The latest piece for the Lincolnshire Suite focuses on memories of the famous seaside destinations of the Lincolnshire coast.

I have a real proustian rush when I see footage of seaside towns from the seventies and eighties. It reminds me so much of my own experiences as a child. The clothes, the shops, the cars, the faces of the people, all take me back in my mind to those happy childhood days.

Early years

My parents loved the North Yorkshire coast when I was young, we’d often visit Scarborough and Bridlington in my early years. This probably explains why I love being up here so much now as an adult. I’m about an hour away from both places, and that wonderful sound of the sea.

Back then my parents stayed at shared holiday lets, B&B type places, often painted bright white, and usually with a selection of small rooms and a live in landlord/landlady. I remember one time as a youngster mum had took me to the shared bathroom for a nighttime bath before bed, and we’d got straight in which was unusual, we normally had to queue. After starting to run my bath, there was a loud knocking on the door and shouting as the ferocious landlady gave mum a telling off for being in the bathroom five minutes before the allocated bathroom time. Her face was a picture which I’ll never forget, like a naughty school kid who was caught by the teacher. Suffice to say it was a very quick bath, world record standard, and we sneaked back up to our room before she came back.

I remember another holiday when I was a toddler where I managed to scratch a lot of wallpaper off the wall behind my cot, and there was a panicked repair job by my dad, muttering his usual “flipping kids!”

We stayed at some good places too, mum still talks of Mrs Holt, a landlady who we returned to a number of times as she was lovely and made us feel very welcome at her little B&B.

Another holiday I remember very vividly was in 1978 in October when I was six, I remember us staying up late watching the news on the little black and white tv in the room to see Pope John Paul the Second elected, it seemed very important at the time to mum and dad, and quite a spectacle to me as a young boy, watching the smoke come out of the chimney in the Vatican. To this day he’s still my favourite pope, and he must have left quite an impression on me, and the popemobile he had is iconic!

On the same holiday I also remember fondly passing the seaside shops with loads of toy cars in the window, like the legendary John Wherrits in Scarborough.

I was a typical boy obsessed with toy cars so it was very exciting to press my face against the shop windows and see the cornucopia of cars from Matchbox, Corgi and Dinky toys.

My dad used to sneak out at some point during the day and get me a little car from one of the shops we’d seen, usually a matchbox one, and it would magically appear each morning when I woke up, it was a “thing” that only occurred when we were on holiday.

When I see them now it takes my mind right back to those days. The artwork was so vivid and colourful and the shop displays were great too, lots of cars all in rows in their little cardboard boxes. It appealed to my ordered mind, I liked the uniformity.

The holiday in question actually was memorable because one day rather than a matchbox car he sneaked out and got me a larger corgi toy I’d been obsessing over in the week. A Touring Caravan was not the coolest toy, but for some reason it really appealed to me.

I’m not sure why I loved this but I did and it even makes me smile seeing it again now. It had some cool little features, the door opened and the awning came out, and there was a little plant in the window. I was a very happy boy that holiday.

I suppose it was that idea of interactivity that appealed and the idea of it being a literal holiday home, so perhaps in my young head it symbolised “holiday” and all the freedom and excitement associated with that.

It also reminded me of one of our other slightly eccentric pastimes as a family…

Sometimes on Saturday or Sunday afternoons if we didn’t visit a garden centre we’d drive out to a caravan showroom and pretend to be interested in buying a caravan, in reality mum and dad had no interest in buying one and just fancied a look at what the posh caravans looked like. I suppose it was a way of seeing how “the other half lived” and for them it was almost a role play, pretending to be upper middle class and that we could afford such a thing when in reality there was no chance! So that perhaps is why caravans were lodged in my subconscious and why that toy meant so much to me. A caravan was very much an aspirational thing at the time for many people I think.

A few years later caravans became a real holiday experience for us as companies like Hoseasons and Haven Holidays started to promote their big caravan parks as holiday destinations, rather than the pokey small caravans of old they were now filled with large static caravans that were a home from home, with all mod cons.

