No. 1 ('86)

Me And My Flat

No, she doesn't live in a gloomy, Gothic castle in the misty wilderness of Transylvania but she does have the odd death-mask or two!

Exterior

"It's in West Kensington, in the basement of this old Victorian house down a quiet side-street. It looks quite unprepossessing from the outside-hardly a `rockstar pad'! I like basements-they're quite dark and spooky."

Hallway

"I designed the whole interior myself. As soon as you open the front door, you see all these hands coming out of the hallway wall, holding lamps. I ripped that off from the Roman Polanski film Repulsion which stars Catherine Deneuve-there's a fantastically surreal scene where this woman, who's going mad, is having a nightmare, and all these hands begin to emerge from the wall to grab her."

"The floor in the hall, like the rest of the flat, is bare varnished floorboards, with the odd rug for embellishment. The predominant colours are my favourites-white, red, and black."

Living Room

"It looks spacious, basically because there's hardly anything in it! It's very sparse-I don't keep knick-knacks. The only things I've collected are these face masks, hung around the walls, which I've picked up on my travels. They're mainly from Japan, Italy, and Singapore. Some are just fancy-dress garments, but I've got a few death masks too."

"The main feature of my living room is this wrought-iron spiral staircase that leads nowhere. It was actually the thing what intially attracted me to the flat. I saw it and thought, `Mmmm-I like this'. It's a hangover from the house's conversion-it used to lead up into what's now the ground-floor flat."

"I've also got lots of lights on dimmer switches, and hidden lights in places where you least expect them!"

"The main item of furniture in the room is the TV and video. I've got a big video collection. My fave film at the moment is one of those really old late-night horror ones, called The Old Dark House, 'cos there's a character in it who looks just like me!"

Bathroom

"Ah yes, now... I've got *two* of those! My mum was *really* impressed when she heard that. Thing is, one of them's really tiny-there's barely enough room to close the door when you're in it! The other one is what I call my `hell-toilet'-it's like a mini-torture chamber!"

"There are sculptured heads poking out of the wall, bits of exposed brickwork sticking out, and a *horrid* witch's head I found, with purple hair. It's all in black, with big hairy spiders nailed to the wall. My mum *loved* it. When my nieces and nephews came over to see me, they wouldn't go in it at all! I was pushing them in, and they were worried that I was going to turn the light off and lock the door. That's my favourite room in the whole flat."

Other rooms

"Not *too* interesting, really. The kitchen's always quiet and bare 'cos I *hate* cooking. The bedroom's also very bare-it's just a room where I go and sleep. And that's *all* I'm going to tell you about it!"