Back in the heat of summer, in early August, I asked about this subject. And while I plan upcoming /Tuesday Tens some months ahead nowadays, even I couldn’t have expected summer to effectively last into October.

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/amodelofcontrol.com now has a Patreon page, at this stage purely as a potential way of helping to cover the running costs of the site. There is absolutely no compulsion to do so: if you feel you can chuck a small amount to the site each month, that would be appreciated.

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But, of course, the summer temperatures finally evaporated away late last week down here on the Kent Coast, and certainly in the evenings it all of a sudden feels distinctly cooler. I did my last swim of the year last week, too, brought forward a bit by getting my first tattoo last week – by the time I can swim again, it will frankly be too damned cold for me.

So let’s go back to those warmer climes for one last visit in 2026, as I look at songs about sandy environments and beaches: there’s a lot of songs around the fringes of this subject, and I’ve used a number of suggestions in prior summer-based posts.

Join me to warm your day a bit: at least mostly, anyway.

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A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details above).

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/Jane’s Addiction
/Up The Beach
/Nothing’s Shocking

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We begin this week with a band from Los Angeles, a vast conurbation with a long shoreline (approximately 75 miles in LA County alone, 150 miles if we include Ventura and Orange Counties too) and a big beach and surfing culture – this, indeed, will not be the only song from the region this week. This song, the dreamy, rolling intro to Nothing’s Shocking shows little hint of the subversive proto-alternative rock that’s to follow – it is instead a proggy palate cleanser that crashes like the Pacific on the beaches of Los Angeles County. Incidentally, the song that follows it on the album, Ocean Size, shows Perry Farrell at least in his surfing gear on a local beach, and out in the waves too.

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/The Cure
/Killing an Arab
/Boys Don’t Cry

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A choice of title that has given Robert Smith and The Cure no end of grief over the nearly fifty years since it was first recorded, it remains a remarkable debut single. Not the only single of the era to try and condense a classic piece of literature into a couple of minutes, here Robert Smith retells some of L’Étranger by Albert Camus, where Meursault kills a man on a beach and is ostracised for daring to admit conflicted feelings over his actions. The stark sound evokes the big open spaces of a rural beach, where sound carries according to the wind and making out the detail on such a vast expanse can be very difficult indeed.

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/All Saints
/Pure Shores
/Saints & Sinners

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The recent death of William Orbit helped shine a light on just how much modern music he’d been involved in – and perhaps his greatest mainstream music moment was this frankly brilliant four minutes of pop music with All Saints (it was written by bandmember Shaznay Lewis and Orbit). Originally written for the soundtrack of the film The Beach (but Alex Garland’s book that it was adapted from is far better than the film, which lost a fair amount of the savage critique of rich white young people in “paradise”), the song has an otherworldly, dreamlike quality and builds like a brewing storm before an entirely unexpected switch-up into a dramatic bridge. The parts of the video that were filmed using night vision on a Norfolk beach – in January 2000! – looks like it was absolutely bloody freezing, too…

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/Belinda Carlisle
/Circle In The Sand
/Heaven on Earth

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Here’s another LA native, the lead singer of the Go-Go’s and later a solo artist in her own right: and the mighty powerpop of this album became a worldwide hit in 1987, this song being the third single from it. A more measured single than the barnstorming Heaven Is A Place On Earth that bust the door down, this song spends it’s time figuratively and literally on the beach (the video is a clever work for the time with different films showing on photos hung on lines over the seascape, and it’s popularity at the time probably wasn’t hurt by Carlisle’s striking beauty), as Carlisle uses motifs of circles for unbroken love and devotion, and the impermanence of things as the tide washes it away.

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/Hole
/Malibu
/Celebrity Skin

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While not from LA (Courtney Love actually came from up the coast in San Francisco), much of Hole’s output was thematically set in and inspired by the darker sides of the city, and by the time of Celebrity Skin, Love was a bona-fide star in her own right. With the polished, radio-friendly sound, it is a world away from the grimy grunge of their early days, but by the time of the release of this, the band had very much moved on and made it clear they didn’t give one fuck about their detractors. This song has a carefree feeling of killing time on the beach in the sunshine, and was apparently inspired by Love’s time living in the area in her years before Hole were formed – and in the fiery video (an uncomfortable watch in the present day after much of the area was destroyed in wildfires in early 2025), the band look like they are having the time of their lives.

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/Aesthetic Perfection
/Summer Goth

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Daniel Graves ruffled quite a few feathers with this song when it was released in 2023. Graves had made no bones about his love of pop music and his efforts to make his music more accessible, but even those pronouncements didn’t prepare us for this song, that balances a jaunty, Caribbean-influenced rhythm with lyrics that might resonate with a number of us of the Goth persuasion, before interludes of Black Metal blastbeats burst through like radio interference. Some of us actually like the sunshine, lazing on the beach and getting a tan – you don’t have to be of a pallid white complexion to be a Goth, but it’s no problem if you do.

I still don’t love this song, but I get the sentiment…

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/T-Spoon
/Sex on the Beach

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It is perhaps unsurprising that an awful lot of the Eurodance of the 1990s in particular referenced holidays and beaches: where else were you going to hear these songs other than in a holiday resort, day-in, day-out? Songs would trickle back from the Med resorts in particular as the summers went on, resulting in hit after hit later in the summer in the UK. Sex on the Beach was such a hit in the summer of 1997, with a reggae-lite approach to the sound and making great use of metaphors that blur the lines between the titular act and the sweet cocktail that only really works when it is really warm.

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/Darude
/Sandstorm
/Before The Storm

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A song that became a remarkable success: it was initially uploaded to the nascent mp3.com before becoming a worldwide smash hit that sold millions, and amid use in countless adverts and memes, saw Darude take centre-stage at the celebrations for the centenary of Finnish Independence! A distinctive four minutes of Euro Trance that follows the script of the time (opening hook, build, raveup, a monster drop, raveup to fade), it is the dance song that won’t die, and amusingly other than the title, has nothing to do with sand or beaches: apparently the title was the startup text seen on the JP-8080 synth Darude used to create it…

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/The Boo Radleys
/Leaves and Sand
/Giant Steps

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We leave the beach behind entirely for this moment from the classic Giant Steps, an album of towering ambition that sounds absolutely nothing like anything else released by a British band at the time: no-one else was pulling shoegaze into dub, jazz, motorik rhythms and harmonising pop. Leaves and Sand goes from despondent near-silence to squalls of guitar-led noise time and again, while Sice spins a tale of watching something, or someone, from afar as a dispassionate observer. The squalls of noise for me are gusts of wind intermittently swirling around the protagonist, the titular leaves and sand from the pavement proving painful as they try and hide from them without success.

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/Ganser
/Black Sand
/Animal Hospital

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I’ve only ever stood on black sand a couple of times that I can recall, and every occasion has been in Iceland, which I’ve visited on holiday twice. The island’s beaches are like nowhere else I’ve ever seen: obviously you’re not in a warm, sunny climate there, and indeed both times I’ve stood on the extraordinary beach at Vík í Mýrdal, it was shrouded in rainy mist, which only added to the allure.

Miles from anywhere, it could be the end of the world. And the much-loved Reynisfjara beach, just to the west, has significantly changed this year as a result of storms and erosion, and in time, the view from either Vík or Dyrhólaey (the other side of it) may never now be the same.

The song, by the way, is the snarling opening track from Ganser’s excellent album Animal Hospital, released last year.