Blackpool has a rich musical heritage associated with its tourist industry alongside a number of popular music scenes and artists that have emerged there. The first registered venue offering musical entertainment in Blackpool was the original Uncle Tom’s Cabin, situated on the cliffs at North Shore, from the early 1860s.^[1]

The Wurlitzer organ at Blackpool Tower Ballroom was played by Reginald Dixon from March 1930 until March 1970, with live broadcasts of his performances being aired each week during the summer season on the BBC Light Programme.^[2] Phil Kalsall has been principle organist at the venue since 1977.^[3]

Lawrence Wright was a successful music publisher and song writer who moved to Blackpool in the 1920s and opened 20 song booths, hiring musicians to play his sheet music inside which passers-by would purchase after entering to listen and sing along.^[4]

Blackpool was instrumental in the music of big bands who performed jazz and swing music in its dancehalls and ballrooms from the 1930s-1950s. Frequent performers from 1946 to 1959 were Ted Heath, Joe Loss and Jack Parnell.^[5]

In the post-war period Blackpool was the centre of live entertainment outside London and there was a proliferation of musical talent coming from and discovered in the town. The town hosted three or four variety shows per night during tourist seasons, each featuring popular music including The Shadows, Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck and American stars including Frank Sinatra who performed twice in the early 1950s.^[6]

The heyday of Blackpool’s musical history to date and the golden era was the 1960s when live music was offered in the town’s many pubs, clubs, theatres and concert venues to accommodate its millions of visitors.^[1] All the top British beat groups played in Blackpool, forging a tradition at the Winter Gardens Empress Ballroom of staging of rock, alternative and indie music with visiting bands through the decades including Queen, the Stone Roses, Blur and New Order.^[6]

Smaller music venues of note include The Galleon bar on Adelaide Street which opened in 1954 and was a magnet for musicians^[7] and Mama & Papa Jenks on Talbot Road, which attracted emerging acts of the 1970s including the Eurythmics and the Buzzcocks and evolved into a punk music venue hosting bands such as the Fits and the Membranes.^[1]

John Lennon spent a short time living in Blackpool as a child and would often visit family there and watch musical acts including George Formby and Dickie Valentine.^[8] The Beatles were booked to perform on South Pier throughout the summer of 1962 but their fame saw them outgrow the venue before they could fulfil their residency. They did go on to play a series of dates in the ABC Theatre and later the Opera House in August 1963 and 1964.^[1]

The Rolling Stones gig at the Empress Ballroom on the 24th of July 1964 resulted in a riot. The venue was left badly damaged, with fans smashing two chandeliers, tearing up seats and breaking a Steinway grand piano. Two people were hospitalised and around 50 treated for minor injuries. Blackpool Council banned the Rolling Stones from performing in the town again, lifting the ban 44 years later, although the band is yet to return.^[1]

Jimi Hendrix supported Cat Stevens at the Odeon complex on 15th of April 1967. There are claims Hendrix was refused entry to his hotel after the show due to intoxication. Pink Floyd played the Empress Ballroom a month later, on 26 May 1967. Hendrix and Pink Floyd both returned later that year to perform on the same bill at Blackpool Opera House on 25 November 1967. Pink Floyd returned to Blackpool on 21 March 1969 to play the Blackpool Technical College Arts Ball on 21 March 1969.^[1][9]

Factory Records' Section 25 formed in Blackpool in 1977. Their key recordings include the US crossover club hit Looking Form a Hilltop and the album From the Hip.^[10] Another Blackpool band signed to the label was Tunnelvision, who recorded just one single for the label in 1981.^[11]

The large number of musical artists connected to Blackpool exceeds that of the town’s comparable size^[6] and include the band Boston Manor, Chris Lowe, Graham Nash, John Evan, John Robb, Jon Gomm, Karima Francis, Rae Morris, Robert Smith and Section 25. With the exception of grime artists, however, their hometown hardly features in the work of these artists and we never heard about ‘Blackpool sound’, as opposed to the Mersey Sound or Madchester.^[6]

