22 Beaches

22 Beaches were a six-piece post-punk and new wave group from Stirling, Scotland, formed in the late 1970s out of the short-lived band Alone At Last. Drummer Fred Parsons and guitarist Stephen Hunter were the two members who carried over from the earlier group, while the rest of the lineup came together largely through school friendships and local connections. The completed lineup was Hugh McGregor on vocals, Jackie Sharkey on vocals and synthesizer, Stephen Hunter on guitar, Simon Fildes on bass, Fred Parsons on drums and Billy McChord on percussion. 

The band developed during a particularly active period for Scottish post-punk, with Stirling sitting between the larger musical centres of Glasgow and Edinburgh. Their early sound was rooted in punk but quickly became more stripped-down, angular and experimental. Guitar, bass and drums were joined by synths, percussion and the contrasting voices of McGregor and Sharkey, giving the songs a slightly detached, sometimes unsettling character. Their recordings also show a gradual move away from the sharper punk attack of their early material towards more spacious, rhythm-led and dub-influenced arrangements. 

22 Beaches were an active live band and played a surprisingly wide range of venues around Britain. Their gigs included small clubs, university events, a swimming-pool boiler room and fundraisers connected with the miners' strike. One particularly memorable show took place at the International in Grangemouth, where they appeared on a bill with The Exploited and the first incarnation of the Cocteau Twins. The event even included a coach from Stirling for the audience and a buffet break during the concert. 

Their recorded output during the early 1980s was almost entirely confined to cassette compilations rather than conventional singles or albums. They appeared on 'The A.N.K.L.E. File', a compilation documenting bands and artists from the Stirling area, with tracks including “What Day Is It?” and “Sadie When She Died”. “Dust” appeared on a compilation connected with the fanzine Another Spark, while “Zoo” was included on 'An Hour Of Eloquent Sounds', issued by Glasgow's Pleasantly Surprised label alongside early recordings by groups such as Primal Scream, Cocteau Twins, The Wake and Sunset Gun.

 
The surviving recordings reveal several sides of the group. Earlier pieces such as “Zoo” and “Talent Show” have a raw, live-in-the-room quality, with Hunter's guitar and McGregor's vocals pushing against Parsons' drumming and McChord's percussion. Later material is more spacious and rhythmically sophisticated, with “Dust” built around bass, drums and percussion while the two vocalists create a layered, almost psychedelic atmosphere. “Cartoon Boy” is considerably more skeletal, using a persistent bass line, a repeating guitar figure and the interplay between McGregor and Sharkey. 

There was also a clear Scottish post-punk character to tracks such as “That Girl”, “One Of Us”, “Somebody Got It Wrong” and “Breathing”. Their music could move from tense, minimalist guitar work into punk-funk rhythms, jangling passages and dub-like spaces. The male/female vocal combination became an important part of the sound, particularly on “Breathing”, while Sharkey's spoken delivery on “Talent Show” added another experimental element. 

The group continued through the early 1980s but stopped in 1984, leaving behind a small collection of cassette recordings and demos. Much of the material remained practically unknown for decades, circulating mainly among people who had managed to find the original compilation tapes. The recordings were eventually digitised from the original cassettes by Conor Walker at the National Library of Scotland's Sound and Moving Image Archive at Kelvin Hall in Glasgow. 

The band's recordings were finally collected on 'Dust: Recordings 1980–1984', issued by Glasgow label Seated Records on 27 May 2024. The eight-track release contains five previously unreleased recordings alongside three tracks that had appeared on the rare cassette compilations. The sequence covers the band's development across the period, moving between their early DIY post-punk material and the more spacious, dub- and Balearic-influenced direction heard in the later recordings.