Makes My Heart Burst

[Lancashire Fusileer]

SIMMO!!!

There's A Ghost In My House:


All alone in my room
Your voice echoes through the gloom
There's a ghost in my house
- and I can't hide
There's A Ghost in My House-R. Dean Taylor
(© Holland-Dozier-Holland-Taylor 1967
Stone Agate Music (BMI)

With hoarfrost on the windows - two-bar fire radiating orange light but no heat, coats worn indoors and last year's tinsel still hanging, this could be Eastern Europe. Nothing works properly here and even the kitchen taps give electric shocks. The top floor flat I'm sharing with Echo and The Bunnymen's genius drummer Pete de Freitas has terminal lung disease and a deeply troubled psychic history. Previous tenants of the house include the pre-acid Julian Cope, a young Courtney Love and Pete Burns of Dead or Alive and cosmetic surgery fame. Prior to these beautiful freaks it was home to a coven of black magicians who raised something they couldn't put down; a malevolent entity that won't let me sleep. And, if all this were not distressing enough, at some time in the early 1970s the brickwork of 20 Devonshire Road was rendered in a vomit-coloured plaster. Being the largest room in the flat the lounge also doubles as Pete's bedroom and, with his mattress in one corner and his motorbike dripping oil into a turkey-roasting dish in another, it's not the most convenient arrangement for me. On the nights when one of his girlfriends sleep over I hole up in my room shivering under layers of army surplus blankets reading 19th century accounts of delirious young men in cold rooms.
There's no TV or radio to ease our days here but we do have two record players and more vinyl than an indie record shop. Right now I'm lost in the malarial haze of Dr John' s Night Tripper album and, thanks to the Sputnik we've been smoking, night blooming cacti blossom from the walls. Weak from a diet of packet soups and Benylin, I'm hallucinating like a bastard and although I know that the noise from the street below is just a bin-lid blown off by the wind, it's still the machete-wielding Tontons Macoute I see when I close my eyes. Pete emerges from the bathroom damp-haired and smiling, wearing just a bath towel tied at the waist. Taking up a yoga position upon his mattress he recites a passage from his favourite book Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. It's beautiful, like Ginsberg reading Howl or Christ preaching on the Mount of Olives. Pete's giving it Bokonism and ultimate truth but I can't concentrate, I'm too fucked up on this tranquilliser-laced pot to know what's Stork and what's butter anymore. Like every other job-fearing poet in town I'm using this cheap street anaesthetic not for kicks but as a survival tool; a temporary means of escape from Margaret Thatcher's reign of terror, D.H.S.S. fraud squad investigators and the southern menace of Spandau Ballet and the New Romantics.
Down at carpet level our teenage drug buddy neighbours Mike Mooney and Paul Green share a bong with my fellow Wild Swans Ged Quinn and Jerry Kelly. Sporting Tommy Atkins haircuts and baggy tweeds tucked into thick socks and mountaineering boots, my band-mates look like pissed film extras from The Heroes Of Telemark. We know that apart from Echo and the Bunnymen most of the Liverpool bands dismiss The Wild Swans as poseurs but we don't give a fuck; we've already shagged most of their girlfriends.

