The Haunted Generation

My name is Bob Fischer, and my 1970s childhood was imbued with an odd sense of melancholy and a vague, unsettling disquiet. And oddly, I’m really rather happy about this. For decades, I vainly attempted to describe, evoke and recapture these feelings… until I realised that a generation of musicians, artists and writers were already – rather conveniently – doing the job for me. If you’re reading this, then it’s likely you’re familiar with the world of “hauntology” – of Ghost Box Records and Scarfolk Council and Boards of Canada – but if not, then that’s fine. I’d be delighted for this blog to act as a gentle introduction.

In 2017, after years of blissful immersion in the whole movement, I wrote a heartfelt feature about my experiences for the Fortean Times magazine, an article simply entitled “The Haunted Generation”. It had a heartening reception, and I was delighted when the magazine’s editor, David Sutton, offered me the opportunity to update readers on this ever-expanding scene on a bi-monthly basis. The first regular “Haunted Generation” column appeared in issue No. 379, dated May 2019.

This blog as intended as an accompaniment to the column… to expand on some of the printed articles, as well as providing additional material in its own right. So welcome along! I’d be delighted to swap thoughts and memories with anyone who finds this whole movement similarly beguiling.

To start us off, here’s the original “Haunted Generation” article, as published in the Fortean Times No. 354, dated June 2017.

Bob Fischer discovers how the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water has inspired a generation to creativity, and ponders the future of popular hauntology…

There are four of them, blank-faced children in old-fashioned pinafores, standing at the end of the street, staring back at me. They could be Edwardian; it’s difficult to tell. Time is standing still here. The world has suddenly become fuzzy, vague, and sepia-tinted, and I’m filled with an overwhelming and inexplicable feeling of strange, melancholy disquiet.

They are, of course, the four children in the opening titles to Bagpuss. It’s 1977, I’m four years old, and I’m watching Oliver Postgate‘s immortal childrens’ television programme in our shadowy, brown front room, clutching a mug of warm milk before the dancing flames of a roaring coal fire. At the time, I find it hard to put my feelings into words. Four decades on, I can try: the programme makes me feel both simultaneously reassured and unsettled. It’s filled with old things, lost things, tatty puppets and sadness; folk tales, ships in bottles, abandoned toys and long-ago kings. It’s like television made by the ghosts of those Edwardian children themselves. It makes me feel, for want of a better word, haunted.

This wasn’t just a feeling that I got from Bagpuss; it seemed to pervade much of my 1970s childhood. And it’s a feeling that I tried to describe, emulate and recapture for over twenty years, without success. Until, in the late 1990s, I heard a piece of music that so transported me back to that formative era of cosy wrongness that my 25-year-old self sat down in my childhood bedroom and gently wept. It was an instrumental track called Roygbiv on the 1998 album Music Has The Right To Children, the debut release by Scottish electronic duo Boards of Canada. I’m listening to it again as I write this, and it still makes me shiver. Woozy, vintage synths pick out a melody straight from some long-lost BBC Programmes for Schools and Colleges module, while the spectral voice of a child repeats some indistinct playground holler, possibly played backwards on a loop. I’ve no idea, but it doesn’t really matter – the effect on me was profound. At last, I thought. Somebody understands my haunted, 1970s childhood. Somebody else has experienced those same feelings of lost, hazy disquiet; of watching Children of the Stones on listless February afternoons and worrying about the ghosts that live in my Grandma’s bedroom. 

I wasn’t alone. Writer and graphic designer Richard Littler heard the call, too. “We’re like the guy in Close Encounters…” he tells me. “You think that no-one can understand what you’re talking about, but then you find all of these people that have had the same vision. My first feeling came from Boards of Canada too, and I remember when I first heard Music Has The Right To Children, I couldn’t believe that they’d caught a mood that was so specific”.

“At that point they seemed like a one-off”, says music journalist and author Simon Reynolds. “There was another artist at that time that I loved called Position Normal, but I never really connected the two in my mind, it was only later that I thought, actually… these are the ancestors of Ghost Box. They both had the same effect on me, which was this almost involuntary feeling of being transported through time and assailed by these images; my mind being flooded with images of the past.”

And Ghost Box? In 2005, musicians Jim Jupp and Julian House founded Ghost Box Records; not merely a label dedicated to the musical expression of these fuzzy, disquieted memories, but also, effectively, a support group for the now middle-aged children still affected by them. Ghost Box is – according to the label’s own website – home to “a group of artists exploring the musical history of a parallel world”, and that parallel world is Belbury, an eerie English village straight out of a John Wyndham novel (Although the name is actually from a work by C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength) seemingly stuck in a perpetually unsettling 1970s of analogue synths, otherworldly children and unspeakable Pagan rituals conducted in the shadows of pylons. From this fictional outpost of oddness, Jupp makes music as spooky prog-tinged outfit Belbury Poly; House presents evocative psychedelic sound collages as The Focus Group; and early recruit Jon Brooks –  recording as The Advisory Circle – has created entire albums inspired by the terrifying, authoritarian feel of vintage Public Information Films.

