I’ve made myself a map of Manchester, in my quest to explore the record stores and many haunts of my home town. As I walk around the city, I’m kept company by a multitude of musical ghosts – musicians wrestling with the people and places that have haunted them. I think about those spooked songs that linger on long after they’ve been played. Music haunts us with the ghosts of our old selves, who we were when we first heard songs, as well as all the ghosts of who we might have been.
Then there are the actual ghosts haunting songs, from The Ghost of Tom Joad in Bruce Springsteen’s song, to “the ghost of Troubled Joe” in the Smiths’ A Rush and a Push and the Land is Ours. There are numerous nameless ghosts: some of my favourites are Ghosts by Laura Marling (“I’m still mourning”), and Ghosts by both the Jam and Ibeyi. There are those who are Haunted (including Beyoncé), and even Pale Green Ghosts (John Grant). There are Hungry Ghosts, Ghosts on the Dancefloor and those Born As Ghosts.
There are haunted places, too: Madonna’s Ghosttown, the exquisite Ghost Towns by Radical Face, Ghost Ship (Blur), and Jim O’Rourke’s gorgeous Ghost Ship in a Storm, whose lyrics haunt me: “And as I’m sinkin’ / The last thing that I think / Is did I pay my rent … I ride through like a ghost ship in a storm.”
On the top floor of my old teen haunt, Afflecks Palace, I discover the delightful Vinyl Resting Place, where I buy bargain records from Patti Smith to Prince. On my way down, I stumble upon a treasure-trove, the new Soundwaves Here We Come record store. I’m intrigued to explore more northern soul and ask the record store owner to choose a record for me. He hands me a seven-inch vinyl which I buy for £3 called There’s a Ghost in My House by R Dean Taylor (a song also covered by the Fall), while also playing me some northern soul on a cute Crosley turntable. On this song, the singer speaks of how he’s haunted by “The ghost of your memories / The ghost of the love you took from me”. This is a song about what it’s like to miss someone and the difficulties of letting go. So much is the singer haunted that he hears footsteps on the stairs, feels “fingers running through my hair”; hears his beloved’s voice echoing through the room, and even sees their face in his coffee cup.
Rummaging through record stores, I sense the ghosts, too: I love second-hand records because of the mysteries and stories they hold. In Vinyl Resting Place, I find a batch of second-hand Inspiral Carpets records signed to someone called Gideon which includes “moo!” in the autograph. I wonder who held these records and listened to them before I did.
“Take a good look around / This is your home town …”, advises Springsteen, as I walk past the spot where I camped out overnight for front-row tickets to see my favourite bands, and past where I’d skive school to browse new releases in HMV. Not having a turntable back in my teens I devoured music on CD and cassette. Today though, I explore the wonders of the Vinyl Exchange, Piccadilly Records, and Oxfam Emporium, seeking out records of my own to fill up the new rented room.
There are so many Mancunian musical ghosts beckoning me to listen to them: I walk down the Stretford street where I grew up, the same street where Ian Curtis was born, not far from one of Morrissey’s childhood homes, and further on to Kingbee Records, a fine independent record store.
The city comes teeming to life through song: “There’s nothing worse than feeling like a ghost”, is a lyric that crops up on the song Ghost in the Machine by BoB, and music can well capture those moments of feeling like a ghost in our own lives – it was during such times that music made me feel real, able to hear my own heart beating again. For all its ghostliness, hauntingly beautiful music can make us fully flesh-and-blood – a sliver of song can give us goosepimples, prompt tears . There’s an eery ethereal quality intrinsic in music too: beyond the tactility of records and instruments, it isn’t possible to see or touch music,d yet it can touch us. In exploring life’s absent presences, grappling with the otherworldliness of love and death and time and loss and yearning, music can deeply evoke whatever it is that makes us human.
Recommended record store of the week: “One of the things my mum said before she died is, ‘I’m going to miss out on so much’, and I thought, life’s too short to do something you don’t enjoy”, Alex Lee, the owner of Soundwaves Here We Come record store and label tells me as we stand in his store. “So I entered a competition to win a shop unit for three months, rent-free, putting forward a proposal for a record store and performance space for musicians.” Another fine addition to Manchester’s treasure-trove of music.
Recommended song: Haunting me most at the moment is Bruce Springsteen’s The Ghost of Tom Joad – it’s a superb song, giving voice to the voiceless, invisible members of society, articulating the anguish of those sleeping in cars or in cardboard boxes, those with “no home, no job, no peace, no rest”. It’s a timely song haunted too by influences, based on Woody Guthrie’s The Ballad of Tom Joad which was in turn inspired by John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. This version where Springsteen is joined on stage in Madison Square by Tom Morello is particularly gut-wrenching.
Playlist: I’ve put together a Spotify playlist teeming with ghosts (below): no doubt there are many others, so please add any favourites in the comments below, whether there’s a literal ghost in it, or whether it’s simply a piece of music that has haunted you. (Incidentally, the Ghostbusters theme-tune has crept onto the playlist, and since the film is on the brink of being produced with an all female-cast of ghostbusters, it seemed appropriate).