Blackpool has, conversely, has been referenced within popular music for the best part of a century.^[12] Stanley Holloway’s 1932 comic song, The Lion and Albert tells the story of a small child being eaten by a lion at Blackpool Zoo and George Formby, one of the town’s most successful regular performers in the 1930s and ‘40s, penned songs including Blackpool Prom, Sitting on the Top of Blackpool Tower and With My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock.^[12] The George Formby Society formed at the Imperial Hotel with 56 members a few months after Formby's death in 1961. Now consisting of over 800 members worldwide, many return to the same hotel quarterly to for society conventions.^[13]

In the latter part of the 20th century songs inspired by Blackpool included, Blur’s This Is a Low, Soft Cell’s Say Hello, Wave Goodbye, Manic Street Preachers' Elvis Impersonator, Blackpool Pier and The Kinks’ Autumn Almanac, which has been called ‘the most British song of all time’.^[6]

Up The Pool by Jethro Tull, who formed as a blues-based rock band in the Blackpool in the late 1960s, was released in 1971. It differs from the band’s other musical output at the time with frontman Ian Anderson, who lived in Blackpool, choosing to reflect national identity both lyrically and musically in a conscious rejection of the American music that influenced so many other British bands of the era. In Blackpool Tower Suite, Manchester indie band World of Twist present a personification of the Tower almost as a female deity presiding over the pleasure grounds of Blackpool.^[12]

Blackpool-born singer Rae Morris’s 2022 album Rachel@Fairyland pays homage to her hometown with songs referencing Blackpool Tower, childhood memories, the town’s LGBTQ+ community and it’s deprivation. Music videos for singles No Woman Is An Island and Go Dancing were shot in Blackpool, as was the video for her 2021 standalone single Fish n Chips, featuring grime artist Sophie Aspin.^[14][15]

Many songs about Blackpool reflect its position as a popular holiday destination for the working classes.^[12] Folk singer Howard Broadbent’s 1983 song Blackpool Belle was rerecorded by Bolton folk trio the Houghton Weavers in 1993 and, like the song Blackpool by indie band the Delgados, speaks of happy memories of bygone days and of the sense of comradeship. Meanwhile, Tatty Seaside Town by punk band The Membranes, who formed in Blackpool in the 1970s, reflects the experience of young men growing up there. The Fall, in their 2003 song Idiot Joy Showland, reflect on the town’s artifice while Macclesfield-based punk band the Macc Lads, in their 1985 song Blackpool, boasts of outrageous and offensive behaviour reflective of the idea of that the town is a place to shed inhibitions.^[12]

Recurring motifs in songs about Blackpool include the idea that Blackpool is an important part of English identity,^[6] the distance between the glittering surface and a grimier reality of the town, and of Blackpool as a place of freedom and relative sexual freedom, as embodied by the Kiss Me Quick hat or “saucy postcard”.^[12] While depictions of Blackpool in popular music represent a wide range of attitudes to the town, their connection to the English working-class is inevitably a persistent seam running through them.^[12]

Blackpool has played a significant role in music scenes including northern soul, punk, rave and grime.

Locarno Mecca opened on Central Drive in April 1965 attracting acts including Slade (1972), Bob Marley and the Wailers (22 November 1973) and Martha and the Vandellas (25 February 1977).^[1] The venue went on to become home to one of four legendary northern soul nights in the Highland Room, established in 1970 by local DJ, Tony Jebb along with Les Cokell, followed by Ian Levine and Colin Curtis.^[16] At the end of the 1970s it was renamed Tiffany’s and later the Rhythm Dome, home to Federation – influential in the 1990s house and rave scene. It was demolished in 2009.^[17] Blackpool retains a strong connection to northern soul with major weekender events still taking place in the town at both the Blackpool Tower and the Winter Gardens.^[18] The town also remains a frequent destination for soul weekenders, which were popular during the jazz-funk era of the mid-1980s.^[6]

Blackpool’s embracing of punk in the 1970s and the subsequent middle-class reaction to to it has been likened to the anxieties of the middle classes during the influx of working-class visitors arriving via the railway system to Blackpool with in Victorian times.^[12] Blackpool’s connection with punk is also said to reflect and gains its strength from Blackpool’s poor life prospects in terms of employment, recreational drug use, health, housing and antisocial behaviour.^[19]

