Jack Cooper on his hometown of Blackpool

It's the place Vice go when they want to do a documentary on the Spice epidemic or in the fatuous photography books that poke fun at the working classes on hen parties or stag-dos. It's the heart of Brexit country where 67.5% of people voted to leave. It's no coincidence that Blackpool currently has the country's highest number of alcohol related deaths and male suicide rates, as well as unprecedented levels of opiate abuse. Maybe the 67.5% that voted leave are protesting something? I can't think of ever being in a more liberal, welcoming town than the "gay capital of the north".

I've always written about Blackpool and growing up on the coast. The imagery of the British seaside and the nostalgia of being a teenager there has been something I've constantly returned to. Even in the context of a short article like this, I'm struggling to express the way I feel about the place. I wish I was a better writer or a filmmaker, as I don't think anyone has ever got Blackpool down. At some point I'd love to create something much longer and in depth, but for now I feel pretty satisfied with this album Sandgrown. The mental image I have when I think of Blackpool and being a teenager there in the Summer is one of mist and that strange heat haze. I can always tell a photograph was taken in Blackpool, regardless of famous landmarks, because the look of the light. Making something 'sound' the way something 'looks' is fascinating. I wanted to make a record that sounded cinematic in that way.

Blackpool attracts a very weird and wonderful set of people...tourists obviously make up a high percentage of visitors, but like a lot of coastal towns I've visited like Santa Cruz in California; misfits and people living on the edge of society seemed to gravitate there. The greatest job I ever had was between the ages of 15 and 21 on Blackpool seafront, working as a deckchair attendant. Gynn Square was the furthest outpost of Blackpool Council's deckchair operation and unlike the majority of the other stacks; you'd work this one alone. Your day would usually begin by asking a homeless guy to move so you could open up. You'd set him up in a chair by the side of the stack and then start renting the chairs out to the tourists who hadn't figured out this was probably the worst part of the beach. The public toilets were like running the gauntlet. Sitting in a stall with two junkies shooting up next door and then from the other side an eye appearing through a glory hole is not something I'll forget. People would go down to those areas to lose themselves.

I guess writing about Blackpool is not really my forté. It's nice to explain songs sometimes, especially when the album is as specific as this, but sometimes you write songs to express feelings or process memories that you might not want to explain too much. Or so you don't have to.

I wanted to make something that had a similar air to the feeling I get when I think of the fields and woods around my childhood home. There was a weirdness that surrounded it, that will be familiar to anyone that grew up in a rural part of the north. Under Milk Wood would be a good reference point. That tapestry of odd folk and menace that Dylan Thomas wrote felt very familiar to me.