Peter Kimpton 

Readers recommend: songs about the coast

Crashing surf, rocky cliffs or serene sands, suggest songs in those fertile or mysterious places where land meets sea, says Peter Kimpton
  
  

An endangered Hawaiian Green Sea Turtle (Honu in Hawaiian) swimming behind a breaking wave in the shallow waters off of the North Shore, in Oahu, Hawaii.
Give us a wave. Here’s one, with a green sea turtle off the coast of Oahu, Hawaii. Photograph: Clark Little/Barcroft Media Photograph: Clark Little /Barcroft Media

This week let’s take a trip to the coast, and together walk along the shoreline for some musical beachcombing. All manner of stuff might wash up, from a beautiful shell or fossil to an old bottle stuffed with a rescue note, strangely sculptured driftwood, a giant jellyfish, oil pollution, a shipwreck, a mysterious person, but hopefully nothing as disturbing as an exploding whale. But above all let us search for songs that make mention of the place where land and sea meet. But in geological terms, where exactly is this? The difficulty in measuring it is called the coastline paradox. And the edge of the land, in prehistoric times, was probably perceived as the precarious edge of the world.

This is fertile brief, for the coast is both the land and sea either side of the shoreline. And perhaps that’s one of many reasons why mention of ports, beaches and cliffs inspire the imagination of explorers, storytellers, and songwriters. They represent a lookout and launch into the unknown, the border to a better life, an escape, an adventure in to either death, glory or riches. Britain’s jagged coastline is estimated at 11,000 miles in length. Has this shored up its independence, or made it more vulnerable? Britain also has some odd coastal places. The Broomway in Essex, for example, on a flatland almost indistinguishable between sea, land and sky, has claimed dozens of lives because of how easy it is to lose your way and be caught by the tides rushing in.

The world’s coastal areas are also nature’s melting pot, where not only water and rock collide in a battle of erosion, but also unique and often beautiful miniature ecosystems of weather of seawater and freshwater merge, where crabs and turtles cross sands and lay eggs, the rocks where puffins perch, the ice where penguins slide, where sunseekers surf or flop like fat seals.

And coasts come in all shapes and sizes, from the rugged rocks of Norway, Cornwall, Dover, Ireland or Portugal to the flatter sands of Somalia, Australia or California, where there are sandbars, lagoons and runnels, or the mangrove creeks of India, Thailand or the sweaty crocodile-filled southern US states. Cultures, particuarly music, are formed by their proximity to the sea, with areas such wetland Fens of eastern England an unusual fusion. But in such places vibrant communities can suddenly find disaster strikes, such as Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 to Hurricane Katrina smashing through the levees into New Orleans.

Although there here have been previous topics of water and a long time ago the sea, there are still many shorelines to explore. So whether the surf is up or the boat comes in, this week’s curator of the coast will be the impeccable suzi, who will gather your pickings with precision and place them in a results post next Thursday 7 August, so please put in your findings by last orders (11pm BST) on Monday 4 August.

In a change from the usual form, I leave you a new release that touches on this theme, some of west coast wanderings by Lana Del Rey. It’s an odd fish, with unusual changes of pace, just like the tide itself. But as Lana puts it: “You’ve got the music in you.”

To increase the likelihood of your nomination being considered, please:

• Tell us why it’s a worthy contender.
• Quote lyrics if helpful, but for copyright reasons no more than a third of a song’s words.
• Provide a link to the song. We prefer Muzu or YouTube, but Spotify, SoundCloud or Grooveshark are fine.
• Listen to others people’s suggestions and add yours to a collaborative Spotify playlist.
• If you have a good theme for Readers recommend, or if you’d like to volunteer to compile a playlist, please email peter.kimpton@theguardian.com or adam.boult@theguardian.com
• There’s a wealth of data on RR, including the songs that are “zedded”, at the Marconium. It also tells you the meaning of “zedded”, “donds” and other strange words used by RR regulars.
• Many RR regulars also congregate at the ‘Spill blog.

 

Leave a Comment

Required fields are marked *

*

*