that are not receiving the kind of investment that they should be by central government. and let's just say that. Okay, there's a couple of things to say. I mean, one is, yeah, that general picture of decline has been part of the picture of the British seaside town since the 70s. And so it has produced this sense of them being among those left behind areas. And the contrast with, you know, the British Rust Bell, the Red War,

the post-industrial areas is that what's declined in the seaside towns is what was mostly a sort of petty bourgeois economy, mostly an economy of like small businesses to begin with. that has left people, and now people are very poor, but what there isn't is a history of unionisation, a history of industrial struggle, a history of socialism, which still,

which in a lot of places is still able to act as a kind of bulwark against the too much rise of the far right. So that's the thing that's happening. But of course, it's also the case that in very recent years, like a few seaside towns, most obviously Brighton, but also Margate and most notably recently Hastings

on the south coast, they have become playing. to which people priced out of London have migrated to form families. And actually, they're quite left-wing. So Hastings was in the recent council elections, the recent local elections, it was Hastings that was the big surprise with the Green Party winning the council. It was Hastings and my London Borough of Waltham Forest.

And London Borough of Orthome Forest was kind of surprised everyone, but it was immediately not surprising as soon as everybody thought about it for a moment. Whereas Hastings has really kind of, is it not, surprising if you're familiar with the demographic changes that have been taking place in Hastings, which basically people who can't afford to live in Brighton have moved one town along the coast of Hastings. But again, part of the conditions actually even for Hastings, becoming a green centre is the fact that, well, now it's got all these sort of bohemians and kind of young professionals and people who are the sort of, and graduate and a lot of artists as well.

It's a metropolitan elite moving out since the pandemic, you know. Yeah, but it's not just the pandemic. It's people who can't afford to stay in London. They can't afford to be in London. For sure. For sure, for sure. It's the same in Norwich. That's also why Norwich has gone completely green.

But I mean, it's the working from home culture as well, right? So that's allowed for a lot of people to be able to move out. But that big green shift is partly happening in places that don't, again, there isn't a kind of tradition of industrial socialism. So green politics becomes the manifestation of a kind of left, of a progressive leftism, like more easily in these places where, like where there just isn't really there hasn't ever really been much of an organised left and that and that is something that characterises the seaside towns like historically i think that are places

even in play in the northwest actually blackpool i think is sort blackpool was historically a bit poorer and labour but like southboard was historically this like tory island this Tory stronghold because it was a place where you know there were loads of people there were loads of kind of affluent hotel owners and kind of bed and breakfast proprieties and stuff who are really sort of classically petty bourgeois even though most of their clientele were actually kind of working class people from the industrial regions and and Liverpool yeah it's a good point the other thing we should say about like the coast at the moment particularly coastal towns is it's the epicenter of like the big moral panic of our time

which is around small boats basically which is like migrants arriving cross english channel in particular in like inflatable dinghies, etc. Quite a few of them not making it as well at the same time. The UK is not everybody's final destination necessarily. And there are different routes for the kind of this small boats of people escaping, you know, war and persecution, etc. And like Italy and Spain and the Greek islands are getting a huge amount of migrants as well. And migration has gone down in the UK generally anyway, net migration.

I just wanted to situate it in that before we speak, specifically about the UK context in terms of small boats. Like we could tie this to loads of stuff we've been saying about why this is such a big picture. I mean, part of it is like it adds to an idea of like this country is an island country that's been invaded on its beaches, etc, etc. But I also think it is to do with like the imaginary of carefreness that is associated with like the beach or the coasts in the UK. And all of a sudden the world's problems, which we can block out for a little.

little bit, like, emerge there, basically. All you're seeing as, like, the result of, like, war and poverty and these sorts of things. Do you know what I mean? Suddenly appearing and intruding into the imaginary of the British beach. Don't know, overdo it, but, like, I think that plays something, a role in it. Yeah, I think you're right. Yes, I think that's true. I mean, because the beach is supposed to be this place of complete care-free freedom, all this place of serenity and retirement. And especially now that, as we keep saying, the beaches have become really the coastal towns have become places people retire to. The idea that they should be these places of absolutely placid serenity,

like it's really kind of interrupted, it's threatened by this imaginary, like these dark people, these dark reminders. But also dead children, like we've seen those pictures of like there are some really, you know, really shocking and disturbing imagery of that bring it home. As in you've got people crossing in ridiculous like vehicles effectively. like these boats escaping terrible horrors. And, you know, I mean, the largest percentage of people, as I understand it, are like Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Eritrea, this is all war, like people escaping war.

