Brothers in the Dust

In Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the ghost of Christmas present admonishes Scrooge for his lack of charity to those less well off than he. “O God! To hear the insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!”, he exclaims at Scrooge’s declaration that the poor should die to decrease the surplus population. Dickens’s leaf was metaphorical but in Eastbourne, twenty years after Dickens wrote those words, there was a more literal leaf that sought to raise those less well off out of the dust.

Today, on a slightly down-at-heel stretch of Seaside, the road that runs behind Eastbourne’s coastal Royal Parade, sits an imposing buff and red brick building. Topped with a four-faced clock tower and a high pitched roof with a gothic arched window at its gable end, it manages to appear both civic and sacred at the same time. Squashed between Senlac House - where future motorists come to sit their driving theory test - and a National Tyres garage, its signage advertises that it is home to an academy of performing arts and a community arts centre; but this was not always the case.

Leaf Hall – the town’s oldest public building - was named after William Laidler Leaf, Victorian philanthropist and evangelical Christian, who had a holiday home on the town’s Grand Parade. Leaf was aware that the dwellings to the east of the pier were in stark contrast to the hotels, houses and apartments occupied by the wealthy; and he noticed that the occupants were largely unemployed and virtually destitute when the holidaymakers, that the resort’s trade relied upon, left at the end of the season. Wishing to alleviate poverty and, more importantly for Leaf, keep the idle out of the pubs, he persuaded William Cavendish, the 7th Duke of Devonshire and the town’s largest landowner, to donate a space where Leaf could build a venue to sustain and educate the working classes.

The architect was Robert Blessley, who also designed Eastbourne’s Grand Hotel, and construction began in 1863. The building’s commanding exterior was intended to inspire reverence in its users and, once inside, respect for its lecture hall, library and reading room. Books could be borrowed for tuppence a week, at a time when the town had no public library, and penny lectures could accommodate audiences of up to 200. But the focus was not just improvement: there was also a large kitchen and serving room and, in the harsh winters of the 1880s, Leaf Hall dispensed 3,000 pints of soup and 3,000 loaves each week.

Despite these philanthropic endeavours, the people Leaf most wanted to reach were put off by his support for the temperance movement. Allowing the Band of Hope and the Salvation Army to base themselves at the hall, attendance amongst working men dwindled and the building became a target for violence organised by local publicans keen to protect their trade. In fact, this was to be the start of the Eastbourne Riots (an oxymoron if ever there was one – or a Half Man Half Biscuit song) of the 1890s when Sunday processions by the Sally Army would be violently disrupted by paid hooligans and large crowds would gather to watch the spectacle.

As the new century began, Leaf Hall lost its missionary zeal and concentrated instead on being a proto-foodbank and a pre-NHS medical centre where local doctors provided free care to those who could not normally afford their fees. With the advent of the welfare state after the Second World War, Leaf Hall’s philanthropy became largely redundant; although now, in the twenty-first century, the town is hosting a foodbank again.

Green and Pleasant Land

If I had gone to view A Green and Pleasant Land, the exhibition of British landscape photography currently at the Towner Gallery, expecting to be treated to a depiction of a bucolic pastoral idyll, I would have been sorely disappointed. This superb exhibition of images, from the 1970s to now, underlines the fact that the topography of this island is not defined by nature's scenic splendour but is shaped and marked by the multiplicity of human activity and endeavour.

This is a landscape that, above all, has been scarred by our place as an industrial nation. Using 1970 as a starting point, the exhibition reveals a world that has been lost and left behind. Ron McCormick's atmospheric shots of South Wales mark the beginnings of a post-industrial age and Chris Killip and Graham Smith's similarly monochrome images reinforce the idea of decline in our northern heartlands.

If I hadn't already realised the irony in the exhibition’s title, the work of Northern Irish artists Paul Seawright and Donovan Wylie confirmed it. Seawright’s large, full colour daytime shots of the scenes of past sectarian murders, denuded of their terror but given a sinister edge with accompanying text from newspaper reports, were chilling. And Donovan Wylie’s studies of army watchtowers in the lush, green countryside of South Armagh provided a stark reminder that for a large part of this timeframe, an area of Britain was under military occupation.

However, it is also leisure that defines our landscape: Simon Roberts and Melanie Friend both use a large colour format to show people at play on the Sussex coast, whether that be paddling in the sea or watching an air show in the skies above; and there is a quartet of early Martin Parr images – unusually for him in black and white. Three are unpopulated but the fourth, Beauty Spot - Brimham Rocks, is more familiarly what Parr is renowned for as he captures day trippers in the throes of their banality.

In the first room of the exhibition, it struck me that football is an activity that has had a dominating effect on our environment. In the words of John Davies, "we are collectively responsible for shaping the landscape we occupy"; and that most communal of sports features in two of his three stunning images on display. Agecroft Power Station, Salford dwarfs the two amateur football matches that are taking place on pitches alongside, and his Runcorn Bridge, Cheshire is underpinned by the football graffiti that litters the supports below. Placed alongside Robert Judges' eerie Football Pitch at Dawn, these images reinforced the prominence of the national game in our physical and mental terrain.

