Scene and Heard: The bands and clubs that put Southend on the map
- Phil Shaw
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
Phil Shaw
While big urban hothouses such as Liverpool, Sheffield and Manchester have plainly produced more household names in postwar music, in terms of population there can be few cities, if any, to rival the lavish heritage in popular culture of Southend-on-Sea.
Procol Harum are its best-known gift to the world. Yet as a new exhibition titled The Scene By the Sea at the Beecroft Art Gallery demonstrates, there’s far more to Southend (182,000 inhabitants), Canvey Island (38,000) and their corner of Essex than skipping the light fandango and cartwheels across the floor.
The show, which nestles alongside works by Rossetti, Constable and Edward Lear, celebrates what its PR material describes as Southend’s ‘rich and rebellious’ pop culture. It is accompanied by a beautifully designed, written, illustrated and refreshingly free fold-out map.
The map charts the bands – also including Dr Feelgood, the Kursaal Flyers and Eddie & the Hot Rods – and the dancehalls, clubs and pubs where they cut their teeth. Not forgetting the record shops, coffee bars and fashion boutiques that helped make the town, as it then was, ‘a creative epicentre by the estuary’.
The late Wilko Johnson, who played in the most influential incarnation of the Feelgoods, reckoned Southend’s ‘seaside atmosphere’ made it ‘very fertile ground for rock ‘n’ roll’. So why don’t, say, Blackpool or Brighton have a comparable history? Maybe they do, and it’s just a matter of writers and artists combining to highlight it, as Will Birch, Kosmo Vinyl and Jules Balme have done for Southend.
Birch, now an author and music journalist but formerly drummer and lyricist for the Kursaal Flyers and The Records, penned the map’s Cultural Guide to the City along with the fascinating potted biographies of the 50 selected venues. He has a knack, enhanced by having actually been on the ‘scene’, for delivering nuggets of information which make you wish you could time-travel to some of the hotbeds.
Shades, a basement club on Southend’s Eastern Esplanade, is a case in point. Opened in 1961 by Len Trower, father of future Procol guitarist Robin, it was ‘Mod Central, with dozens of scooters lining the seafront outside’.
It was also home to The Paramounts before Gary Brooker and Co changed their name and direction to release A Whiter Shade of Pale in 1967. You can imagine it being the kind of place where ‘the room was humming harder and the ceiling flew away’ in both their soul/R&B and Bach-soaked psychedelia identities.
Then there’s Southend Pier. The longest of its kind in the world at nearly 1.4 miles, its claim to pop fame was its status as the starting point for the ship Royal Daffodil’s Rock Across The Channel trips. Gene Vincent and Jerry Lee Lewis featured just as The Beatles – and, down among the slot machines and cockle sheds, The Paramounts – were breaking the mould.
Saturday Beat Night at Victor Sylvester’s Ballroom on the High Street sounds like a culture clash to savour. Downstairs, the Odeon Cinema, where Laurel and Hardy performed in 1952, put on live shows by everyone from the Fab Four and the Stones to Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry.
The Kursaal Ballroom also spanned the eras and generations, with artists ranging from the Ted Heath Orchestra to Black Sabbath and the Faces. Shrubbery Coffee Bar’s clientele included ‘a teenage Helen Mirren’ and boasted ‘a good jukebox’ (now you’re talking). At TF Heath’s, a record shop and bicycle dealer: ‘You could listen to the latest discs in listening booths and also get your punctures repaired’.
Less cheerily, we learn that at Westcliff Swimming Baths, on the Western Esplanade, ‘Ian Dury sadly contracted polio in 1949’. Dury, like Brooker, has sadly left us, but Southend’s rich legacy, playful and poignant, lives on.
The Scene By the Sea exhibition runs until 26 October 2025 at the Beecroft Art Gallery, Victoria Avenue, Southend-on-Sea, SS2 6EX (Tel: 01702 212511).
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