December is here and Christmas will soon be upon us. Thus this month’s Yuletide Time Machine explores a musical side of Christmas in Worthing that goes back at least 130 years. For as long as anyone reading this will be able to remember, the Salvation Army’s brass...

The period when Trevor Grant was briefly in Gary Numan’s band set him up for a lifetime doing his favourite thing, playing guitar. The Time Machine travels back with him to those years but finds there’s more to him than Are ‘Friends’ Electric?

A quarter century after it existed, the legend of Worthing rave mecca Sterns only grows. When people mention it, they usually mean In-Ter-Dance at Sterns, which ran from 1991 to 1993 and turned the place into one of the UK’s leading clubs.

Back in the mid- 1960s, if you’d popped into The Dragoon pub for a pint (Market Street, demolished at the start of the 70s to make way for the Guildbourne Centre), you might have tapped a toe to the band there. JED ARMSTRONG, ON DRUMS, was at the beginning...

DAVE FENTON MOVED TO WORTHING A YEAR AGO. Now the Time Machine materialises in his back garden to sweep him off. He’s best known for being frontman of The Vapors, and they, in turn, are best known for one monster hit, ‘Turning Japanese’, but there’s more to his life than that.

Not every rock’n’roll tale ends with stadium gigs, gold discs and blathering to Graham Norton on late night TV. 99% do not.

Last month the Time Machine followed Steve Davey from his Worthing childhood to London and the initial success of Steamhammer, the band for whom he played bass.

Of the hundreds of bands Worthing has given the world, a few have gone on to international success. This century the likes of Royal Blood and The Ordinary Boys carved a name for themselves (the Time Machine will reach them eventually), but they were far from the first.

Converted from a Victorian terraced house to Waldorf’s Café in the 1960s, 42 Marine Parade initially served ice cream with a dash of rock’n’roll spirit. By the mid-80s it had become the Boat and Anchor pub, with netting and plastic lobsters on the ceiling and a...

Last month the Time Machine followed singer Shirley Western from her childhood through to her performing in swinging 60s London with Ken Mackintosh and his Orchestra, hanging out with The Beatles, Shirley Bassey and the Queen Mother, and appearing regularly on BBC Radio.

In the late 1970s and first half of the ‘80s, the Shirley Western Showband was a well-loved fixture of Worthing’s entertainment scene. Every Thursday night at the Pavilion and Saturday night at the Assembly Hall they’d bring a dose of glamour and big band panache to the town.

This month’s Time Machine offers a photo gallery interlude courtesy of one of Worthing’s most devoted gig-goers. Since his retirement in 2013, Rod Cohen and his camera have been a regular feature on the town’s small but devoted micro-gig circuit.

Just because you own a musical time machine, it doesn’t mean you have to keep going back decades, to the last century and all that. Sometimes it’s a blast to just pop back a year, maybe take a peek at what Worthing was up to on the 31 December 2017.

This month the Time Machine returns to the 1960s. We take the journey with local resident Denise Tayler who once “saw Jimi Hendrix for half a crown”. Her story is also one of how music forms bonds and enriches lives. It begins in London.

CRASS Play Field Place Worthing, Saturday 6 June 1981 If The Sex Pistols kick-started the British punk movement and The Clash flashlit the possibility of social commentary, Crass actually lived punk as a political idea. They were punk’s conscience. Active between 1977...

This month the Time Machine takes a swerve and explores the life of a musician who’s been resident in Worthing for 16 years. His story doesn’t all concern Worthing but he’s one of ours so we’re going to celebrate him – Pete Fij.

The Worthing Symphony Orchestra and its predecessor, the Worthing Municipal Orchestra, have been part of the fabric of the town for almost a century. Whether you’re interested in classical music or not, they’re one of the area’s most admired musical institutions, and certainly one of its oldest.

The Time Machine has previously travelled back to Worthing gigs of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, a golden era for the town’s music scene, kicked off by promoter Freddy Bannister and his wife Wendy.

In Worthing 2018 a weekend evening can be a blast. If you’re willing to explore, there’s always something going on, something lively, curious and original, almost certainly something you can dance to. It wasn’t always thus. Rewind the clock only a decade and Worthing was very different…

Spring 2018, Sunday afternoon, Worthing Assembly Hall. About 200 are gathered. To applause, a magnificent Wurlitzer organ rises from the stage, the gaudy sound of ‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’ rings out.

1991-92 was a golden period for manic, homemade electronic dance music. Rave culture was peaking. Tunes – “choons” – were created cheaply and independently in home studios across the country using analogue synths, samples and chopped up breakbeats.

If you drive west on the A259 from Worthing, past Goring into Ferring, there’s a mansion house there, built in 1820. What few people realise is that, for a couple of years, at the dawn of the 1990s, it was one of the most iconic clubs in Britain: Sterns, a true rave mecca.

It’s strange to think of the bands who played Worthing in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. In fact, it seems almost unbelievable now, the names that performed at the Pavilion and at the Assembly Hall. How’s this, just for starters: Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Tina Turner and a tonne more!

Roy Stannard and Worthing’s Radio Heritage 1985-2018 The Time Machine has a tendency to veer towards the counterculture (and it always will!). However, music touches lives in many more ways than punk, psychedelia, rave and all that good stuff, and often on a much...

50 YEARS AGO WORTHING WAS A VERY DIFFERENT TOWN. However, as the ‘60s turned to the ‘70s, a small coterie of hippies not only survived in Worthing but, for a brief period, even flourished. The engine at the heart of their activity was a loose collective called the Worthing Workshop.

FOURTY YEARS AGO PUNK ROCK changed pop culture. Its lo-fi, aesthetic, belligerent attitude and, spiky sound inspired a generation. Music was no longer a closed shop.

Phun City Festival... LP Hartley’s 1953 novel ‘The Go-Between’ famously opens with the line, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” The phrase was never more apt than looking back at Phun City Festival, which took place on Ecclesdon Common,...