When I was 13 my parents decided we could afford a holiday in Corfu. Aside from a day in Calais, the Haymans had never been abroad. Our regular trips to the Isle of Wight and Weymouth would soon be a thing of the past. We had entered the age of cheap air travel. It would be 20 years before I rediscovered the British coastal holiday.

I’m a songwriter. I feel there are too many songs and too many songwriters, so the best I can do is try to make songs about things that you wouldn’t usually find in songs. I write songs about astronauts, girls’ shoes and former lead singers of Genesis crying alone in airport lounges – that sort of thing.

In 2004 my music career was halted by a legal difficulty. I was advised to stop making records while it was sorted, but making records is all I know how to do. I fell into a depression. In times of trouble McCartney retreated to the Mull of Kintyre, the Band escaped to Big Pink in Woodstock. I took refuge at Cresswell Towers Caravan Park, 25 miles up the coast from Newcastle.

I took two ukuleles and a Minidisc recorder to my wife’s uncle’s caravan. I lived on Baron Romero wine and hard, thick pizzas from the onsite takeaway. Everything was warm, even when the weather was cold. The caravans were works of art. People had personalised them into extensions of their characters. Flowers, ornaments, trinkets, ornate fences and water fountains turned the park into a mutant cousin of the Ideal Home Exhibition. I went to bingo, but they spotted my notebook and camera and pegged me as the middle-class interloper I was. They still made me welcome. I wanted to belong but I knew I didn’t.

I wrote and recorded an EP. It was my best set of songs for years. I found myself writing about the people I’d met and was penning a much friendlier type of song. The Formica tables, the children’s room at the end of the bar, the determined swimmers in the “heated” swimming pool, were all things I’d forgotten existed. They made me think of my childhood. I wrote songs about how I viewed the future when I was young. I wrote about Elisabeth Sladen becoming my wife. I wrote about my hover car, my monorail and my robot slave.

When I returned to London I fell back into depression, and decided to turn the one-off project into a series of EPs recorded at classic British seaside locations. When my legal problems were over, the aptly named label Static Caravan offered to release the records. In 2005 my wife and I took the dog, the ukes and a drum machine to the north Devon coast. It rained hard and I wrote my wife love songs. I sang, “It can rain all summertime, I don’t mind.” I bought a vintage Bush radio. I wrote songs about mobile libraries, Betamax videos and Commodore 64s. I wanted to build a wall around me and never let the present near again.

The third EP was to be called Eastbourne Lights. The world preserved on the Eastbourne seafront is from a time before mine. They have milk bars. They have a Greek restaurant selling Beef Wellington, Chicken Maryland and prawn cocktail. They have a shop selling cakes with blue icing and hundreds and thousands and those tiny silver balls. Eastbourne has always been the destination of the older holidaymaker. Instead of writing songs about my childhood I wrote about what it might be like to grow old with my wife, dancing the foxtrot at the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne, drinking Earl Grey tea in my beige slacks. My wife wants us to retire to the Asturian mountains in Spain. I can’t see a middle ground.

Modernity emanates from the centre but never reaches the corners. The edge of Britain hides forgotten places and forgotten people. George Musgrave refuses to be forgotten to the extent that he has created a museum about himself. The Musgrave Collection lies on Seaside Road in Eastbourne and I’m genuinely surprised it isn’t world famous. He has amassed all the artefacts and mementos of his life and placed them in a room behind a shop front. You can see George’s coin collection, George’s model village and George’s painting of Olympian Sally Gunnell. Please visit it – you won’t get bored, just a little frightened.

The fourth and final of my Great British Holiday EPs was written at Butlins in Minehead in 2006. This time, instead of a ukulele and a Minidisc, I took a 16-track recorder, drum machines, microphones, guitars, basses and keyboards. I wheeled them on a trolley from my car to the chalet in front of horrified Red Coats. I experienced the same wave of childhood memories but I was more of an outsider here. I was a 35-year-old man alone with a camera and a Dictaphone in a family environment. I got funny looks at the kids’ shows.

I wrote songs about how much I missed my wife and how holidays aren’t the same on your own. I got the songs done and went home – which is really where I want to be most of the time.

www.myspace.com/darren-hayman

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