THE sounds were those of the juke box and the hissing of an espresso machine. The smell, coffee. The taste, froth, coffee flavoured. The touch, smooth Formica surfaces.

For those who were teenagers in the Fifties and Sixites, the mere mention of the word coffee bar brings powerful memories flooding back on a tide of coffee-tinted nostalgia.

Coffee bars were a feature of towns around Britain 50 years ago, but Southend had more than its fair share.

Numbers were swollen by the swarms of Mods and Rockers, from London’s East End and beyond, who visited Southend at weekends and bank holidays. But local teenagers were the mainstay.

If you were young and had any sort of claim to a social and/or love life, then the coffee bars were your haunt. They remain part of the DNA of thousands of 60-something Essex people.

The coffee bar, as known to that generation, is an extinct species now. The Shades, the Zanzibar, the Panda, the Capri, the Shrubbery, the Black Cat... they are all vanished, taking their evocative names with them.

But at least their place in social history should be guaranteed.

Two quite separate research projects are under way to collect memories of the old coffee bars.

Tony Adams, 43, a Southend policeman, has been researching his mother’s background as part of a family history project.

“As I’ve grown older and had kids of my own, I wanted to be able to pass on details about our family background and the lives our mums and dads lived,” says Tony.

“Coffee bars were a very important part of their lives. They gave teenagers their first chance to break away from their families and have lives of their own outside the home.”

Tony’s mum met his dad in a coffee bar. Their relationship was short-lived and left behind none of the normal snapshots, letters, or other records.

But Tony hopes that by painting a picture of Souuthend’s coffee bars, he can recreate something of his mum’s life at the time.

“The kids in those days couldn’t afford cameras, so there are very few pictures,” he says.

“I’m having to use words and memories to build a picture of my mum instead. But I know she wore the fashion clothes of the time. I have this vision of her with bouffant hair and slim-cut jeans, leaning against a juke box.”

Tony’s researches into the coffee bars are tinged with regret.

“They were a place the kids could go without doing drugs or getting smashed out of their minds,” he says.

He wishes that was still the case: “They were safe then. As a policeman, seeing what happens to kids nowadays, it breaks your heart.”

Tony’s inquiries have evoked a wave of response from the coffee bar generation.

Letter writers helped to identify the most iconic coffee bars in Southend and their location, along with the most-fondly recollected personalities, such as Denny Knot, who ran the Panda in Southchurch Road.

Some of the reminiscences are touching. Maureen Reuben recalls she met her husband Mick at the Zanzibar.

She says: “I was 15, he was 18.”

Sadly, Mick died suddenly, three and a half years ago.

Margaret and Derek Oliver recall how fashionably dressed all the youngsters were, despite having very little money”.

They recall: “Somehow we had all the latest gear. The girls had tight skirts, the boys had Beatles cuts and copied their jackets.”

Another delver into the history of Southend coffee bars is Brian Ayling. At 64, and a one-time Mod, the retired telecoms consultant and pub landlord is old enough to have personal memories of the places.

Brian passed his motor scooter test in 1962, giving him the freedom to range far and wide.

“But the base camp from which all journeys started was the coffee bar,” he says. “We could spend the whole evening there, drinking nothing more than one or maybe two Cokes or coffees.”

He stresses the appeal of the music. “There were no Playstations or X-boxes, no internet, and the radio stations did not cater for the music of the kids,” Brian says.

“But the juke box did play our music. It was the music of original R&B, Bo Diddley, Motown, the Blues, Soul and so much more. As Mods we were not supposed to like Rock ’n’ Roll – but we did.”

There were no drug problems and Brian can remember no instances of violence between the Mods and Rockers.

For him, the coffee bar life summed up “a time when people of a certain generation just simply lived a new lifestyle compared to that of their parents. It was a time of freedom and choice that earlier generations had not had”.

Brian has organised one successful coffee bar reunion in Southend, and plans another, see details below.

“Apart from those who attended the reunion there were numerous e-mails from around the world from people who were there and remembered those times with such affection,” he says.

He is also preparing a book about the coffee bars. He calls the project “a definitive account of the period which will eventually become an historical document”.

Nowadays we think of coffee bars in terms of Starbucks and Costa, a changed surrounding for a different age.

They have all the trendiness of their predecessors without the rough edges. But they lack the home-grown character of the older coffee bars. Nor can they claim to be nurseries of local musical talent.

The Southend coffee bars of the Sixties may have disappeared, but they left a legacy, a claim to worldwide immortality. Procul Harum’s Whiter Shade of Pale, the most widely-performed UK song of the past 75 years, was written in Southend in 1967. Procul Harum were regular performers around the Southend circuit, notably at Shades coffee bar on the seafront.

The appearance of the word Shade in the song’s title begs an obvious question. As for the mysterious and long argued over lyrics, could “white shade of pale” simply refer to the colour that Procul Harum liked their coffee?