The first time we went to one of these was when I was eight years old, in 1980. It was Easter and I’d just had some time off school as I managed to catch Chicken Pox, and I remember mum asking our Doctor, Dr Ward, a lovely Irish doctor who always made me laugh, and was quite a character, if it was ok for me to go on the holiday still. They were obviously worried they would have to cancel! He said it was fine to go as long as I didn’t mix with other kids as I was still infectious, so off we went to Ingoldmells on the Lincolnshire coast near Skegness. One of the towns featured in the video for “Rhythm and Movement”.

It was exciting for mum and dad as it was the first time we had a static caravan and I remember my own excitement at having a bunk bed in my own room, I set myself up on the top bunk and had a fab time eating my Easter eggs and reading Asterix and Tin-Tin books in my own little bubble.

We had a fab time in the caravan and from then on we went for holidays in static caravans for a very long time, visiting lots of great places over the years in the UK.

While on the Ingoldmells trip in an effort to stay kid contact free we also visited the windmill at Alford, star of the Duty track “The Windmill”.

Teenage years

As a teenager my memories drift to Skegness, myself and a few friends would often have a little trip over driven by Graham (Gribbles) in his trusty white MK2 Escort estate and hit the arcades. Back then in the 80s while home computers were fun the real gaming aficionados played the arcades. Arcade games had better graphics and played faster and smoother than their home computer counterparts, and arcades had a great atmosphere back then too, as echoed in recent TV shows like Stranger Things where the local arcade is the hub for teenagers and gamer geeks.

In our home town of Gainsborough we had the Silver Slipper, but it was mainly one armed bandit machines with a pitiful array of 2 or 3 arcade cabinets at the back, although one of them was Double Dragon, so not all bad. Occasionally pubs had machines in too, and one we frequented regularly, The Peacock, now demolished, had a Golden Axe machine for a while, which I remember us enjoying a lot.

The arcade at Skeggy was a whole new world, literally full of light, noise and machines. We’d spend a whole afternoon there just playing as many games as we could, I played a lot of APB, Star Wars, Operation Wolf and Pole Position. Graham had a penchant for Robotron, and still does!

Myself and Graham played a lot of two player Bubble Bobble (still a favourite) and an excellent two player game called Xybots which played well, but ate our money on “continues”. If other friends came with us we often ended the afternoon with a four player game of Gauntlet too.

There used to be a great little family ran record shop in Skeg too, Herrick Watson which was there for 87 years but has sadly closed now. I got some great bits and bobs of music from there over the years.

We were so lucky to be less than an hour away from this whole new world, full of light, sound, rhythm and movement which felt so very different from our small sleepy market town.

Making the track.

The “Rhythm and Movement” track itself came together very quickly, I’d watched the footage from the 80s promotional videos again, and identified a few choice spoken word clips regarding seaside destinations and edited them into clips on Ableton.

This time the voices came first and I constructed the music around them, coming up with a nice slow start with some synthesised chords, I’d envisaged the track as a day trip to Skegness, with the slow start representing a sleepy morning. The music then building to a crescendo as the full seaside experience of rhythm and movement kicked in. Then fading back down again as the day ends. At the end of the track I added a repeating percussive loop to emphasise this and replicate the sound of a train fading away as the holidaymaker returns home after a great day at the seaside.

Coincidentally I’d managed to find a cheap classic Yamaha SY35 synth on a trip to Scarborough the weekend I recorded the track so quite a lot of the sounds came from that synth too, another seaside connection!

Then as with the other Lincolnshire Suite tracks, once I’d got the audio recorded it was a case of re-editing the video to fit the song. In this case I left the video in colour as I felt that a black and white video didn’t quite have the seaside joy I wanted to portray.

For me this video is the most nostalgic I’ve done so far and it resonates deeply with my own memories, especially because the child in the park at the start of the film is wearing exactly the same muppet t-shirt I had as a youngster.

I noticed when I uploaded this to streaming services that the previous Lincolnshire Suite song was uploaded in July 2025, over a year ago. I hadn’t intended that there should be such a big gap between songs, but unfortunately life has taken some twists and turns this year for me, some bad and some good.

I was worried that I’d lost my mojo with the Lincolnshire songs too, so it’s a big relief to get a new song finished and out for people to watch and listen to. For streaming release I backed the track with another new composition “The Buried Moon” which is an instrumental inspired by an old Lincolnshire folk tale from the Isle of Axholme, just down the road from where I spent my early years in Misterton.

I hope you enjoy the song and apologies for the longer than usual blog this time!