My Love, The Sea: On Writing "Airscape"

From the archives: a contact sheet photo by George Wright

And in the element of light
The sun reflected from the waves
Inshore it spangles
The child of air is borne upon the wind
That blows across the sea

This song seeped through me, and then out into the world, in the summer of 1986. The Airscape is what I call the view over Compton Bay on the south-west corner of the Isle of Wight. It’s one of my favourite places on Earth. The beach itself is a long strip of sand sloping gently into the ocean, beloved of swimmers, surfers, and those who just seek immersion. The sea isn’t very warm, though.

To reach the Airscape, you ascend by whatever means necessary up the steep hill from Freshwater Bay, past thickets of wind-flattened shrubbery and other tenacious clifftop vegetation until you gain enough altitude to see whole stretches of the world beneath you. Over to the west, Tennyson Down rises up from the Bay you’ve just left behind; it peaks at the looming cross atop it, then tapers down to the Needles, which are often silhouetted in the glare of afternoon sunlight. Behind you unfurls the golf course, and beyond its pulsating green sward lies the Mainland, that alien world full of roads, trains, and people - so many people. Sometimes you can see that far, sometimes you can’t. Regardless, you can feel your psychic windows cleaning themselves once you’re up there. You’re in clear air.

Walk a little further - or dismount from your vehicle - and you get glimpses of the beach below you. It’s windy up there: usually, a kindly gale blustering from across the channel, but occasionally, it’s a neck-shredding blast of icy Russian air piped direct from the east. The Military Road up which you’ve walked or driven (or ridden one of the occasional buses, if timing and luck are with you) bends along the coastline and runs close to the cliffs. Those cliffs are composed of soft, multicoloured sandstone called Blue Slipper that’s crumbling at a steady rate onto the beach below. The island is melting in slow motion: every year, the south face loses another few yards. The Military Road will fall into the sea soon enough, leaving ghost passengers and drivers at clifftop height above the future shoreline. I’ve often pictured myself among those ghosts (though as a pedestrian, of course) hovering above the people on the beach in centuries to come.

Walk across the field that currently still separates the road from the clifftops, and you can see the whole beach extending below you from east to west. It’s the closest I’ve ever felt to being airborne without flying in an aircraft. You’re high above everybody: detached, benign, like a trainee angel. If you were a balloon, you could float away until you burst over France, Southampton, or a plover’s nest. Black cattle drift around you. Once in a while, one of these poor, heavy creatures falls over the cliff…

The path descending from the clifftops to Compton Beach changes yearly as the cliffside crumbles. A rickety wooden staircase meanders from the wind-blown summit down to a marshy wasteland of melted Blue Slipper which, in turn, leads to the sea. Since I was 11, I’ve walked along that beach, seeing myself grow up and grow old, watching the oozing cliffside re-shape itself each year. It’s millions of years older than I am, yet still in flux. As I walk, I measure my own mayfly lifespan against it.

As long as there are people, or whatever our species develops into, they will patrol that shore. Or they’ll bask in the flies and sunlight, or batter themselves in the waves, or catch fish, or probe the rockpools at low tide for tiny crustaceans, or fuck in the shallow water - if they happen to have the right company.

In June 1986, my feelings about the Airscape and the beach below it crystallised into this song. The tune and some of the lyrics came to me as I was pacing up and down an echoey corridor with my guitar around my neck, in a holiday house in the nearby port of Yarmouth, where ferries run to the Mainland. The next day, I took my notebook on the bus to Compton, scrambled down to the beach and sat on a rock. Batting away the flies, I filled in the blank lines in my notebook.

Back in London just one month later, I recorded the song with my band the Egyptians, and this remains my favourite recording with that band. It seems to be a popular song with listeners too.

You can listen to Airscape on Spotify here, on Apple here and on YouTube here. The Element of Light album is available on compact disc and download via Bandcamp.

And in the element of darkness
The starlight shimmers on the spray
And falls towards you
Your perfect lover's never there
And if she was, she wouldn't be
And neither, though, would you