There are more traditional representations of landscape but even Fay Godwin, former president of the Ramblers Association, uses light and dark and open spaces under troubled skies to create a discomfiting tone. Over fifty artists are represented in this exhibition and the work is drawn largely from the Arts Council Collection. It is an excellent exhibition and it gave me a real sense of the Britain I have grown up in and the Britain I live in today - food for thought for the leaders of our country who seem to be some distance away from understanding our green and pleasant land.

A Green and Pleasant Land, British Landscape and the Imagination: 1970s to Now is at the Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne until 21st January 2018. Entry is free.

Engels in Eastbourne

In August 1895, the ashes of Friedrich Engels, co-author of The Communist Manifesto with his friend Karl Marx, were scattered into the sea from the top of Beachy Head at Eastbourne. This may seem surprising given that the philosopher, writer and businessman is more associated with Manchester, having lived there between 1842 and 1870, broken only by a five-year European spell in Paris, Brussels and Cologne.

Engels, born in Germany in 1820, was the eldest son of a textiles manufacturer. His wealthy father sent him to England to work in one of the family factories with the hope that exposure to the world of business would rein in some of his liberal political views; it had the opposite effect.

In Manchester, he met a young working class woman, Mary Burns, whose radical opinions were to be an influence on Engels. Burns was his guide to the slums of the city and enabled him to write The Condition of the Working Class in England. Published by Marx in 1845, it exposed the grim effects of capitalism. Engels and Burns stayed together until her death in 1863. They never married as they were both opposed to what they saw as a bourgeois institution.

In 1870, Engels relocated to London where Marx already lived and the two worked on Das Kapital, the masterpiece of Communist philosophy. It was in this stage of Engels’ life that his association with Eastbourne began. The two friends were great enjoyers of the Victorian seaside and they visited many resorts. Margate, Ramsgate and the Isle of Wight were all regular destinations but Eastbourne was where Engels holidayed for extended periods during the summers after he had retired from business. He often stayed at 4 Cavendish Place, just opposite the pier, and it was here that he spent the last few weeks of his life on doctor’s orders before briefly returning to London to succumb to throat cancer. Of all the places Engels had lived, Eastbourne was his favourite and his last wish was that his ashes be scattered there.

Never Stop

Danny Baker never stops. Over three hours onstage at the Royal Hippodrome Theatre in Eastbourne last weekend, with his Cradle to the Stage show, and he barely gets beyond his primary school years and a handful of reminiscences about great comedians he came across in the 80s. But then he has never stopped: nascent scribblings for Sniffin' Glue, a stint at the NME, yoof documentaries, prime time television shows, comedy writing, ground-breaking radio shows and, most recently, autobiography and its subsequent sitcom serialisation. Transferring the raw material from his autobiographies to a stand-up show was supposed to be his swansong before he retires to the Florida Keys but another tour is already booked for next year so that, despite his many digressions ("Now, here's a thing..."), he can at least get onto his adult life proper.

Once he actually starts his routine - we have a very engaging half-hour preamble about why he's actually doing the show - Baker tells warm and funny anecdotes about his dad, Spud, and family life in Bermondsey. These are extensions of the excellent Cradle to the Grave TV show and are all told with Danny's familiar amphetamine delivery: never missing a beat, never drawing a breath. There are great stories about kids and fireworks, insurance burglaries and his dad's general resourcefulness in always chasing the next pound note to provide for the family. It all paints a picture of life on a south-east London council estate in the 50s and 60s which stays just the right side of nostalgic. But when he mentions his mum's jobs at Shuttleworths and Peek Freans, I can't help but feel a little sentimental: my dad worked at Peek Freans when I was a kid and, such were the employee perks, that I was a teenager before I saw what an unbroken biscuit looked like.

After the interval, when he does move on to his career, he attributes his breaks to "dumb luck" - being in the right place at the right time and having perfect recall. Working on The 6 O'Clock Show, his forensic knowledge of obscure past routines enables him to make instant connections with irascible comedians Spike Milligan and Kenneth Williams when the pros around him are floundering. His love of comedy shines through: he talks about Max Miller albums as being more important to him than the contemporary pop music he and his friends were listening to growing up, and he seems genuinely in awe of the fact that he is on a stage where Miller once trod the boards.

He is a marvellous raconteur and, despite claiming to be out of his realm of experience, a natural performer. In fact, his avowal that he is new to the stage is not true: the first time I ever heard of Danny Baker was reading an account in the August 1977 Sniffin' Glue of him jumping up onstage at the Vortex the night Elvis Presley died to berate the punks, who had cheered the news, for being disrespectful to a true rebel. Hopefully, we'll hear that story on next year's tour; but I'm not holding my breath.