The bong is a homemade affair, all sinuous pipes, rubber bungs, tinfoil and Sellotape. When Pete suggests exchanging the dirty water in the glass demijohn for the Courvoisier that he lifted from last night's Bunnymen gig rider we don't understand. When he explains to us that we'll drink the cognac after it's been fortified with half an ounce of pot smoke passing through it our faces light up like pre-schoolers. I told you he was a genius. Now I'm a sucker for ritual of any kind but we are already so cabbaged the idea of us getting any higher than this is preposterous; if I wanted to see magnesium suns exploding on the head of a pin I'd start dropping acid again.
I'm bored with Dr John now and want to browse through my record collection for something to elevate the mood, Evening Star or The Greatest Hit, but the door to my bedroom is proving a lot harder to open than it should. When I do manage to force it there's a noise like a spaceship's vacuum seals being blown as the air is sucked from my lungs. Through white gauze I can just make out the outline of my bed. I call it a bed, but it's really just a 3/4-size mattress on bare floorboards. Whatever it's called it's on fire so running to the kitchen I cover my mouth with a wet tea towel, re-enter the smoke-filled room and, feeling my way to the sash window, hurl it wide and then retreat. Five minutes and several trips ferrying jugs of water back and forth later the bed finally stops smoking. Just as I'm dreaming about where I'm going to sleep tonight a violent knocking on the flat door jolts me back into the moment. Shit! This will be the awful family from flat 2 come to complain about the music again. I answer the door with a prize-winning apology ready on my lips but it isn't our downstairs neighbours, it's a fireman wearing face mask, oxygen tanks and what looks like a deep-sea divers suit and, behind him in a descending spiral down the stairwell, are 3 more similarly kitted out firemen with axes and fire extinguishers and enough machismo for a homosexual calendar shoot. Now I'm worried. You see Pete and I are already living here on borrowed time. Not only has the owner discovered that we are illegally sub-renting his flat from his newly separated tenants Julian and Kath Cope, but he's also fielding weekly complaints from the house's other tenants concerning the 24-hour traffic of freaks to and from Flat 3 and the Old Testament levels of noise we generate. But how else is Pete going to get his motorbike up and down the 3 flights of stairs each morning and evening except by riding it? I just know that whatever happens next will almost certainly result in the landlord throwing us out. The fire chief tries to get past me but I block his way. "It's alright" I yell as if he's retarded "My bed was on fire but I've dealt with it". "Have you now?" he says sarcastically while pushing me aside. Directed to my bedroom the first thing he does is to hurl a chunk of my record collection to one side so he can unplug the tangle of electrical cables from the wall socket. Shit! Doesn't he care that that's an import copy of the first Modern Lovers album and the acetate of Rev Spirit he's just frisbeed into the wall? Throwing back the blankets he stands smartly back as the mattress reignites in an impressive Whomph! of spectral blue flame. After zapping it for 60 seconds with CO2, he looks across at me shaking his head in that world-weary, I pity you way before leaving followed by the rest of the Village People. Moments later I'm sitting on the top step outside our flat doorway staring down the empty stairwell and wondering did that really happen? Sadly the stench of smoke and the wet footprints on the stairs tell me it did.
Re-entering the darkened living room I find friends and band-mates leaning out of the great sash windows Oohing and Ahhing like simpletons at the retreating lights of the Fire truck. Firing up the bong I inhale a long slow drag only to burst out laughing as Pete replaces Dr John with She Is Beyond Good And Evil by The Pop Group.
Spending a shitty dream-filled night in the damp spare room at the back of the house I awake shivering to weak sunshine and the migraine-inducing sounds of Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich's Drum Battle. Before leaving to rehearse with the Bunnymen, Pete has put the birthday present I left for him on repeat play on the stereo and propped our mail, which I'm heartened to see includes his driving licence and my unemployment benefit cheque, on the sideboard next to the remains of his breakfast cereal. Welcome as it is today's Giro brings a dilemma; Rye bread, Polish sausage, washing-up liquid and toilet roll versus 2nd hand copies of Babel and Journey To The Orient from Atticus book shop and that chalk-stripe demob suit I've had put away in Deja-Vu, the antique clothes shop on Hardman Street. Before getting dressed I do a post-mortem on last night's fire damage. Lifting the soaking mattress I find myself staring through a hole large enough for a circus midget to jump through and, there on the scorched floorboards, a plug attached to a length of blackened flex is all that remains of my electric blanket. Until a moment ago I'd been attributing last nights' fire to the entity that's been targeting me since I moved into the flat five months ago; the pissed off discarnate that the magicians who once practiced from the house summoned but failed to banish. But now, un-drugged in the clear light of morning I think it just might have some thing to do with me leaving my Pifco electric blanket switched on for five days solid. I'm perilously close to breakdown but I can't tell anyone because if I try to speak of the ghost I'm made nauseous, and if I try to write it down in any detail my hand is stilled and I'll vomit. I'm so terrified when I fall into bed each night that sometimes I don't even get undressed or switch off the light. While my old friends and stable-mates Julian Cope and Ian McCulloch's careers are skyrocketing, mine is sub-basement. In 18 months these two have gone from bumming my clothes for gigs and promo photos to having clothing allowances, accountants and hit records. One minute they're laughing at my army gear the next they're arguing about which of them came up with the idea. I think I know now why Bill Drummond and Dave Balfe passed on managing my righteous Pre-Raphaelite holy futurism. They knew what I've only just found out; that I'm haunted and just not malleable enough to bank on. Well, I may be 5 years ahead of my time but it's no comfort to me. I'm tired of living like a degenerate and I'm going to get my act together starting right now. Well, starting tomorrow because I've just found the note Pete has left pinned to his door.
Paul,
Jake riding up from Bristol tonight, I'll knock for Mike and Paul on my way home.
Ring Ged, Jerry and Hot Knives. Gear in the tin.
Pete.
P.S. Get milk and skins.

Copyright © Paul Simpson 2003.