ACFM 62: The Beach

**Jeremy Gilbert** (0:20)
Hello, and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Jeremy Gilbert. I'm here as usual with my good friend Nadia Idol.

**Keir Milburn** (0:29)
Hello.

**Jeremy Gilbert** (0:30)
And my other good friend, Keir Milburn.

**Keir Milburn** (0:32)
Hello.

**Jeremy Gilbert** (0:33)
And today, we are going to be talking about The Beach. So why are we talking about The Beach, Keir?

**Keir Milburn** (0:40)
Because it's damn hot outside.
We're recording at the midpoint in a historic heat wave. At times like this, people's minds turn to getting in the water, etc. And the primary place that people get into the water in the UK is either shit-laden rivers or shit-laden beaches. And so we thought we'd talk about The Beach. It's a nice summer topic. We did holidays last year. We're going to get a little bit more specific this time. And there's plenty to talk about in terms of The Beach, both in terms of it as a material thing and as a cultural thing, you know, a place of nostalgia, a place of freedom and a place where perhaps the problems of the world also appear every now and then.

**Jeremy Gilbert** (1:27)
And what about you, Nadia? Why are you interested in this?

**Nadia Idle** (1:30)
Yeah, interesting. I mean, I love the famous Situationist's quote, which translates as, Beneath the paving stones, the beach or Beneath the streets, the beach'. I think that's really interesting about how the beach occupies some kind of imaginary of a future that perhaps we want, of some kind of life without work and how the beach exists in, definitely the UK imaginary as this idea of a holiday. It's slightly different for me. I grew up with two seas, the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, which I visited often growing up. So definitely a space of leisure, but not necessarily a kind of untouched idea with, you know, the summer holiday per se. But I guess I'm also interested most specifically in, you know, not just the imaginary stuff, but the political economy of the beach, so to speak. So like, what is the history of the seaside, specifically in the UK? What does it say about migration and other things as well, especially about coastal towns and the politics and economics of that as well. And also of course, alluded to by Keir, the beach as a site of protest with, you know, anti-sewage campaigns and other stuff as well. So I think there's loads of interesting topics. Obviously, it is very hot at the time of recording, thankfully just past the heat wave. So our laptops and computers are not quite at burning point.
But that's one of the reasons why I think talking about the beach will be an interesting thing for ACFM.

**Jeremy Gilbert** (3:07)
All right, great. Well, before we get into it any further, we should mention that you listeners can go even weirder and even leftier by subscribing to our newsletter. We've got a lot of subscribers now. Please join us. This is an email newsletter that goes out just once with every new trip. So it's just once a month at most. With bonus content and updates from all of the crew.
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**Keir Milburn** (4:22)
Let's play Echo Beach by Martha and the Muffins. So Martha and the Muffins are a Canadian band. And they really only had one hit, which was Echo Beach. But I like this song because it really shows the imaginary of a beach as a place of freedom. We put it like that. A place of freedom as opposed to work as a time of unfreedom, perhaps we put it like that. So the song was written by band member Mark Gain while he was working at a wallpaper factory. It's the first song he ever wrote. And before that, he was in experimental sort of avant-garde bands.