Cradle to the Stage is at the Theatre Royal, Brighton on 30th April.

White Light

Shuttling backwards and forwards to Eastbourne on Saturday, ferrying kids to various activities, I was struck by how different the light could be over a stretch of 10 miles. The faint amber glow of warm spring sunlight up on the ridge above the Pevensey Levels soon turned to a smoky haze on the marshes and then numerous shades of grey that blended sea and sky as I reached the misty coast. Later in the day, the sun had conquered all and the sky was iridescent violet and peach.

With light on my mind and time to kill before my final pick-up, I was able to pop in to the Towner and view its current exhibition, A Certain Kind of Light. I always enjoy the hour before closing at a gallery as you can usually have the space pretty much to yourself; yesterday was no exception. Bringing together artworks from over six decades, the exhibition shows how artists have explored various aspects of light, from its power as a source of energy and illumination to its transient and transformative nature.

If the range of responses is broad, so too is the diversity of form: encompassing sculpture, installation, video, photography and painting, the exhibition is a stimulating and satisfying experience. David Batchelor's Festdella, a festive tower of illuminated coloured plastic bottles, greets you at the door signalling the warm and celebratory quality of illumination. I spent 10 minutes at Anish Kapoor's untitled mirror trying to work out whether it had a flat surface that gave a three-dimensional illusion or its concavity actually penetrated the wall; the notes suggested the latter but whichever it was, there was a typically enigmatic depth to the work.

Rachel Whiteread's semi-translucent resin cubes are more an exploration of space than light; moulds of childhood hiding places under chairs, they are reminiscent of her 1993 work, House, that mourned the lost space of the interior of a demolished house. Kate Paterson's Totality, a mirrorball reflecting eclipses around the gallery space was disorientating, as was Runa Islam's video loop of a photographic negative of a woman's intense gaze.

More traditionally, I enjoyed Roger Ackling's patterns of sunlight burnt with a lens onto driftwood and TV Room, Paul Winstanley's almost photographic monochrome painting of light reflecting from the screen and ceiling in a deserted television room in a University of London hall of residence. Another painting that stood out was Elizabeth Magill's haunting study in oils, Without, a deserted and darkened landscape lit only by the stars in the night sky.

As the five-minutes-to-closing announcement was being made, I had just reached the final painting. L.S. Lowry was famed for his populated industrial landscapes of his native North-West, but in later life he crossed country to paint a series of seascapes inspired by the North Sea. Seascape 1965 contrasts the grey of the sea and sky with the bleached crests of the breaking waves and an intense white light that radiates out from the barely perceptible horizon. For all its desolation, the light seems to signify that hope is out there somewhere.

A Certain Kind of Light is at the Towner Gallery, Eastbourne until 7th May 2017; admission is free.

Back to the Future

The Congress Theatre in Eastbourne, the largest on the south coast with a 1700-seat capacity, closed its doors last month whilst it undergoes an interior renovation and the construction of an adjacent welcome building that will house the box office and bar. Due to be completed in late 2018, the refurbishment follows the recent £2 million 5-year overhaul of the exterior. Opened in 1963, this Grade II* listed building has reached a point in its life where it clearly needs some love and attention.

The architects of the building were brothers Bryan and Norman Westwood. Up until then, their Surrey practice had largely been designing laboratories for research institutions and shops, most significantly for long-term client Austin Reed. Such was their expertise in retail design that they produced the definitive text, The Modern Shop, in 1952. After this, they were involved in a wider range of projects that saw them design Liverpool University’s arts precinct, housing for the Greater London Council and the Congress Theatre. It was the Eastbourne theatre that Norman Westwood was said to be most proud of.

Designed in 1958, the Congress was described by the late British-based American architect Rick Mather as having a “Festival-Hall-meets-East-Berlin interior and a dour exterior.” However, it reflected the prevailing trend of the age and its glass, metal and concrete frame frontage are a perfect example of post-war Modernist architecture, whilst its rear elevation owes much to the Brutalist school. Inside, its three-level foyer and the moulded balcony fronts and concealed lighting of the auditorium do, as Mather said, create a Soviet-style atmosphere. Indeed, the last time I was there was to witness the cultural orthodoxy of Reeves and Mortimer.

I first went to the Congress when I was on holiday with my mum and dad at Pevensey Bay. The building would have only been seven or eight years-old then and I do remember it being an exciting and impressive sight for a child of roughly the same age: towering above me on a warm summer’s night, light shining out from its pellucid front, it looked like the future. When I moved to East Sussex permanently a dozen years ago, time had dimmed that memory and the Congress looked as though it was something from the distant past. Next year, hopefully, the future will be back.

Almost Blue

The possibility that the Conservatives contravened the laws on election expenses in key seats during last year’s General Election is a story that is not widely reported in the mainstream media, being largely confined to Channel 4. To be charitable, this may be because investigations by a number of police forces are still on-going, or that other news outlets are unwilling to run with a rival’s exclusive. However, it is a story that is gaining traction as the number of investigations has been slowly increasing and recently expanded to include Sussex.