Syria, yeah. Syria, yeah. Yeah, it's true. It's a good point. It's a really good point, actually, yeah. Yeah, just on the body's bit, like 84 people died, of migrants died trying to cross a channel in 2024, I'm going to figure for 2025. That is dwarfed by the amount of people who die in the Mediterranean,

and tried across the Mediterranean, you know, it's tens of thousands, basically. To bring it back to some sort of political issues and political economy, well, obviously what we were just talking about is political as well as cultural. But, of course, one reason, as I said earlier, the beach is so important in British culture is because we've got terrible laws in England and Wales around access to land. But beaches in Britain, quite unusually, it's not like this in a lot of other countries,

they're all technically owned by the crown, which means they're technically owned by the king, or they're sort of owned by the country. I mean, what it even means that they're part of the crown estate is very complicated, but it does mean that everybody has free access to them. Growing up, like a lot on the coast, you didn't really think about, yeah, you can just go on the beach.

You can just basically walk around the whole country, like around the coast if you want to. Like, no one's going to stop you. You just sort of take it for granted. But I remember it was a real shock the first time I was ever in a place in a different country, there was a private beach. There's like, you're walking along the beach and then suddenly there's a fence and you can't

go through the fence. I was completely freaked out. Like, what is, what even is this? And that is a unique, that is a kind, well, it's not unique, but that is an unusual feature of British culture, British political culture and land culture. And of course, that's one reason the beach ends up playing this really important role in British leisure culture, isn't it? Yeah, no, absolutely.

I mean, there are, there are private beaches in the UK, but like they're not, they're not as extensive. I think the Crown Estate controls like 50% of the foreshore in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. I think it's bigger in Scotland, but it's a little bit more complicated because it's technically under the ownership of like the of a bit of the Scottish government, basically. The National Trust owns quite a bit of foreshore as well. I think it's a really good argument that like, yeah, there's this sort of like quirk of inequality in the UK, i.e. like the crowd owns it, owns all of this land. It basically means that we have access to it. Yeah, and it's become more of an issue that because, like, the intertidal zone has become more of

a sort of productive area for shellfish farms, etc. Even seaweed farms, etc. A bit further out there's sort of like salmon fishing and all that sort of stuff. For example, in Brazil, by law, all beaches are completely free and have public access. So, like, you are not allowed to fence off the sand or charge entry, even if you have a private resort, right? So even if there's a private resort and there are very many elite private resorts in Brazil, you cannot stop other people from accessing that bit of beach, right? And that is like, that's the kind of, that's a national legislation. And I think that's really interesting and really important and is hugely contrasted to somewhere like Egypt, which is, which has experienced an intense amount of enclosure of

access to the sea, both the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, over the last 30 years. I mean, so much of it is enclosed. You cannot get near the beach unless you are part of, you know, a private set of chalets or whatever or a hotel that you're staying at. You know, it's completely different in terms of how the general public's able to access the sea, unless the sea is somewhere like, is next to a city like Alexandria, which is on the sea, in which case it is not included. So in Scotland there's an automatic right to access the foreshore, but there's no right in the UK. It just happens that a lot of the foreshores owned by charities or by most of it by the Crown Estate. So there's a sort of presumption of access, basically.

Well, we've talked about house music, dance music from Manchester, and I've talked about the Pacific, and I've talked today about California. I want to play a track for us which brings all of those themes together. I want to play Hawk, that's Hawk, H-A-W-K-E, Pacific Coast Highway, number one. The Pacific Coast Highway is famously

the highway that runs down the Pacific Coast from north to south in California. Hawk is one of the names used by this recording artist who's actual, I actually don't know, is his actual name because the name he often goes by as a DJ and producer

is Gavin Hard Kiss. Hard Kiss was the name adopted by this group or I think there were three of them originally. There was Gavin Hard Kiss, Scott Hard Kiss. I'm very sorry everyone. I can't remember the other one. And I think Scott Hard Kiss died

a couple of years ago. There were a group of producers and DJs really active in the California rave scene in the early 90s and their music has a very distinctive set of influences. They draw quite a lot on kind of hip-hop beats, but synthesise them with these sort of balleric bliss out chords and samples a lot of the time to produce a really kind of distinctive

and really compelling sound. I remember that, you know, they became like the favourite music for me to play at house parties when I was putting on a lot of house parties in the, like in the mid-90s. They seem to be making this music that was psychedelic, that was very kind of pleasant, It was kind of accessible for anyone to dance to but had more depth than the ordinary kind of rave or trance and we really sort of loved it. Anyway, it's a great truck, a great bit of

mesmerizing early 90s kind of, you know, psychedelic house. Pacific Coast Highway number one. The other political aspects to the beach, I suppose, I mean, all of it's political, isn't it? But like directly political is that like it's also been a site of like protests basically.

