Turn It Up or Go Home: The Case Against the Generic Seaside Soundtrack

Stand on Blackpool's Golden Mile on a Saturday in August and you'll be hit by a wall of sound so aggressive it borders on the physical. Amusement arcades bellowing synthetic fanfares into each other, fish and chip shops competing on bass, the famous Tower Ballroom's Wurlitzer doing something dignified and defiant three streets away. It's cacophony. It's glorious. It is, crucially, Blackpool.

Now stand on the seafront of almost any other British resort and you'll hear something far worse: nothing much. A tasteful, corporate, volume-at-40% playlist of mid-2010s indie and background soul, piped from a speaker system that someone in head office approved. The same playlist, incidentally, that's playing in a shopping centre in Solihull and an airport lounge in Dubai.

This is a problem, and I'd like to make the case that it's killing something we should care about.

Every Pier Gets the Music It Deserves

The great British seaside towns have always had sound identities, and the good ones still do. Whitby has its folk scene — the annual Whitby Folk Week turns the town into a week-long session, and on any given Tuesday in the Elsinore or the Duke of York you'll catch a maritime ballad sung by people who mean it. Newquay thumps with surf-rock and drum and bass, unembarrassed and young. Southend's pubs still host the kind of Essex rhythm-and-blues that produced half of the 1980s. Margate has reinvented itself with an arts-led scene that hums through the Turner Contemporary's events and the town's small venues.

These soundtracks aren't accidental. They're expressions of identity. Blackpool is loud because Blackpool is loud — it's a town built on spectacle, on giving working-class holidaymakers more noise, more light and more fun than anywhere else dared. Muting it would be an act of cultural vandalism.

The Tyranny of the Tasteful Playlist

So what happened? Somewhere in the last fifteen years, a certain kind of coastal regeneration decided that the future of the British seaside was to be a branch of Everywhere Else. Regeneration consultants arrived with mood boards and the word 'curated' used unironically. Out went the pier organ; in came a Bluetooth speaker and a Spotify account licensed for commercial use, apparently.

I understand the impulse. Seaside towns have had a rough few decades, and nobody wants to romanticise decline. But there's a difference between modernising and homogenising. The generic playlist is the sonic equivalent of the same artisan bakery, the same reupholstered fish shack, the same 'coastal lifestyle store' selling rope-effect mirrors. It says: this could be anywhere, and therefore it is nowhere.

Compare that with the places doing it properly. Cromer keeps its pier pavilion theatre hosting end-of-the-pier shows — a genuine living tradition, with a band. Scarborough's Scarborough Fair collection of events and its thriving venue circuit give the town a sound specific to its bays and its history. These towns aren't stuck in aspic; they're specific.

Be Bold Enough to Be Loud

Here's my position, stated plainly: a seaside town should soundtrack itself deliberately, boldly and distinctly, or not at all. If you're Blackpool, be a wall of noise — lean in. If you're Whitby, let the fiddles out of the pubs and onto the quayside. If you're a quiet place like Southwold, then maybe the right soundtrack is the sea itself and the halyards of the harbour, and the discipline to leave it be.

What you should never do is the middle path: the anonymous playlist, the volume turned down so as not to offend, the sound of a town apologising for itself.

Music is one of the cheapest, most powerful tools a place has for saying what it is. The towns that get this — the ones where you can close your eyes and know exactly where you are by sound alone — are the ones people drive three hours to visit. Not because of the beach. Because of the feeling.

And feeling, it turns out, has a frequency.

So next time you're on a British seafront and hear that all-too-familiar corporate murmur, ask the question the playlist is designed to prevent you from asking: what does this place actually sound like? Then go find the pub where somebody's answering it properly.