There is cap on local spending by candidates in parliamentary elections and, in an investigation by Channel 4 News reporter Michael Crick, evidence was uncovered of the Tories incurring costs for activists who were bussed in to assist in marginal constituencies; these costs had not been declared in their submitted election expenses. The police have asked the courts to grant them extra time, in addition to the one-year limit, to investigate these allegations, a move that was unsuccessfully challenged by the Tory Party in one constituency.

With nearly 20 police forces throughout England now working on cases of potential electoral fraud, Sussex Police today applied for extra time to investigate the expenses of Conservative Maria Caulfield who won the Lewes constituency from the Liberal Democrats last May. The result was one of a number of surprises in East Sussex – where the Tories astonishingly won six out of eight seats to turn the county almost blue - as sitting MP Norman Baker’s majority of 7,500 was overturned.

It is now possible that opposition parties in other East Sussex constituencies will ask the Electoral Commission to look at the expenses of unanticipated Tory victors: the Liberal Democrats also lost Eastbourne by a wafer-thin majority; Labour missed out in the marginal seat of Brighton Kemptown, which was held by the Conservatives with a majority of less than 700 votes; and the Hastings and Rye sitting MP, cabinet minister Amber Rudd, unexpectedly increased her slender majority over Labour from 2010.

With the possible outcome that some election results from May 2015 will be declared void, a government with a working parliamentary majority of only 16 may soon find that the EU referendum is not their biggest problem.

Close to the Edge

I have an old black and white photograph of myself taken - out of focus - at Beachy Head by my dad on a Kodak Instamatic camera, probably in 1971. I am standing close to the cliff edge, rictus grin of fear frozen on my face, pointing down at the sea 500 feet below. Barely discernible at the bottom of the photograph is the tiny smudge of a lighthouse. Out walking to Birling Gap recently I came across, not only that lighthouse, but another that I have no recollection of from that family holiday forty-five years ago.

The Beachy Head lighthouse is an enduring image: with its red and white marker stripes and its position nestling close to the coastline at the foot of the high cliffs, it has entered our collective consciousness. Ask any child to draw a lighthouse and it is likely that they will produce something like this 140-foot structure that shines a warning light nine miles out to sea just west of Eastbourne.

For the past thirty years, the lighthouse has been automated; throughout the years before that it had been maintained and operated by a team of at least three keepers since its construction in 1902. But the perilous Beachy Head cliffs were not just a 20th century danger to shipping: there had been numerous shipwrecks there during the 17th and 18th centuries which led Sussex Member of Parliament ‘Mad Jack’ Fuller to fund the construction of the first navigational aid for mariners at Beachy Head in 1829, the Belle Tout lighthouse.

The Belle Tout was originally made of wood but the decision was soon taken to invest in the construction of a permanent granite structure. However, it was not a great success as a lighthouse: its location at the top of the huge cliffs meant that it was not easily seen by shipping close to the shoreline and it was eventually replaced by the current sea-level lighthouse.

Despite this, the Belle Tout still exists today but not as a functioning lighthouse. Currently a bed and breakfast hotel, it has had many incarnations since it was decommissioned: private residence, historic monument and film location amongst them. It is perhaps best known as the setting for the BBC’s 1986 adaptation of Fay Weldon’s novel, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, starring Julie T. Wallace and Patricia Hodge. What is most remarkable about the Belle Tout lighthouse, though, is its escape from coastal erosion: in 1999 the building was moved, whole and intact, away from the crumbing cliff, using hydraulics and rollers, to a new location 50 feet further inland. I know what it is like to be too close to the edge.

Big Night Out

In the 1980s, I used to watch a lot of stand-up comedy at venues around south-east London, such as the Tunnel Club in Greenwich, Woolwich Tramshed and Deptford Albany. One night at the Goldsmiths Tavern in New Cross, I saw an act I had never heard of before who was billed as Vic Reeves: Britain’s foremost light entertainer. I would like to say that I was ahead of the game in spotting a nascent comedy genius but, in the interests of truth rather than myth, I have to confess I was completely unmoved. In an age of hard-edged political stand-up, I found a man in a suit with a toy monkey unfunny, childish and silly. Hey, ho: we cannot always be right.

When Vic Reeves reappeared a few years later on Channel 4 – now with Bob Mortimer - in Big Night Out, the surrealism, the repetition, the ridiculous characters and, above all, the playfulness with language, were a different proposition entirely. And then, with The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer and Shooting Stars, the duo became part of the British comedy pantheon. They then branched out into television drama and sitcom with Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), Catterick and, most recently, House of Fools.

Last autumn, the pair were set to celebrate 25 years of their partnership with a large venue tour of Britain when the trials of middle-age intervened. Bob Mortimer, complaining of chest pains, was admitted to hospital and underwent triple bypass heart surgery. Having made a swift recovery, the tour has been re-scheduled to start tonight in Leeds. Last night, they played a low-key warm-up show at Eastbourne’s Congress Theatre and, as they took the stage, Mortimer checked his heart rate. Reeves assured him, however, that he would be fine as long as it did not exceed 1,000 bpm.

