1. Chilling Thrilling Sounds of The Haunted House
I spent so much time listening to this record, it was very influential. The first side is narrated by a woman, and the second side, the idea was that you would play along to it. So my stepfather’s mother lived in this trailer park and had this room where she had all these butterflies under glass. Through a friend she got me a chord organ second hand. I was probably eight or nine, and what I would do is I would put on the haunted house record and I would play the chord organ with side two. I found it really haunting – it scared me, there’s this scream that goes throughout the record and I loved it. It was absolutely a private world and I really took it seriously. When I would listen to that record, I felt I was in those spaces. I felt the wind was blowing, the dogs were outside, it’s almost like I could see my face in that orange lit window on the cover – that’s where I wanted to be. I was so scared, but I loved that fear as well. My childhood, my home life, it was traumatic, so this was my little private space that I could escape into, and I put a lot of weight into these worlds of music.
Even as early as that, I recognised that my friends were just not as interested in music. I had this real excitement about these records, but if I tried to talk to friends about it, they didn’t give a shit. It’s tied to my love of horror films too. My mother had me at 16 and when I was about five, she was taking me to cinemas, so I saw The Shining and The Exorcist, and they implanted themselves into my dreams, and had a profound influence on my work. There is the mystery of it, and there was something forbidden about it too.
