David Bowie crossing an alien landscape dressed as a Pierrot clown. Black Sabbath playing among the ruins of Battle Abbey. Olivia Dean running at the English Channel. Suggs fighting zombies outside the Carlisle.
All of it shot within a few miles of Hastings.
What began as an attempt to build a YouTube playlist turned into something better: an unofficial filmography of Hastings, St Leonards and the 1066 area going back nearly fifty years.
Some directors came looking for English seaside. Others looked at the same shingle and saw an alien planet, a desert island, a plane crash or the end of the world. The best way through it is along the coast.
Pett Level: where the world ends
Few beaches this size have a CV like it.
It starts around 1978 with director David Mallet and The Kenny Everett Video Show, who filmed Hot Gossip performing Cerrone’s Supernature on the beach — stark landscape, blown-out colour, video effects. Mallet shot Justin Hayward’s Forever Autumn there in the same period. Television films rather than promos in the MTV sense, but they matter, because Mallet came back two years later.
It is the biggest single entry on the map, and nowhere near the last production to work out that Pett can convincingly play nowhere in particular.
Three years later Charlotte Hatherley went further and turned Pett into another planet. Gavin Rothery’s film for A Sign follows an alien traveller across a barren world. The world is Pett.
In 2023 Jason McNiff added Try for the Sky, filmed at Pett Level by Mark French. At which point it becomes fair to ask whether Pett Level is a beach or Britain’s least celebrated outdoor studio.
Hastings: from Toyah to the Ghost Train
Hastings joins early. In April 1982 Toyah Willcox shot the sea and beach material for Brave New World here before the production moved to Battersea Power Station.
By the 1990s the old pier was on screen: Kingmaker’s Queen Jane in 1993, and Ash’s Tracers before the 2010 fire. Anyone who remembers the pier knows why film-makers wanted it — open sea, Victorian ironwork, amusements and faded grandeur in one location.
This is not Hastings pretending to be Brighton. It is Hastings because Hastings looks like Hastings.
The same years brought musicians with skin in the game. Hastings-born Tom Chaplin filmed scenes here for See It So Clear, restaging episodes from his own childhood. Sam Calver chose Hastings for Midnight. Both belong to a second strand: local musicians deciding there is no reason to hide where they are from.
The 2020s: a production base, not a location
Something changed at the turn of the decade. Hastings and St Leonards stopped being a place outside directors occasionally discovered, and became a place with its own filmmakers, studios and companies — Ramshackle Productions among them. The count rises sharply from here.
Rain became the point for M Huncho, whose Of Course was filmed here by Kelvin Jones in gloriously grim conditions. And Paradox, from the musical Lady M with Karl Queensborough, is the one to watch if you want to play spot-the-location: Bottle Alley, Gotham Alley, the beach under the pier, the seafront, the mini golf. A location tour disguised as a music video.
More recently, Jessica Sweetman’s Rise Up was shot on the Hastings shoreline by Chris Turner of Favourite Colour: Black, with actor Emmet J. Scanlan. The director lost his planned golden hour to cloud and high wind, shot the closing scene first and let the film get moodier — which is roughly the Hastings experience in one production note.
Kid Kapichi: the town as part of the brand
No band has put Hastings on screen more willingly.
Let’s Get To Work moved to the Pilot Field, home of Hastings United — the band in United colours, the ground doing more than holding the camera up.
Then Zombie Nation with Suggs, in which Hastings falls to a zombie apocalypse and the action centres on the Carlisle and the streets around it before everyone retreats to the pub. It may be the point where the town stops being a location and becomes a character.
St Leonards: the DIY end
Move west and it gets more interesting, because increasingly the people making the videos live here.
One early local entry I can confirm personally is Whitestar’s Deadbeat Poet, filmed here for the straightforward reason that I made it. It belongs to a DIY generation that barely shows up in searchable production databases, and there are certainly more from that period waiting to be found.
At the other end of the CV: Sophie Muller, who has directed Beyoncé, Blur, No Doubt and Annie Lennox, made James Righton’s Start by walking around St Leonards filming him on an iPhone. Seafront, under the pier, no production apparatus at all.
HotWax
Three videos, three local locations, and the point underneath them: bands growing up here no longer have to go elsewhere to make work that looks professional. The musicians are here, the studios are here, the crews are here, and so is an absurd range of locations.
Bexhill
Unlike most of this list, Bexhill isn’t doubling for anywhere. It is playing itself.
Battle
Which ends the journey a few miles from where Keane started.
What we still don’t know
This list is version one, and four things are genuinely unresolved.
Keane — Atlantic. Irvine Welsh directed it in 2006 and has said it was made near Battle. The coastline looks extremely familiar and our best guess is Pett Level. We have chased the production credits and cannot find one that says so. If you were on that shoot, or can positively identify the beach, we want to hear from you.
Two Flynn videos. Hastings producer Dan Matthews has said two music videos by the Irish artist Flynn were shot inside the Observer Building. We can’t work out which two.
Kid Kapichi — Thugs and Puppet Strings. Everything about Thugs points to a local shoot; we want a firm location before it goes on the confirmed map. Puppet Strings was filmed in a striking circular Georgian church, and we’d like somebody to name the building.
Wolf Alice at Pett Level. There is evidence they were filming at Pett in late 2020, while the visual material around Blue Weekend was being made. We have watched the obvious candidates and cannot point at a finished scene and say that’s Pett — so they are not on the confirmed list. Drummer Joel Amey has since moved to the area, which is interesting and proves nothing about a shoot five years earlier.
Also outstanding: Hastings band Alibi have talked about early videos on beaches in Hastings and Bexhill, and we don’t know which songs went where.
Were you there?
This is where you come in. Maybe you were an extra. Maybe somebody asked to park a production van outside your house. Maybe you supplied a horse, a pub, a church, an arcade machine, a fishing boat or fifty cups of tea. Maybe you watched a shoot and never found out what happened to the footage. Maybe your own band made a video here and we’ve missed it.
Our patch is deliberately wide: Hastings, St Leonards, Pett and Pett Level, Fairlight, Bexhill, Battle and the surrounding 1066 area. Major-label productions and fifty-quid DIY videos are equally welcome.
Send us the artist, the song, roughly when it was filmed, where, and a link. If we’ve got something wrong, tell us that too — the aim is a properly researched and constantly updated map, not another internet list that gets copied from site to site until nobody can remember where the information came from.
A film set hiding in plain sight
What stands out, having pulled it together, is how adaptable this small stretch of coast has proved. Pett Level has been an alien planet, a desert island, a crash site and Bowie’s dreamscape. Hastings has been arcade, football ground, storm and zombie apocalypse. St Leonards has supplied studios, churches, cinemas and streets where one of the world’s best-known video directors could work with nothing but a phone. Bexhill has had the confidence to play itself. Battle Abbey needed only Black Sabbath.
The landscape explains part of it. The rest is a network of musicians, filmmakers, producers, venues and studios that can now make things happen here rather than just providing scenery for people driving down from London.
Which means this list will keep growing. And somewhere on an old hard drive, a forgotten YouTube account or a VHS tape, there is another one none of us has remembered yet.