In a two hour performance, with interval, many of the favourites from across their shows appeared: The Man with the Stick, Graham Lister and Novelty Island, Mulligan and O’Hare, Dr Shakamoto, The Dove from Above and – my personal favourite - frying pans. There is something about seeing Tom and Jerry cartoon violence made flesh and I thought I was going to be sick with laughter as they repeatedly smashed each other in the face with (almost) impeccable timing until Vic pummelled Bob to the ground with a fire extinguisher. Bob, of course, emerged from behind the desk with a massive and distorted head.

It was not all nostalgia for the largely forty-something audience, though: new sketches were projected on to the back screen during costume changes. One, sending up urban free running, was hilarious: “Banksy! Bollards! Graffiti! Stairwells!” With physical comedy that is almost as energetic as it was 25 years ago, I do hope Bob will be okay on their hectic 15-date tour that finishes in London the day after their St. Valentine’s gig in Brighton. As long as he follows Vic’s sound medical advice, he should be alright.

In the Ravilious Room

2015 was the year in which one of East Sussex’s most famous twentieth century artists became the property of the whole country. When I say ‘the country’, I mean that London finally caught up with the simple beauty of the paintings of Eric Ravilious. Ravilious, Dulwich Picture Gallery’s exhibition, was the biggest-ever showing of his work and was a sell-out this summer; the public, the art world and the media were united in praise for this largely unsung watercolourist.

In his delightful end of year review, The Guardian’s Ian Jack wrote, “He is an easy painter to enjoy … bright and tender even in his depictions of war. His pictures give the viewer the permission to like England and to mourn it”; but not all is from a lost age. If his work as a war artist portrays the nation at a particular point of conflict, other images capture a timeless essence of England: his paintings of Sussex, the South Downs and the South Coast capture a landscape that is largely unchanged.

Born in west London in 1903, Eric Ravilious grew up in Eastbourne where his parents ran an antique shop. A scholarship boy, he was educated at Eastbourne Grammar School and Eastbourne School of Art before moving on to the Royal College of Art. Ravilious excelled in a variety of media – ceramic design, wood engraving, book illustration – but it is for his watercolours that he is mostly remembered.

At the start of the Second World War, he was commissioned as a full-time war artist; his watercolours recorded the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force in action from a number of postings around Britain and abroad. In August 1942 whilst based at Kaldadarnes in Iceland, Ravilious was on board an aircraft that went missing. After a four-day search, the aircrew were declared lost in action. Ravilious’s body was never recovered; he was 39 years old.

The Dulwich exhibition may now be over, but Eastbourne’s wonderful Towner Art Gallery holds one of the largest public collections of Ravilious’s work. The permanent Ravilious Room contains watercolours, books about the artist and a unique archive of associated materials. Currently, there are Ravilious works on display that have been loaned from Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museum and it is the perfect reason to visit, particularly in this interregnum between Christmas and New Year.

When I was there today, it was one of the loaned paintings, Train Landscape, that especially caught my eye. This popular work dates from 1940, when Ravilous spent a day travelling up and down the Eastbourne to Lewes line painting the interior of the railway carriage with the landscape viewed through the window. However, the figure in this watercolour is of the Westbury Horse in Wiltshire and not the Long Man of Wilmington that was in the original work. Ravilious was very interested in the hillside chalk figures of the South Coast and painted several, including two viewed from trains; but he was dissatisfied with both and wanted to discard them. It was Tirzah Garwood, married to Ravilious, who cut and pasted together the best parts of both works to create such an enduring image of England.

Towner Art Gallery is open Tuesday to Sunday, and Bank Holiday Mondays, between 10am and 5pm. Admission is free. The gallery will be closed on New Year’s Day.

Note: The Ravilious Room will be closed from 26 January to 5 February 2016, inclusive, to change the works on display.

Three-Song Wonders

When I saw the charming and disarming Wave Pictures in Bexhill last summer, they had finished recording their most recent album, at Billy Childish’s studio in Kent, only a few days earlier. Just one of the songs that lead vocalist and guitarist David Tattersall co-wrote with Childish for the album was played that night but, a year on, and with the album released earlier this year to critical acclaim, a trio of those tracks formed the centrepiece of their set at the Underground Theatre in Eastbourne last night.

Working with Childish has given the band’s songs a garage rock edge and, having played the provocative and raucous Pea Green Coat – “Everybody in the station wore black/And then there was you in your pea green coat” – requests from the crowd for The Fire Alarm are rebuffed with typically self-deprecating humour. “We can’t play those two back-to-back,” Tattersall explains, “because then you’ll realise they are the same tune - essentially, we only have about three songs.” None of which is true, but they launch into the album’s title track, instead, before completing the run of songs from Great Big Flamingo Burning Moon with The Fire Alarm, safely distanced from its ‘doppelganger’.

