The Musical heritage of Hastings Pier by Olu Jenzen and Beatrice Rapley

The silent disco on the Hastings Pier was an event that aimed to test the potentials and limitations of telling the popular culture history of the pier through music. It was organised in September of 2015 as part of the Heritage Open Days.

The event was a collaboration between The People’s Pier research project and the Hastings Pier Charity.

Olu and Archie produced a podcast that showcased the musical heritage of the pier from the 1960s to the 2000s, based on research into the pier as a music venue and space for the enjoyment of a wide range of popular culture by the research team in collaboration with the pier archive team volunteers. It featured music, oral history and various seaside sound effects.

the Rolling Stones played Hastings Pier three times in 1964, but also groups such as The Kinks, The Who, The Zombies and artists such as Jimi Hendrix and Cilla Black sustained youth culture on the south coast as well as attracted young people down from London.

Hastings Pier has such a fantastically rich musical heritage – and is quite unique in how it became the host for waves of new types of music such as progressive and glam rock (Pink Floyd, The Nice, Genesis, Hawkwind, Sparks, T-Rex) and onward into the punk period (Sex Pistols, The Damned, The Clash, The Jam) and in the 1990s, as youth musical culture became more dance orientated again – like in the 1950s – Hastings Pier morphed into a rave party venue featuring acts such as the Prodigy.

See The Kinks and read more at http://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/thepeoplespier/2015/10/27/the-musical-heritage-of-hastings-pier/