It’s Hallowe’en this weekend, so obviously, there’s a spooky tone to this week’s /Tuesday Ten.

---

/amodelofcontrol.com now has a Patreon page, at this stage purely as a potential way of helping to cover the running costs of the site. There is absolutely no compulsion to do so: if you feel you can chuck a small amount to the site each month, that would be appreciated.

---

---

This week is all about the idea of ghosts, and haunting. Not everything here is paranormal, as ghosts of the past crop up too, as do genuinely, terrifyingly bad lyrics. It turned out to be a fascinating selection of songs suggested, and had I had more time and headspace this week (I had minor surgery last week so spent much of the weekend recovering!), there may have been twenty songs featured.

But ten it was: thanks to everyone who suggested songs, as ever.

---

A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details above).

---

/Ray Parker Jr.
/Ghostbusters
/Ghostbusters OST

---

Where else to start? The title track to the 1984 film that was reckoned to have added $20 million to the gross of the film – one of the biggest comedy hits of the 80s – and unusually both song and film have had remarkable staying power. Apparently coming from Dan Ackroyd’s fascination with spiritual elements and ghosts (his great-grandfather was a “renowned spiritualist”!), the end result was a film that was enormous fun and, unless you’re a kid, not particularly scary. But there are a hell of a lot of ghosts, and a lot of ghostbusting, which is where Ray Parker Jr.’s song comes in.

While it was a monster hit, the echo of Huey Lewis and the News’s I Want a New Drug can be heard in the song (and indeed was settled out of court in 1985 in Huey Lewis’s favour), which makes sense when they had originally approached Huey Lewis to do the song!

---

/Des’ree
/Life
/Supernatural

---

Perhaps iconic for all the wrong reasons, this single by Des’ree is very much preoccupied with the world we can’t see (or perhaps doesn’t exist), around ghosts, spirits, the dark and superstition. And for a pop-soul song of the late 1990s, it’s a perfectly acceptable song for the time…until you pay attention to those damned lyrics.

“I don’t want to see a ghost
It’s a sight that I fear most
I’d rather have a piece of toast
And watch the evening news”

Voted by 6Music listeners in 2007 as the worst pop lyrics ever (and with Snap and Razorlight close behind, it should be added – and yes, Oasis featured in the top ten too!), it gained new notoriety perhaps thanks to this.

---

/Rome Burns
/Non Specific Ghost Story
/Non Specific Ghost Stories

---

Apparently centred around a visit to the legendary Hull (alternative) nightclub Spiders, one of the greatest modern goth songs has a particularly spooky, unsettling feel to it, and much of that is down to Simon Satori’s measured, clever wordplay. Amid the whirl of a dark, dank nightclub – and not a few cocktails – the protagonist’s reality is blurred and they start seeing and feeling weird things. We’ve all been there, right? We couldn’t explain what happened, but it was a hell of a night – sounds like pretty much every Whitby of old, for a start…

---

/The Black Angels
/Haunting At 1300 McKinley
/Phosphene Dream

---

An unusually short single from the Austin, Texas psych-rock band is apparently set in a house that the band once lived in, at the titular address in Texas. Clearly, the house was perceived to be haunted, with the protagonist somewhat concerned about staying there after dark, as they’ve heard rumours of weird goings-on in the house, but he’s assured by his friend that it’s not that bad, but the later repeated coda suggests otherwise.

The video is just as strange, filmed in Paris as someone is dealing with all kinds of paranormal weirdness.

---

/GHOST
/If You Have Ghosts
/If You Have Ghost

---

A cover of a Roky Erickson and the Aliens track released in 1980 – but originally written when Erickson was in the Rusk State Hospital for the Criminally Insane (having been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, not to mention his herculean drug intake in the sixties) nearly a decade earlier – was perhaps the most obvious tip of the hat the-then nascent Swedish band could make. GHOST’s early appearances were striking and shocking (I saw them live twice by 2013, and the first time in particular they were absolutely extraordinary), but there was an obvious feeling sometimes that their somewhat tamer recorded material could never match up to their theatrical, powerful shows.

---

/Eels
/Friendly Ghost
/Souljacker

---

Compared to some of the experiences in this week’s /Tuesday Ten, E doesn’t even want a visit from a friendly, benevolent ghost: as he says in the song, “a friendly ghost is all I need“. By the time of Souljacker, Eels had had unexpected hits (particularly Mr. E’s Beautiful Blues), had dealt with the suicide of his sister and death of his mother, and was trying to move on – so perhaps the friendly ghost here was reflections of his past as he was trying to put it behind him.

---

/The Slow Readers Club
/I Saw A Ghost
/Cavalcade

---

While I’ve heard of this Manchester band, and a few of my friends are big fans of them, I’m not sure I’ve ever listened to them before deciding to use this song this week. This song in particular certainly owes something to the gloomier, post-punk leanings of their Mancunian forebears, that’s for sure, and it’s a song where they are wallowing in sorrow, but the suggestion of seeing a ghost is tempered by an admission that they were likely drunk at the time, so once again, who the fuck knows what they actually saw?

---

/The Men They Couldn’t Hang
/Ghosts of Cable Street
/How Green Is the Valley

---

Who said the ghosts had to be supernatural? The ghosts here are those who came before us to fight fascism, and as the Battle of Cable Street was ninety years ago earlier this month (04-October 1936), let us commemorate the day when the working class of the East End of London rose up as one – the Jewish community, the dockworkers, tram drivers and locals among others – to fight back against the fascist Oswald Mosley and his blackshirts once and for all.

Many of those then will have fought, or been involved in the war effort, in World War II that followed just a few years later, to defeat fascism. And ninety years on, we’re still having to fight these fucks, once again in sharp suits telling us to blame immigrants, trans people, the classic “othering”. Fuck them all. Fascism has no place in society and if you’re a friend of mine that chooses to vote for such parties, perhaps you shouldn’t be my friend.

---

/Japan
/Ghosts
/Tin Drum

---

Perhaps one of the most unlikely top five hits I’ve ever heard, and probably the spookiest, strangest song on this week’s /Tuesday Ten. There are no beats to speak of, just a miasma of synths and David Sylvian’s striking voice, who in this song sounds utterly haunted by the consequences of actions he’d made before, and those ghosts are trying to burst through the door and halt any progress he’s making.

Japan were always an elegant, striking band that sounded more sophisticated than any of their peers, looking and sounding so stylish, and Ghosts is probably their crowning moment.

---

/Dark Star
/ghosts
/…out flew reason

---

Another band who always sounded somewhat haunted by their past was Dark Star – the band formed from the ashes of Levitation and didn’t have a particularly long active period of their own around the turn of the millennium. Their long-planned second album was never released at the time, and eventually made it out in 2023 as …out flew reason: for those of us that might be called, er, obsessive fans (Hi, I’m adam, and my domain comes from a Dark Star song), we’d already long since heard some of these songs in leaked demo form.

The closing song ghosts is a song that makes great use of their trademark dub-influenced basslines and cavernous reverb, as they weave a tale of escape and invisibility, a wish to become a ghost in the system, one that can never be found.