Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 April 2024
Seaton Snook was a thriving community of fishermen, blacksmiths, teachers, seacoalers, labourers and musicians on the coast of County Durham, UK. After 1968, however, government records and newspaper reports referring to the town cease and there are, apparently, no former residents still living. This article outlines the creation of What Happened to Seaton Snook?, an internet-based archive of sounds and music from the area, its residents and its workers, devised to try and form a picture of the town and what happened there. Among the nearly 100 artefacts in this ethnomusicological study are pieces for piano and harpsichord, pedagogic works, folk tunes for voice and Northumbrian smallpipes, brass band music, Krautrock, psychedelic rock and works for magnetic tape. There are biographies and photographs of people key to the history of the town, and interviews with experts in matters pertaining to the artefacts. The archive also seeks to examine the economic and cultural neglect of the North East of England and the importance of the stories we tell around the music we make.
1 Ian Forrest, ‘Seaton Common / North Gare Pier / Seaton Snook and Seaton Channel’, Teesmouth Bird Club www.teesmouthbc.com/seatonsnookarea/ (accessed 11 December 2020).
2 www.seatonsnook.com/ (accessed 7 August 2023).
3 The lack of apostrophe in the name is deliberate, in reference to the then-respectable socialist-leaning, desegregated, Peoples Temple Christian Church Full Gospel, run by Jim Jones, who would later be responsible for the deaths of over 900 people in what became known as the Jonestown Massacre.
4 Kate Tyzak, ‘Peoples Mass Photos’, 6 August 2017.
5 George Brallisford and unknown interviewer, Interview with George Brallisford for Beat Instrumental (Seaton Snook, 1964) www.seatonsnook.com/gbinterview.
6 We have a recording of such an occurrence in the archive, and it is remarkable how unspectacular the sound of smashing electric guitars turns out to be: a guitar will usually take one or two blows before snapping, and with the strings no longer near the pickups, the only noise is of so many chunks of wood smacking against the stage.
7 Sheppard, Henry Fleetwood, ‘On the Melodies of Songs of the West’, in Songs and Ballads of the West, eds. Baring-Gould, Sabine and Sheppard, Henry Fleetwood (London: Methuen, 1891), p. xlviiiGoogle Scholar.
8 ‘Waltz of the Graces’ was even converted to be played on the Grande Carousel at Seaton Snook fairground, and we were fortunate enough to unearth a recording of the carousel on the 1990s ITV magazine programme Look at Brookwood during a segment on the Woking Fairground Museum; this can be heard on the Seaton Snook website.
9 Gaynor Leigh, ‘Letter to Jane Hopper’, 1930.
10 The piece was performed in 2021 at the Horniman Museum in London by the harpsichordist Jane Chapman; a video is available on the Seaton Snook website.
11 The large area of grazing pasture at the north end of the town.
12 Redacted, ‘Note Accompanying “The Crofter's Dream”’, 8 June 2018.
13 The pieces as written have no clef, no key signature and only four lines to a stave: as the pieces are in the same key, using the same eight notes, the clef and key signature are redundant; the bottom line is not needed since the tunes never reach lower than a G. The four-line stave has a precedent in the William Dixon manuscript from the early 18th century, which was deduced by Matt Seattle to be music for a similar nine-note instrument, the border pipes; see William Dixon, The Master Piper: Nine Notes that Shook the World: A Border Bagpipe Repertoire, ed. Matt Seattle, 2nd rev. ed (Peebles: Dragonfly Music, 2002).
14 Lambert-Beatty, Carrie, ‘Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility’, October, 129 (2009), pp. 51–84 (p. 54)CrossRefGoogle Scholar https://doi.org/10.1162/octo.2009.129.1.51.
15 Lambert-Beatty, ‘Make-Believe’, p. 54.
16 Lambert-Beatty, ‘Make-Believe’, p. 57.
17 Other examples of parafictional works include The Blair Witch Project (1999), which although best remembered as a fun, found-footage horror, also explored the idea of the internet as a source of misinformation; The Atlas Group (1989–2004) by photographer Walid Raad, which used fake photographs of the Lebanon to investigate how we document war; political activists The Yes Men, who use deep fakes and hoax websites for corporations and politicians to highlight their damaging activities; and composer Johannes Kreidler, whose 2009 work Fremdarbeit put capitalist exploitation at centre stage of the concert hall by claiming to have outsourced the work to underpaid composers in India and China.
18 Imaginary Histories, dir. by Jennifer Walshe (Sonic Acts Academy, 2018) www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqbCcvuB21s (accessed 10 January 2019).
19 As discussed in Imaginary Histories.
20 As discussed in Imaginary Histories.
21 The methodology owes as much to the philology and world-building of J.R.R. Tolkien as to any musical influence and is discussed at length in my thesis. Falconer Peter, ‘What Happened to Seaton Snook? A Parafictional Archive of Sounds and Music from an Abandoned Seaside Town’. (Doctoral Thesis, University of Southampton, 2022). Available at http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/454936.
22 The other reason why the band didn't make it was because their drummer, James Woodward, was terrible and was only in the band because he knew Ken and Marjory Tyzak, who owned the Blue Lagoon club where the band rehearsed. The Blue Lagoon and the Tyzaks are entirely real.
23 The exegesis section of my Ph.D. thesis was also presented as recordings and transcriptions of conversations between myself as the Artist and myself as the Archivist, extending the parafiction into the commentary itself.
24 Lambert-Beatty, ‘Make-Believe’, p. 54.
25 I was honoured to present the archive at the Hartlepool Folk Festival in 2022, where I interacted with people who remembered visiting the real Seaton Snook as children, and were – thankfully – enthusiastic about these new stories.
26 From an email to me dated 17 August 2020.
27 Lambert-Beatty, ‘Make-Believe’, p. 68.
28 A legitimate local history website recently ran two articles on the history of the real Seaton Snook, and used my website as one of their sources, quoting things that were figments of my imagination, without any verification. Additionally, I managed to list The Crofter's Dream on the Petrucci Library of musical scores, before moderators took it down as it was too recent to be out of copyright.
29 Lambert-Beatty, ‘Make-Believe’, p. 56.
30 ‘The Era of Fake News for Good Has (Re)Begun’, The Yes Men https://theyesmen.org/rant/era-fake-news-good-has-rebegun (accessed 27 January 2021).
31 Ibid.
32 Jensen, Michael, ‘Russian Trolls and Fake News’, Journal of International Affairs, 71, no. 1.5 (2018), pp. 115–24 (p. 116)Google Scholar.
33 Waiting for Work, dir. by Jack Ashley (UK: BBC Television Service, 1963).
34 Nationwide: Hartlepool, dir. by Philip Tibenham (UK: BBC Television Service, 1974).
35 ‘Skint Britain: Friends Without Benefits’, dir. by Owen Gower, Aaron Black and Phil Turner (UK: Channel 4, 2019).
