People's Pier

When Hastings Pier burnt down in 2010 it had already been closed to the public for four years. If the deserted structure was a harsh reminder that it had seen better days, its blackened and twisted wreckage rendered it a metaphor for the irreversible decline of seaside towns.

Built in 1872, its twin peaks of popularity were between the twentieth century wars, and again in the 1960s and 70s when the end of pier pavilion played host to gigs by a number of high-profile acts. The final Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd performance took place there and the Rolling Stones, The Who, Jimi Hendrix, the Sex Pistols and The Clash all played the pier. After that time, a rapidly changing succession of owners ensured that the pier fell into a spiral of disrepair before closing in 2006.

However, a local campaign to resurrect the pier that had begun after its closure, was given fresh impetus by the fire; now the pier is in local community ownership and on the verge of renovation. With the help of volunteers, fundraisers and local authorities, the Hastings Pier Charity (HCP) has raised £11.4m from the Heritage Lottery Fund and over £2m from other public and institutional sources. But with a funding gap still to fill, a community share scheme has been launched to enable real local involvement in the new Hastings Pier.

HCP is trying to attract 3,000 ordinary people – be they residents of Hastings, St. Leonards, East Sussex or just lovers of Hastings Pier – to become community shareholders in the People’s Pier. It is hoped the community share scheme will raise £500,000 to develop additional facilities on the pier, such as a children’s play area and a microbrewery.

All community shareholders will be members of HCP and, effectively, owners of the pier. Able to attend the AGM and vote and stand for the Board of Directors, all owners will have one vote, irrespective of the number of community shares they have bought. But these are not shares to make a profit - they cannot be sold on. However, if the pier is making a profit in the future, community shareholders could apply to get their investment back. More importantly, though, it is about having a long term stake in a community asset.

Community shares are available at £1 each for a minimum stake of £100 from Hastings Pier Charity. The offer is open until 5th April 2014.

The Old Songs

This year will mark the tenth anniversary of the death of Bob Copper, the most well-known member of the Copper Family of Rottingdean. The family’s earliest mention in the parish records dates from the 1590s, although they were probably living and working in the area as farm labourers, carters, shepherds and publicans much earlier.

The Coppers’ tradition of unaccompanied singing of traditional Sussex songs may stretch back just as far, but it was in the late 19th century when James ‘Brasser’ Copper, and his brother Thomas, were discovered singing their rural repetoire by Kate Lee of the Folk Song Society. James wrote down the songs that he knew for the society but continued to pass them down orally to his children, Jim and John. In 1936, Jim recorded dozens of songs in a handwritten book that he dedicated and passed on to his son, Bob.

The songs – whether created or collected - are filled with the richness of local life on the seaward side of the Downs, or draw on universal themes of the rural working class. The Seasons Round charts the ever-turning agricultural calendar:

Now harvest being over bad weather comes on,
We will send for the thresher to thresh out our corn.
His hand-staff he'll handle, his swingel he'll swing,
Till the very next harvest we'll all meet again.

Others tell of farmers and fishermen, lads and lovers, shepherds, soldiers and sailors. Claudy Banks, the first song that ‘Brasser’ transcribed for the Folk Song Society, is a ballad that tells the ageless tale of a returned sailor not recognised by the true love he left behind.

In the 1950s, the Coppers came to wider public attention with Jim and John regularly giving high-profile performances with their respective sons, Bob and Ron. Recorded and broadcast by the BBC, they attracted the attention of the American field collector of folk music, Alan Lomax, who had moved to England after being named in the United States as a communist sympathiser. Jim and John both died in the mid-fifties and when the Folk Song Society’s successor, the English Folk Dance and Song Society, released the LP Traditional Songs From Rottingdean in 1963, the Coppers’ place in the emerging English folk renaissance was firmly established.

In the 1970s, Bob further cemented the Coppers’ reputation with a trilogy of books documenting the family’s vocal tradition, the first of which, A Song For Every Season, won the Robert Pitman Literary Prize of 1971. After brother Ron’s death in the late seventies, Bob heralded a new dawn by broadening family involvement to include his children, John and Jill. The definitive modern collection of their recorded songs, Come Write Me Down, was released in 2001 and by the time of Bob’s death in 2004, at the age of 89, the performing family had swelled to include John and Jill’s respective children. The Copper Family still perform regularly, and carry with them to every gig Jim’s handwritten songbook from 1936.

Sea Power

When the Devil’s Chimney, a 200ft high chalk tower that was part of the Beachy Head cliffs, collapsed into the sea in April 2001, there were several theories as to the cause: the rough seas that had been battering the rock-face throughout the preceding winter; driving rain that had penetrated the chalk and then frozen and expanded, causing the cliff to crack; a curse that had existed since Aleister Crowley, the fin de siecle occultist, had climbed the tower in 1894.