As well as the flamingo, other avian life is present: from 2012’s delicious Long Black Cars album, both Stay Here And Take Care Of The Chickens and Seagulls are performed; and The Wave Pictures’ recurring motif of the sea features on Blue Harbour, from Beer In The Breakers, with the wonderful lyric, “let my eyes slip away/ toward the coast around the pier/ all the things that brought me here”. Bassist Franic Rozycki’s phrasing in the song’s run-out is also a delight.

Drummer Johnny Helm demonstrates the power of his voice when takes the vocals on Atlanta, from 2013’s City Forgiveness, and again later in the set when they play an old song, Sleepy Eye, from 2005’s Hawaiian Open Mic Night album. We are offered the democratic choice of Helm singing that or Now You Are Pregnant, another old song, but the crowd opt for the former. Then there is more audience participation as we are given the tricky task of singing the chorus to Come On Daniel (“come on Daniel!”), and Daniel-time is completed with the obligatory Daniel Johnston cover, this time, I Killed The Monster.

Jointly promoted by excellent local record stores, Bexhill’s Music’s Not Dead and Eastbourne’s Pebble Records, this superlative gig is brought to a close with two numbers from City Forgiveness: the final song of the set is Lisbon, with lyrics - “It was one of those days/ the dead were digging upwards through the earth” - that perfectly demonstrate Tattersall’s gift for marrying the prosaic and the absurd; and the encore is The Woods, a frantic Velvets-style workout that crackles with intimate electricity. There is only a month to go until the Green Man Festival where I will see The Wave Pictures again. But I can barely wait.

Vinyl Reckoning

Demand for new music on vinyl is on the increase: it has been steadily rising over recent years and sales are now back to their 1997 level, helped in part by April’s annual Record Store Day, when special vinyl releases by bands are much sought after. There may have been over a million vinyl sales last year but it still only accounts for 2% of the music market. Whoever the buyers are, it is still a niche area: I am sure there are some diehards who have never stopped buying vinyl and others who have returned to it; and there are undoubtedly younger music fans, raised on digital and not having known music in a physical form, who are responding to the retro appeal of records and turntables.

Even though I still listen to vinyl, I am not part of this new revolution. The sad pedant in me likes to keep my music collection compartmentalised: I have a strict line in the sand for when vinyl ended. I resisted the CD revolution of the mid-1980s and persisted with records until the early 90s when they became an increasingly marginalised format. The difficulty of finding new releases on vinyl made me finally relent. The last two vinyl albums in my chronologically arranged collection are The End of the Surrey People by Vic Godard and Sabresonic by the Sabres of Paradise. This dates my vinyl surrender to 1993 - when I made the switch to cassettes. This was just bloody-mindedness on my part and clearly did not last long as the first CD I bought was Dummy by Portishead, released in 1994. And it didn’t help that I had most of the cassettes stolen when my car got nicked. So, I have a strict format divide when buying music: anything released in 1993, or earlier, I have to buy on vinyl; anything released in 1994, or later has to be on CD.

Having been very briefly tempted by the digital age, I have chosen to shun iTunes and Spotify and I buy all my new music on CD from the wonderful Music's Not Dead shop in Bexhill; but I have never stopped trawling through the racks of charity shops and - increasingly rarely - second-hand record establishments to fill in those pre-94 gaps. Whether through sentimentality or regret, I have spent a reasonable amount of time over the last fifteen years hunting down a mental list of vinyl albums that I never bought at the time or, more usually, that I had but they fell from my clutches - either stolen, lost or sold.

When I was a young person, albums were a fluid currency, a commodity to be pawned: if you needed a few quid quickly, second-hand record shops, where you could sell a couple of albums, were legion. There were many gigs that I attended in the 70s and 80s that were funded by the proceeds of hastily sold albums. More often than not, I would pick up another second-hand copy a few weeks later; but some slipped through the net and over recent years I rectified this when I stumbled across copies of albums such as Raw Power, The Image Has Cracked and Soul Mining. The list is a lot shorter now but it still contains the first Roxy Music album, the New York Doll's Too Much Too Soon, Two Sevens Clash by Culture (how many levels of idiocy was I operating on the day I sold that one?) and The Pogues' Rum, Sodomy and the Lash. I am sure I could buy these over the internet at a click but that's not the point. It would deprive me of going to places like The Vinyl Frontier in Eastbourne.