Blackpool was not initially at the forefront of the punk revolution, with its youth culture still preoccupied by northern soul throughout the ‘70s, and became more well known for its homegrown post-punk groups, The Membranes, The Fits, Section 25 and the Ceramic Hobbs.^[19] But punk has held on well in Blackpool which has hosted the annual Rebellion Festival since 1996, attracting international visitors and claiming to be the largest independent punk music festival in the world. Its line up regularly includes many major bands from the heyday of punk. Sham 69, who played the festival in 1996, celebrated the event and its promotion of the punk values of acceptance and solidarity with their song Blackpool, released the following year.^[12][19]

In the mid-2010s a number of mostly school-aged MCs began to showcase themselves on YouTube channels including Blackpool Grime Media (BGMedia).^[20] The aggressive and unapologetic branch of rap resonated with disaffected young people in Blackpool.^[21] Artists on BGMedia, including Afghan Dan, Little T, Millie B and Sophie Aspin, became the subject of a 2016 Vice documentary Noisey Blackpool: The Controversial Rise of Blackpool Grime, followed by 2017’s Noisey Blackpool 2: One Year On. And in October 2019 Channel 4 aired It’s Grime Up North, a documentary criticised for its “sneering derision” of children as young as 12 growing up in challenging circumstances.^[22] Meanwhile Blackpool grime’s amateur approach was not taken seriously by music industry gatekeepers.^[20] Millie B’s 2016 track M to the B is a viral song that sparked a ‘chav-make-up’ trend on TikTok. The song ‘sends’ for Aspin as the pair were pitted against each other although the pair are now friends. Aspin claims that at the time she was exploited and incentivised with drugs to perform. Hip hop collective House of Wingz has gone on to work with Sophie Aspin and Millie B, teaming them up with Grammy-nominated producer Nat Powers.^[23]

Alongside the Empress Ballroom, which continues to host large touring bands, there are two independent music venues in Blackpool. Opened in 2014, Bootleg Social has established itself as a regular fixture for nationally touring bands and provides a platform for local musicians.^[24][25] The Waterloo Music Bar is a popular independent music venue, regularly hosting local and touring bands with a focus on the punk, rock and metal genres, since its reinvention in 2015.^[26] In Good Company is a grassroots music collective in Blackpool that seeks out and nurtures musicians from across the Fylde Coast and provides them with regular gigs across the town’s venues.^[27]

Ramp City is a 29,000 sq ft indoor skatepark in Blackpool. It is made up of wooden ramps and consists of a large street, park and transition section.^[28] The park was home to a full pipe and kidney-shaped bowl but these were removed in 2016 to make way for a roller rink. It still houses one of the the UK’s biggest vert ramps (13ft 3in) and hosts the UK Vert Series Seaside Sessions.^[29][30] In 2014, then number one UK female skater Lucy Adams named the park one of her favourites in England.^[31] Ramp City also contains a branch of independent skate shop, Big Woody’s, that first opened in Blackpool in June 2002.^[32] In 2020 the park began hosting girl’s only skate nights.^[33]

The Skate Like A Girl (SLAG) collective is a group of female skaters from Blackpool who aim to reclaim the derogatory language they claim can be used towards women in the sport and create safe and inclusive skating environments for women. It works closely with Reclaim Blackpool, a project mapping sexual harassment in public spaces in the town.^[34][35]

In May 2022 a new all concrete 4,000 sq m skatepark was built on Stanley Park in Blackpool following a community fundraising effort to replace an old run down skatepark.^[36]

Live Like Ralph is a charity celebrating the memory of local skater Ralph Roberts who died suddenly of Sarcoidosis in 2021. It aims to provide skateboards and equipment to young skaters and build and maintain skateparks. In 2023 it collaborated with another Blackpool charity, Skool of Street, to build a safe and supportive indoor skatepark called Ralph’s House at House of Wingz studio on Back Reeds Road.^[37]

Disorder is a 2021 short film by the ATB Collective highlighting hidden and well-known skate spots in Blackpool.^[38] Curb Culture is a skateboarding zine highlighting local skateboarding culture.^[39]