Discounting the third theory, the Environment Agency was certain that climate change was responsible for the first two. Increasingly stormy winters had accounted for the collapse of an even larger section of Beachy Head two years earlier, and the sudden disappearance of the Devil’s Chimney was part of an emerging pattern. But since those events at the turn of the century, coastal erosion at Beachy Head has been within expected limits for an undefended rock formation. However, at other points of the East Sussex shore, it has been a different story.

Slightly to the west at Birling Gap - a dip in the high coastline - several cottages on the low cliffs have been lost to gradual erosion in recent decades, and the turn of this year brought a more dramatic alteration to the cliff-face. The powerful swelling sea that buffeted the south coast at New Year, claimed a 3-metre section of chalk, making the cliff edges unstable and closing the already precarious steps down to the beach. Much more spectacularly, at Rock-a-Nore to the east of Hastings, the sandstone cliffs suffered a dramatic collapse after days of heavy seas pounding their base. The remarkable day-time rock fall was captured on film by eyewitnesses.

The effect of the continuing winds, whipping up the power of the sea, is that the craggy East Sussex coastline has become a treacherous place and coastal paths have had to be closed, limiting access to cliff and shore in many places. Perhaps walking the more sedate coastal plain of West Sussex is the way forward for the rest of this wild winter.

Get By

In the bleak midwinter, this will make your heart soar and get you through the longest month. Listen to it here.

“It’s raining and the wind is ruthless,
I’m old and cold and tired and useless;
And toothless.
But I’ll get by,
With a little bit of you,
Alcohol, tobacco, caffeine,
Ephedrine and orange juice…”

The Wave Pictures will be playing the Green Door Store in Brighton on 8th February, and the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill on 20th June. Stanley Brinks and The Wave Pictures will be playing The Prince Albert in Brighton on 2nd March.

Gale Force

The persistent December rain has meant that orchards and fields, hillsides and woodlands have become sodden quagmires, almost impossible for walking. When I proposed to the family that the final walk of the year needed to be a rain-soaked coastline trek on sturdy pebbles, to blow away the Christmas cobwebs, my idea was met with dumb incredulity. Only the dogs seemed interested: but the short-legged one is Scottish and stubborn and I knew he would renege on his word as soon as he felt a stiff breeze; the long-legged one will go anywhere, in any weather, if it means being out of the house and getting sight of a sausage-flavoured dog treat; so only he made the cut. Luckily, he cannot understand the shipping forecast: “Thames, Dover, Wight: southwesterly gale force 8 increasing severe gale force 9 imminent; rough becoming very rough; rain or squally showers; moderate becoming poor.”

With trees blown down, homes flooded and power out in a host of places, there is much for people in south coast counties to worry about. If the litany of the shipping forecast can usually make the threat of force 12 hurricane winds appear benign, getting Alan Bennett to read it on Radio 4 this week was a masterstroke of panic management. His soft Leeds cadence made it sound as though we will never know fear again, even if the forecast was one from October. The roll call of sea areas – Forties, Cromarty, Forth…Sole, Lundy, Fastnet…Shannon, Rockall, Malin – is poetic balm to soothe the soul.

My plan was to start early on Cooden beach, in sea area Dover, and walk far enough west until I was in sea area Wight. If a trans-sea area walk seemed ambitious, the location of the boundary between the two, at Sovereign Harbour in Eastbourne, made it a reasonable round trip of 10 miles. But when I arrived at Cooden, it was high tide and the gale forecast for the coast was already battering the beach. The strip of pebbles between the crashing waves and the coastal road was so narrow that I thought the dog might be swept away or run over; but we made it through to the safety of the broader beach.

There is something strangely attractive about a coastal walk on a wild winter day: the lowering sky, the salty sea-spumed air limiting the vision, and the lack of any other people all make it a beautiful but desolate experience. And this morning’s Beaufort scale force 9 gale, although not quite full in the face, made westerly progress slow; even a solitary gull struggled. But we carried on past the caravan parks of Norman's Bay - as deserted as cemeteries - and the residents of beach-front houses, peering out anxiously at the turbulent swell.

I felt exhausted as we neared Pevensey Bay, but a fortifying glimpse of brightness between the clouds spurred me on. The tide having receded a little, we were able to walk on the more compacted surface nearer the shoreline and the dog even attempted a frolic or two. But as we left Pevensey, the coast curved southwards and the relentless gale became a headwind. With the return walk in mind, my resolve deserted me and, a mile from the harbour, we turned around.

With the wind behind us, we veritably sailed back to Cooden; and, of course, by the time we returned the weather was abating: “Thames, Dover, Wight: southwesterly 5 to 7; moderate or rough; rain then showers; moderate becoming good.”

