Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside. I grew up in a quiet coastal town, where the shore and adjacent pine forests were my childhood playground. Just a few miles up the coast was Southport: the pioneering resort which kicked off a coastal vacation boom in Victorian Britain. Its smell is fish and chips, hot cotton candy and the briny ocean air—its sound is seagulls, children’s laughter, and the fairground organ, blasting out multi-instrumental music hall medleys at the end of the pier.
To me, that marvelous musical automaton will always be closely intertwined with the seaside experience. Perhaps they aren’t heard as often now as they were in the nineties—and far less so then than a generation or two earlier—but many Brits will still be familiar with this sound and its close association with ice cream cones, mini golf, and sunburn. So I was utterly delighted, on a weekend break to Wales last year, to experience something even more magical than a fairground organ; something which produces the same nostalgic noise, but without the aid of pre-printed cards: a theater organ, in the world-champion hands of young Scots organist Aaron Hawthorne.
Aaron was on a nationwide tour of theater organs (or cinema organs, as we call them over here), performing improvised scores to accompany showings of Nosferatu, the 1922 silent movie classic starring Max Schreck as the Dracula-inspired Co
