Pleasure architecture…
...at the seaside, the resorts, the frequented towns: the proms, piers, bandstands, lidos, sun terraces/lounges, pavilions and colonnades, the concert halls and theatres and canteens and restaurants and pools. Everything in Georgian and Victorian and Edwardian and art deco and post-war, Festival of Britain-y. But hopefully deco.
Sun architecture in the places where the sun was sought. Floors and walls with deco’s radiating sunbeams shooting out across them. Stonework with that sort of high contrast, schematic human form carving, fans of lines set in the panes of windows and doors. Grand staircases, decorative balustrades, metalwork and fittings.
“Other materials came to the fore, especially steel and reinforced concrete, used, in the 1920s and ‘30s, to construct a new architecture for the sun, including massive sea defences embroidered with walks and sun terraces, modernist lidos, and minimalist Art Deco pavilions and hotels. Buildings included modernist structures such as the De La Warr Pavilion of 1935 designed by Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff and sited incongruously on Bexhill’s otherwise sedately suburban seafront, and the equally out-of-place Midland Hotel, constructed two years earlier to the designs of Oliver Hill with decorative ornamentation added by contemporary artists, on Morecambe’s decidedly Victorian coastal fringe.”Fred Gray, Designing the Seaside, (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2006) p.52
Seaside spaces are generous spaces – they’re cost-free open space. Councils and the philanthropic provide benches and sunken gardens and shelters and toilets and flowerbeds and greens and ponds and water features and… all just there to walk round. Sun terraces with low walls, pillars, urns and benches ringing them. Things that are free for a family to enjoy. Hotels and restaurants with sun lounges the size of football pitches, filled with people who’ve maybe bought a cup of tea for pence and then sat there for hours spending no more. Big generous space and big generous architecture.
Seafront pavilions with theatres: mass seating areas undulating with raised and lowered sections – all railings and geometric patterned carpets. These sorts of buildings have everything writ large. Entrances and fittings repeat like infinite mirror reflections (why have one door, or a large door, when you can have like six (6) little ones equally spaced – confuse people while you make them queue for a bottleneck).
Everything’s impossibly huge. The venues we get now have far greater capacities but with much smaller bars, open spaces, stairs and ceiling heights than the distended open spaces of the 1920s, 1930s… Then you got a wall of glasses behind the bar the size of a double decker bus – in a dance hall with barely a couple of hundred people in it. Modern venues are big, but purposefully – it’s space to match maximized ticket sales, efficient with budget airline seating configurations.
But old venues were built big so that they looked bright, gasp-inducing, impressive – not just to fit more people in. Cubic meters of nothing but air, higher and higher and higher above everybody’s heads. Then some gilt-bombed dome or chandelier or whatever topped it all.
And mechanics – there’d be spinning dance floors and sprung dance floors and self-elevating/descending dance floors (and obviously the cinema organs doing the same).
Features for features’ sake – bridges and raised walkways and phoney trees and outdoorsy-ness – all indoors, for the wow factor that Vegas hotels go in for now. Brighton’s Hippodrome had a plaster Bridge of Sighs in its Palm Court. It’s like it’s theatre. You put in ‘go up just to come down again’ stairs to give the impression of transition.
And these Liberace venues – the pavilions, halls, ballrooms, winter gardens… even just the canteens and sun lounges – these are where you’re going to see the architecture and fixtures that turn up in the ballrooms and dancehalls in Fred Astaire movies, or at least the stylized sets representing them in those films.
Today these places, if they’ve survived at all, are converted/updated to suit their aging, original audience – it's all bingo, coach trips and god’s waiting room. But go back then: it looks like holiday. Like American yet European yet American FUN. Bronzed, stylish, leisure. Effortless life, sophisticated and choreographed and genteel and nice.
And that architecture is in the cinemas too – the palaces showing the movies that mix the dance/deco/drink architecture and music and lifestyle and dress code. Brighton’s Regent Cinema actually had the whole set: the deco building, the silver screen, the swanky restaurant/bar and, topping it all, the (sprung) dance floor – you could watch and live the movies (aptly enough, the last film the cinema got to show before demolition was the dance-happy Cabaret).
Living the movies… Onscreen it’s all about dancing with my girl. Bunking the fare to find that girl. Seeing my boy/girl to explain the misunderstanding before he/she goes and it’s too late.
I guess the gender portrayals are a bit unfortunate. The guys won’t stop until they’ve swept the women off their feet and the women tend to, underneath it all, really rather like getting swept off their feet.
You start with pre loved-up guy showing off with his male friends/colleagues (‘There ain’t nothing like a Dame’ or something). Lead guy narrows it down to one woman he genuinely likes; tells her. She tips a drink over him (literally or metaphorically) before catching a quick, unnoticed glance at him as she’s walking off, utterly flattered and willing. Ensuing mess of his public bravado versus her private wisdom regards love/life, lots of tenderness then arguments then back again between he and she, then they get together.
It’s probably a bit mean and even risky for affordable mass culture to open up every Tom, Dick and Harry to the idea that, if they walk up to the best dame they ever saw and tell her so and she says ‘beat it, sport,’ the woman is in fact going to be utterly head over heels for them underneath it all.
But it filled the theatres and the song lyrics, and it is complicated along the way with genuinely complex, fleshed out characters. And each sex gives as good as it gets (end of the pier innuendo free of charge there).
End of the pier… The seaside has become associated with far simpler, easier sex. Everyone’s turned up for the same thing. You just ask for it and get it, no games. You’d imagine Brighton beach looks like that bit in Queen’s ‘I Want to Break Free’ video where Freddie Mercury rolls along on the bodies.
In the Garden of Eden lay AdamPlaying around with his madamHe chuckled with mirth‘Cos he knew on this earthThere was only one pair, and he had ‘em
“He knows a lot, that one – he knows ‘em all.”
(Kenny Ball & His Jazzmen, ‘Have a Drink On Me’, Pye Records, 1972)
And the bands and acts that perform in these seaside towns and venues are likely to sing at least some of the songs those films were built around.
We’re all in on the same pleasures – that’s what it’s all about, sing-along. The concert venues are big, open and communal. The lyrics in the songs and the points of interest in the banter between them are all about what the audience can appreciate and connect to.
This was when the between-song jokes were about promoters, stingy venues, bad food... The bands’ lives were probably astral in similar ways to bands now – different social experiences, connections, drugs, status symbols... to what the public access. But onstage the show business given to the audience is more of a ‘you could do our job, folks.’ Though the folks clearly couldn’t.
Serious musicianship and humour. Jaw dropping solos or long notes with lung rupturing capacity. The gimmick songs with sound effects or funny voices, used sparingly and with perfect timing, to raise a smile. Well-earned applause that’s involuntarily heartfelt.
‘Entertainment’ acts. Not bands that holler the name of the town they’re in to thousands of hysterical, already converted fans. These are singers and bands who are trying to win over an audience in a venue (even now, when they’ve been doing nostalgia tours since the ‘70s). They’re accustomed to dressing up and speaking smoothly between the songs, presenting their talents and talking engagingly between the music. They’re raconteurs with a winning enthusiasm.
And, like the seaside architecture and holiday-ness of the venues, the acts are kind of transatlantic in purview and contacts. The Chris Barbers and Kenny Balls could talk about Louis Armstrong and Muddy Waters and Alcide "Slow Drag" Pavageau because they counted them as friends. They soaked up and lived and breathed the culture in New Orleans while on tour. Chris Barber can talk about musicians who hitched aboard merchant ships to cross the Atlantic to be with a girl.
And yeah, there’s that sweeping off of feet again.
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