The Ghosts of Christmas

Sussex duo, Vile Electrodes, have produced a seasonal slice of pop, with their latest offering The Ghosts of Christmas, that beautifully combines the Shangri-Las’ Leader of the Pack, Soft Cell’s Say Hello, Wave Goodbye and Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. With a name punning the bohemian writer of erotica, Anais Nin, vocalist and sometime-milliner Anais Neon intones, in an unmistakably English accent, a festive tale of death and break-up to Martin Swan’s backing of swathes of shimmering analogue synthesiser.

Not being reality television contestants or having their track featured in an advertisement, the St. Leonards-on-Sea group are unlikely to trouble the Christmas number one slot; but not all festive songs are aimed at the mass market, especially ones about your true love dying on Christmas Eve.

The Past is a Foreign Country

About a thousand years ago – well, thirty five but it feels ever so much longer – I wrote a punk fanzine, called Intrusion, with three of my mates. It started in 1978 and lasted for eight issues. It was standard Sniffin’ Glue-inspired fare: the first few editions were single-sided Xerox and it then moved on to the sophistication of double-sided printing. Pages were a mixture of hand-written and typed, with felt pen and Letraset headings. Photographs were rarely original and covers were generally cryptic collages. We mainly sold it through a small ad in the back of the NME, but Rough Trade and a couple of other record shops stocked it successfully on a sale or return basis.

Looking at the excellent Essential Ephemera recently, a blog that unearths forgotten fanzines from the punk era, I came across a post on a fanzine called Toxic Grafity. It prompted me to recall that we had helped its writer with his earlier version, No Real Reason. When I say helped, I think we were involved in getting the first issue photocopied; it then developed into a strong Crass/Poison Girls anarcho-punk fanzine with much more direction than our own. But it made me search online to see what place Intrusion fanzine had secured in the annals of punk. There were three results of my Google search: it had made it into that exhaustive document of punk, Bored Teenagers, and then there was a review, taken from issue 5, of a gig at the Croydon Greyhound on a Penetration fan website. The last result was on eBay; a punk memorabilia seller was offering a copy of issue 7 and there had been one bid of £10. Delighted to see that our modest offering still had currency in the modern world, I went up into the loft and found the bundle of fanzines that I have carefully kept. There, amongst copies of Sniffin’ Glue and Ripped & Torn, was one of each of the eight editions of Intrusion fanzine.

If the past is a foreign country, having your sixteen-year-old self reflected back at you through your juvenile punk ramblings is an uncharted corner of the solar system. It is a mixed experience - at once heartening, baffling and embarrassing. The writing was generally good and the content shows that we were not just playing at it. There were interviews with John Peel, the cartoonist Savage Pencil, band members from Siouxsie and the Banshees and Penetration, and lesser known south London local bands Rodney and the Failures and The Vamp (the latter featuring drummer Max Splodge, soon-to-be lead singer of top ten-hitters Splodgenessabounds). There were live gig reviews of all of those bands, and The Clash, Adam and the Ants, The Adverts and The Mekons, as well as quite perceptive pieces on the recorded output of Alternative TV, Wire, PIL and even David Bowie.

For a reason I have no recollection of, I was writing under the name “Andi Recondite” and some of the pages were nothing more than a puzzling collection of random images and scribbles. More embarrassingly, there was a lot of conflicting and shouty “punk’s dead/punk’s not dead” polemic, which got worse in the later editions and was probably the reason that the fanzine floundered. Interviews were generally typed-up verbatim, like a script, and were not that incisive. Cleary running out of questions, the Banshees started to interview us. (SEVERIN: What’s your favourite Banshees song? ME: All of them!) Oh, dear. But it was passionate, angry and – most importantly – self-produced. And there was some well-intentioned, but naïve, politics. Items on Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League, articles on the Persons Unknown anarchist trial and an apposite picture of an imminent Premier Thatcher with a swastika on her forehead and the Mekons’ lyric “we know what we know and tomorrow is an empty day” underneath.

Issue 7, the one up for sale on ebay, does not stand out. Strangely, it has a cartoon drawing of the four writers on the cover (that’s me, second left) but, that apart, it does not seem to be different from any of the other editions. Maybe it is collectable because of the Peel interview, something he did not do that often. I remember we arranged to meet him in a pub around the corner from Broadcasting House, and he was mortified that The Adverts and Wire were in the pub. He was at great pains to point out that it was a coincidence, that he did not hang out with bands. This is borne out by the rather churlish revelations of Mark E. Smith and Morrissey that, despite being championed by Peel, they had little contact with him. I think they are rather missing the point; as are some others: when I went back to eBay, the winning bid, for an original edition of a fanzine produced by some teenage punks on a council estate, was an inexplicable £124.