Recently relocated from the Old Town area to the Little Chelsea quarter of Eastbourne, The Vinyl Frontier specialises in new, used and rare vinyl. In spacious and light-filled premises with a cafe area at the back, the shop boasts a large stock of used vinyl for the dedicated browswer. With rare time to spare before collecting the kids from sporting activities, I spent a glorious half an hour on Saturday morning rack-flicking. There was nothing from my mental list but I was tempted by Elvis Costello's My Aim is True, an LP I never bought at the time on the grounds that he wasn't "punk enough". That was until I saw a copy of Eden, Everything But The Girl's sumptuous debut album. I recalled playing that LP to death in a grotty South London flat throughout 1984 but didn't seem to possess it anymore. Then I remembered: I lost custody of all the Everything But The Girl albums at the closing of a former life, along with many others. Now, there's a whole new excuse to search for old vinyl...

The Vinyl Frontier is at 35, Grove Road, Eastbourne, East Sussex BN21 4TT.

Art and Ice Cream

The East Sussex Open is an annual exhibition, at Eastbourne’s Towner contemporary art museum, to showcase artists from across the county. Based in the largest gallery space in the area, the ground floor Exhibition Halls, it always provides a wide and interesting mixture of artistic forms; and the 2014 selection, ranging from traditional painting to large installations, does not deviate from this stimulating breadth of media.

Having to entertain the kids for the whole day on Saturday, I gambled on children’s intuitive appreciation of art to help me navigate this year’s collection. Whilst I was taking in Susan Crossett’s watercolours of rural landscapes, and Tom Banks’ eerie dark and depopulated St. Leonards’ street scenes, the kids were fighting over who should wear the headphones to accompany Flats, Gallit Shaltiel’s stop motion animation of a man trapped in a concrete structure.

It is perhaps a given that moving images and three-dimensional pieces will appeal more to younger minds; but whilst I was drawn to David Jones’ video installation, Jacob’s Ladder, an endless loop of empty London Underground escalator advertising frames, and the humour of Sam Carvosso’s Sculpture Falling on Lemon, the children were studying photographer Alex Currie’s urban landscapes, in particular the “sausage of snow” covering the stairs of the M61 Rivington services.

When it came to the installations in the centre of the gallery space, the children all enjoyed Anna Gonzalez Noguchi’s Tsumumi: To Wrap, a scarlet binding between the two main gallery pillars; but it was her arrangement of a chair, table, armbands and coffee cup that prompted a furious debate between the kids on the nature of conceptual art. The middle one was particular fervent, and a little too Daily Mail for my liking, in his questioning of the artistic nature of the piece; and when the oldest offered the suggestion that the title, Support, meant that it was about things we need to get by, he was still not satisfied.

The youngest came to the rescue by dragging us off to see contributions by two artists from Project Art Works in Hastings. Albert Geere is an 80-year-old artist with profound learning difficulties, who has lived in institutions since he was two. The primary geometrics of his painting Storm, Sky, House had especially appealed to her seven-year-old eyes. Then there was an exhibit in the name of Andrew and Eden Kotting. I had first come across this father and daughter team after reading an Iain Sinclair essay about them in the London Review of Books in 2006. I had then seen Andrew's 1996 film, Gallivant, documenting a coastal journey around Britain by his grandmother and seven-year-old Eden. Eden was born with Joubert Sydrome, a rare neurological disorder, and has collaborated with her father on a number of projects. Now 26, Eden’s series of canvases on show at the Towner – Stargeezers - depict religious zealots gazing at the heavens and is accompanied by a short film, shot by her father, showing Eden at work.

Wrapped up in the film, I had let the kids give me the slip but I quickly found them again, at the making table in the foyer, expressing their own artistic talents; fairies, war and Daleks abounded. The debate about Gonzalez Noguchi’s installation was still raging, so we took it across the street to the Favoloso ice cream parlour and worked our way through four large helpings of support.

The East Sussex Open runs at the Towner contemporary art museum until 14 September 2014. Entry is free.

Orwell in Eastbourne

By its very nature as an old and established seaside resort, Eastbourne can boast some high-profile cultural connections: literary giants Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll were regular visitors; the artist Eric Ravilious was a life-long resident and the biologist T.H. Huxley retired there, as did the journalist and literary critic, Cyril Connolly. But Connolly had lived in the town earlier in his life, at a residence he shared with a more renowned contemporary. If you walk along Summerdown Road, one of the well-heeled, tree-lined streets of the Old Town area, you will eventually come across a detached house with two rectangular blue plaques, one of which contains Connolly’s name and that of the writer, George Orwell.

The house, formerly the Headmaster’s lodge, is all that remains of St. Cyprian’s preparatory school. The main school building, where the two writers boarded between 1911 and 1916, stood to the rear of the house. It was destroyed by fire in 1939 and, subsequently, the school was closed and the playing fields sold to Eastbourne College. That less is made of Orwell’s connection to the town is probably due to the fact that he hated his time at St. Cyprian’s and, in a long autobiographical essay, laid his feelings bare. Such, Such Were the Joys – the ironic title coming from one of Blake’s Songs of Innocence, The Echoing Green – was published after his death to a polarised reception.