In the Mediterranean, particularly on Barcelona, etc., there's been these anti-tourist protests, which has included spraying water at tourists and these sorts of things, basically. I don't know what we might think about that, but like it's trying to address a genuine problem, which is that tourism can be really deleterious to the environment and to this space

that like the local population. inhabits. I suppose there's like anti-suage protests. So there was surfers against sewage was there. There still are an organisation at campaigns around surfing. It was starting in Cornwall, I think, in the 70s, probably it was the 80s. But I remember in the 90s there was a big branch of it, very active branch in Port Albert because it was so polluted. And so it is, it comes from like basically the idea that surfers are in the water for a long time and like basically quite exposed to the shitting waters, etc, etc., etc. Yeah, it was really interesting. Yeah. When surfers against sewage started getting a lot of coverage in the 80s and 90s,

it was considered this weird novelty that people who could be into such an insoucion and like trivial activity as surfing could care at all about any sort of political or environmental issue. I remember that being really the sort of tone of the way in which these things were being covered in the news. But they did a lot of good work like campaigning against the massive dumping. of sewage, which is still a huge problem. I mean, historically, now the emphasis is more in rivers, isn't it? I think the EU, I know that the European Union, when Britain

was still in it, did basically force Britain to take quite significant action against the dumping of raw sewage. Because when we were kids, it was an absolute scandal, the extent to which raw sewage was dumped onto British beaches. It's just incredible. I talked about how in Paris, how in France, the idea of the beach

is so important to people. And in Paris, in the past few years, they've had this whole project to create a beach on the banks of the same that people can go and enjoy and sit on the sand and sit in the sun. It does get very hot in the summer in Paris. And in Britain, like in London, like a few years ago now, there was this project called Reclaim the Beach where people would, I mean, there is, I mean, the River Thames does have kind of shore, which is mostly mud, mud and pebbles. But like, you can go and kind of walk along it. Like, not that many people do. And there was this, there was this project.

where people were holding sort of parties on it and they called it Reclaim the Beach. But I don't think anyone's made a serious political proposal for a London beach, but we probably should given the hot weather that obviously isn't going to stop happening. Yeah, I think we should have like swimming in the Thames. Like the campaign for clean rivers should make, you know, should make the river like the beach, I think.

Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah. I mean, the Thames, my understanding is like the healthiness of the Thames, the Thames has been recovering, like so it can support more fish and stuff, like it absolutely couldn't for about 100 years, but it's nowhere near safe to swim in. And that is sort of shocking. The Thames should be swimmable in. That should be a big campaigning issue,

but we're not even anywhere close to that. You know, it's worth recovering this radical history of the utopian imagination, like inspired by the idea of the beach. You know, life should be a beach. That's what we want. We want life to be a beach. We want it to be a zone where people can go and play and interact.

And there's something about the freedom of the beach where people can play sports and they can lie around and they can snog their partner and they can swim in the sea. There is something really utopian about the beach as this kind of liminal space of freedom

and this unknown space of freedom. I think they were right in 68 to say, you know, under the paping stones, the beach, like under the surface of capitalist oppression and the segregation of space that should be a kind of beach for all of us. And I think, you know, in London and everywhere else,

we should be demanded. We should be demanding that we should be allowed to have a beach and to be a beach. I think, you know, the beach is all of us and it should be. Perhaps we should just end on this note as well. We've just been experiencing the reality of climate change, you know. People have been going on that this is the, this is the coolest summer for the rest of your lives. I don't think that's strictly true. It's an alineo year.

But, like, you know, we are going to see raising higher and higher extreme temperatures in the UK. You know, and so access to the beach, trying to keep the beach as like some sort of, sort of commons, even though it's owned by the crown, it's going to be really, really important, I think, because things are only going to get hotter and hotter. This is Aspen.