Cult indie band Los Campesinos! once wrote The Sea Is A Good Place To Think Of The Future.

For both John Osborne’s On The Beach and Amy Mason and Eddie Argos’s collaboration The Islanders, the sea provided an escape from difficult times. Osborne detailed a lunch-hour walk along Weymouth’s sandy beach taken while trying to teach a group of unruly Italian 14-year-olds. His stroll inspired a wealth of fantastic stories, ranging from the semi-regular Becock family beach cricket match to the Cleethorpes musician who ended up writing songs for the King Of Pop.

For Mason and Argos, the seaside provided a memory of a happy time in a painfully intense youthful relationship, played against a sky-blue canopy.

The two hour-long shows contrasted and linked together beautifully in terms of style and approach. Opening the night, Osborne’s piece was quiet, meditative, poetic and gentle, interspersed with retro film footage and carefully chosen indie pop.

Meanwhile The Islanders skipped suddenly from heartbreaking to hilarious and back again, broken up by photographs and fake postcards to their younger selves. Jim Moray’s minimalist song arrangements and Argos’s painfully honest lyrics supported Mason’s sharp and witty narrative, perfectly recreating the world of the late 1990s when only w****** had mobile phones, and reigniting audience memories of similarly doomed teenage crushes.