Writing over 25 years after the experience, Orwell’s detailing of a life of insanitary conditions, inhospitable dormitories and inedible food was recognised by some, but not by all. And it was his view of the violent regime of Mr and Mrs Wilkes, nicknamed Sambo and Flip, handing out humiliating punishments to some and lavish praise to others, that most divided former pupils. Accusing the Wilkes of fawning over the students from rich families, Orwell felt that as a scholarship boy he was cruelly treated. When he first arrived at the school as a seven-year-old, he was beaten with a riding crop so viciously that it broke. But it was his realisation that paranoia and fear were deliberately deployed by those supposed to be taking care of him that made Orwell understand the power of hierarchies. Friendless and spied upon, loneliness and a broken spirit were the outcomes.

Some of Orwell’s time in Eastbourne found its way into his fiction: in his ‘fairy tale’, Animal Farm, the local village is named after Willingdon, just to the north of town; its pub, The Red Lion, is where Farmer Jones gets drunk; and Manor Farm, where the revolution takes place, is based on Chalk Farm on the edge of the Downs. If Orwell used simple landmarks that he would have come across on ‘character-building’ walks for settings in Animal Farm, the area had a more profound effect on his final novel. The Last Man in Europe was Orwell’s original title for Nineteen Eighty-Four, and it perhaps gives us a further clue to how he felt about his time in Eastbourne. Exposed as a young child to an authoritarian regime that was, by turns, caring and violent, the sense of isolation and powerlessness that Winston Smith feels in Orwell’s most well-known novel can be traced back, in Such, Such Were the Joys, to his five long years at St. Cyprian’s.

Austerity Art

Sometime in 1974, when I was 11 or 12 years old, my dad took me to a new restaurant in Woolwich, south-east London. He had read about it as it was the only British outlet of a chain that was huge in the United States and, as we were passing through Woolwich on one of our regular Red Bus Rover trips around London that we took on Saturdays when Millwall were not playing in the capital, he decided we should give it a try. I have no exact memory of what we ate that day but I do remember my dad’s words as we left the restaurant: “Well, that was terrible; it’ll never catch on.” Typically, he was half right. It was terrible, but it did catch on. We had, of course, just visited the first McDonald’s in this country.

Where my dad was most at home eating when we went on a Red Bus Rover – a very early version of the Oyster card but for buses only – was at Jolyon on the corner of the Strand and Duncannon Street, opposite Charing Cross station. It was one of a chain of cafeterias that were successors to the Lyons teashops, or Corner Houses as three of the central London branches were known, that had dominated high streets for the previous 70 years. Struggling to maintain the demand for large-scale affordable dining that had grown out of the war-time canteen culture, the 1970s saw a make-over that relied on formica, brown geometric patterns and a funky renaming to reflect the founding father, Joseph Lyons. The re-launch failed and by the end of the seventies the Lyons name was most well known as a brand of ice cream. The restaurants never regained their place at the forefront of British life that they had occupied before, during and after the Second World War.

Just how integral Lyons teashops were to the post-war cultural landscape can currently be seen in an exhibition, The Lyons Teashops Lithographs: Art in a Time of Austerity 1946-1955, at the Towner gallery in Eastbourne. Facing a drab period where rationing still held sway and raw materials were prioritised elsewhere, J. Lyons & Co found an imaginative way of sprucing up their restaurants and illuminating the lives of their customers: they commissioned a series of large lithographs, from artists of the day, to cover the walls of the teashops. Over three series, in 1946, 1951 and 1955, 40 separate prints were produced by leading artists such as L.S. Lowry, John Nash, John Piper and David Gentleman. Most of the contributors had worked as official war artists, documenting daily life on the home front in a time of conflict, so the shift to peace time adversity was a natural one.

All 40 prints are on show at the Towner, along with some original sketches and paintings that informed the lithographic process carried out by commercial printers Chromoworks of Willesden. Depicting life in post-war Britain, they present a fascinating example of the power of public art. The most successful at the exhibition are those, such as People by Barnett Freedman and The Railway Station by Edward Arrdizzone, that provide a glimpse of the grind of the time – the crowds and careworn faces of that austere post-war world. East Sussex features with Edwin La Dell’s view of Hastings from East Hill and Clifford Frith’s brooding The River Rother at Rye. But for me, nestling next to each other in a corner of the gallery, the contrast between Carel Weight’s melancholic and autumnal Albert Bridge and the spirited and energetic Herne Bay Pier by Anthony Gross, shows the true resilience of ordinary people in an age of austerity.

Perhaps that resilience explains why the streets are not filled with people throwing bricks in protest at our current age of austerity - but it does not explain where the response of art is now. I cannot imagine the fast food heirs to Lyons embarking on a similar project - corporations regularly sponsor art exhibitions, but that is merely advertising. What J. Lyons & Co did was to directly commission, oversee and exhibit these artworks to enrich the lives of the ordinary people who drank their tea.

The Lyons Teashops Lithographs: Art in a Time of Austerity 1946-1955 is at the Towner gallery, Eastbourne until 22nd October 2013. £5.50/£4 concessions.