Seaside towns cropped up last night. Jean Sprackland mentioned places including Margate and Southport in her reading at Costa Coffee, and later I had a Portslade-vs-Southwick debate with Robert Sheppard in the Dispensary. I’m heading from one seaside town to another on this journey, so in a sense I’m in the business of shoreline resorts, though my journey will involve some miles before I see the coast again.
Urban explorers seek a certain lostness, which is hard to achieve in a place bisected by a shoreline. You always know where you are, as the sea is always there and everything can be oriented around it. A town or city by the sea isn’t quite fully urban. How can it be, with a massive chunk of nature at its wildest, never more than a couple of miles away? A heaving wall of water glimpsed between buildings, and gulls swooping to eat your crisps.
In his book Renegade, Mark E Smith demolishes my home town, based on its popularity with music journalists. ‘It’s funny how many of them have moved to Brighton now. All led by the devil’s compass. Cosying up to Fatboy Slim and Chris Eubank over a Sunday roast. It’s worse than London. They’ve created their own modern cultural prison. Burchill and Paul McCartney are the screws! …It’s the Guardian‘s version of The Prisoner. They’re so middle class they put pebbles on the beach so they don’t get any sand between their toes’.
MES has a point, though there is still a real Brighton that is nothing to do with the kind of lifestyle that attracts the ghastly celebrities and those who might admire them. (Far from ‘cosying up’ to the bloated popinjays of the celebrity caste, people who actually live in Brighton view the famous with indifference and disdain – merely keeping an eye on them in case they try and jump the queue or exhibit any other nikulturni behaviour. By contrast people in the North West seem to take an active, non-contemptuous interest in the residential, dietary and marital arrangements of footballers, band members and the like – a cultural difference I may never get used to.)
I like the ‘devil’s compass’ phrase (a device pointing south presumably), and the point about the pebbles is well-made. Perhaps this massive effort by the middle classes of Brighton inspired their colleagues in Southport to have the sea removed from their own beach, to avoid getting water between their toes.
Is there really a North-South divide on celebrity stalking? I remember reading an interview with Mick Hucknall (I must have been really stuck for something to read), in which he claimed he couldn’t go out in Manchester for being mobbed and shortly afterwards seeing him drinking in a pub near the town centre (The Old Garret – probably isn’t there any more) sitting on his own looking proper grumpy and being studiously ignored by the rest of the clientele.
Not sure what that proves, but there you go.
Didn’t even know that the Manchester’s Prole Art Threat had written a book (have been living under a stone for many years). I assume that it’s well worth a look?
The book’s OK, though I didn’t feel I got much more out of the actual book than I did from the Guardian extracts
http://tinyurl.com/6jw84r
http://tinyurl.com/6awhuy
Perhaps the celebrity thing is seasonal rather than geographical…
[…] comes in for withering poetic scorn at the hands of Mark E. Smith at some point. For instance, he has a go at my home town in his new book. The sometimes cliche-ridden products of HE marketing had to take their […]
It’s not just MES having a go… here’s what Attila the Stockbroker says about Brighton (his home town too of course), in a backhanded sort of favourable comparison to its North-West England namesake…
New Brighton
No supercilious yuppie hordes
No rip-off absentee landlords
No crap stude chains to ruin your pub
No overpriced, pretentious grub
No begging crusties hooked on smack
No London dealers pushing crack
No narrow streets clogged up with cars
No endless naff expresso bars
No pissed up blokes who fight and sing
No beer, no life, no … anything!
There IS a fort. Says ‘Open’. But
The gates are resolutely shut.
New Brighton. That’s a good idea –
But it’s not going to happen here …
Good stuff, equally fair and unfair to both places. Strangely I’ve never met Attila, though we have some mutual friends.
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Cool site. Thanks.