I celebrated Halloween earlier this week with my Top Twenty Horror Films, but I also wanted to do something to mark the day itself so I started collecting ghost songs with the aim of compiling a Top Ten. Then I realised there were more than 10 essential ghost songs, so I bumped it up to 13 in honour of the day. As mentioned previously, I'm a supreme triskaidekaphobic, but this is the one day of the year that such bad luck cancels itself out. You remember how on Buffy, no self-respecting vamp or ghoul would be seen dead causing trouble on Halloween? It's the same principle.
Even with 13 positions in my Top Ten, I still had to leave out a bunch of great ghost songs, including haunted offerings by Aimee Mann, Gene, Tom Waits, Prefab Sprout, the Manics, Richard Thompson, The White Stripes and others. Not to mention Cherry Ghost, the Ghosts and Phil... Spector.
If you're interested in Ghost Rider songs, I suggest you click here.
13. The Beautiful South - Woman In The Wall
A man murders his wife and plasters her into the bedroom wall... but the wife gets her revenge, driving him mad with ghostly screams and a wall that drips blood. If only all relationships were that simple.
12. Orange Juice - What Presence?
In the moth eaten gloom of his shabby room, Edwyn Collins sees the strangest manifestiation...
It may just be his imagination.
11. The Smiths - A Rush And A Push And The Land Is Ours
In which Morrissey becomes the Ghost of Troubled Joe, hung by his pretty white neck some 18 months ago, then travels to a mystical time zone...
There's too much caffeine in your bloodstream
And a lack of real spice in your life
Yeah, man, I know how that goes...
10. Stan Ridgway - Camouflage
In which a young soldier in Vietnam is saved from an ambush by an awfully big marine who cries "Semper Fi!" and then turns out to have died the previous evening.
He was an awfully strange marine.
9. Bruce Springsteen - The Ghost Of Tom Joad
In which Bruce calls upon the spirit of Steinbeck's classic hero to stand up for the disenfranchised of modern day America. Not so much a ghost story as a requiem for an age long gone...
8. Godley & Creme - Under Your Thumb
A man takes refuge from a storm in the last compartment of a stationary train... but someone follows him on board... the spirit of a woman whose only escape from an oppressive relationship was to take her own life...
7. Laura Marling - Ghosts
These are just ghosts that broke my heart before I met you.
6. Jellyfish - The Ghost At Number One
I will defend Jellyfish as a great 90s rock-pop institution, but on reflection the lyrics to this song are very silly.
5. Ray Parker Jr. - Ghostbusters
I ain't 'fraid of no ghosts
4. John Leyton - Johnny Remember Me
Joe Meek's finest 2 minutes 38 seconds?
One of many so-called "death discs" from the 60s (see also Leader Of The Pack, Dead Man's Curve, Last Kiss et al. ... I've got a whole album of them at home), although this is one of the few wherein the crash victim comes back, with haunting consequences.
3. R Dean Taylor - There's A Ghost In My House
Another rave from the grave by Holland Dozier Holland.
See also The Fall's version.
2. Kate Bush - Wuthering Heights
Heathcliff - it's me, Cathy, I've come home... let me in your window...
1. The Specials - Ghost Town
Not a town full of ghosts, but a town that's a ghost of its former self... this is still one of the spookiest records you'll ever hear...