“Television from that era is the big touchstone for us,” Jim tells me, “and those eerie moments, for me, came largely through Programmes for School and Colleges. As a kid, I spent a lot of time off school because I had pollen-related asthma. So I would sit around indoors watching Programmes For Schools and Colleges, and loving the ident music between the programmes. There was also something in the look of television from that era… the touchstone film for us would be Penda’s Fen. It’s the way that the landscape has that grainy, 1970s TV look… it was there in all the location stuff on Play For Today. It’s hard to put your finger on it, but there’s something in the television images of that period that’s just not right. It’s kind of otherworldly.”

Sharing an ethos (and the occasional artist) with Ghost Box is the newer label Clay Pipe, founded in 2011 by artist and musician Frances Castle, whose taste in vintage television is strikingly similar. “Penda’s Fan is the ultimate,” she says. “That, to me, is very evocative of that time, and of childhood. It’s very pastoral, and very eerie.” Frances too cites the fuzzy, grainy look of archive TV presentation as a major contributory factor to this sense of childhood disquiet: “Everything was seen or heard through a slight hiss; the TV would go in and out of focus, and that added to it. We’re so used now to everything being crystal clear, but in those days it just wasn’t. And obviously there were the programmes, too… The Tomorrow People I loved, The Changes I loved, all those sorts of things. They created an atmosphere, and a sense of unease.”

Long seen as a lost, holy grail for lovers of archive weirdness, Penda’s Fen was produced by the BBC as a 1974 Play For Today, telling the story of tormented gay teenager Stephen Franklin, whose emerging sexuality is at odds with his rigidly unswerving – and largely self-imposed – Christian and political beliefs. His internal torment manifests itself as a series of supernatural visitations amidst the rolling hills of Worcestershire; he is set upon by angels and demons, by the ghost of Edward Elgar, and by King Penda himself; the 7th Century King of Mercia, and the last of Britain’s great Pagan warrior-kings. It’s a long way from Bagpuss, but the range of disquieting television cited as influences by this “haunted generation” of the 1970s comfortably spans the gamut from pre-school whimsy to full-on adult weirdness. Jim Jupp claims the opening titles of Granada TV’s schools’ programme Picture Box, with their gently rotating jewellery casket and discordant waltz, as “the central image we had in mind when we came up with the name and the mood of the label.” And somewhere in-between lies Frances’ beloved The Changes, broadcast by the BBC in 1975, depicting the post-apocalyptic rural nightmare of a Britain that has inexplicably and involuntarily smashed up every single item of technology and machinery, at the behest of a mysterious, all-pervading klaxon.

Another kindred spirit – and occasional Ghost Box collaborator – is archivist and fellow record label-owner Jonny Trunk, whose Trunk Records was founded in the mid-1990s, with the long-lost soundtrack to seminal 1971 British horror film The Wicker Man amongst its earliest releases. While the Ghost Box and Clay Pipe rosters have thrown themselves into creating new sounds, Trunk has concentrated more on the unearthing of original, lost audio artefacts from the original “haunted” era. The label’s catalogue of reissues is a treasure trove of vintage strangeness, encompassing the gentle soundtracks to Ivor the Engine and Fingerbobs; the disquieting electronica of Doctor Who and Hammer Horror composer Tristram Cary, and the extraordinary Classroom Projects, a collection of – frankly – disturbing, avant-garde music recorded by school orchestras and choirs throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

But it’s Trunk’s reissue of 1969 album The Seasons that has provided discerning listeners with perhaps the seminal audio example of school-age wrongness from this era; marrying the poetry of Ronald Duncan to the abrasively harsh electronic soundscapes of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop‘s David Cain. The imagery is vivid, stark and frequently unsettling…

Like severed hands the wet leaves lie
Flat on the deserted avenue;
Houses like skulls stare through uncurtained windows

…and anyone born much later than 1980 may find it incomprehensible that this resolutely leftfield concoction was initially released on BBC Records as part of the BBC Schools Radio service’s Drama Workshop series, intended to be played in primary school halls to inspire tiny children to creative dancing. “The Seasons is very much me, in a hall with a kind of parquet wooden floor and a big speaker,” says Jonny Trunk, “with a bunch of kids wearing non-marking plimsolls, listening to it and following the instructions. Music, Movement and Mime.

“It’s almost bordering on the offensive. But if you’re young, and you’re told to improvise, and think about the music and the words, and dance and act along to them, then it sounds completely normal. It’s like a hardcore childrens’ education LP. It’s hard. And that was the norm. It’s definitely a touchstone for a lot of people, that record.”

This institutionalised presentation of the utterly otherworldly to impressionable children, was – according to Trunk – an important contributory factor to our collective haunted childhoods. “It was good to have a bit of avant-garde in your life, as well as some of these controversial subject matters,” he says. “What we have now is oddly vanilla; what you’re allowed to see and what you’re allowed to hear is governed and over-thought. There wasn’t any of that in the 1970s.”

“I guess people were far less squeamish about these things,” agrees Ghost Box’s Jim Jupp. “When I was a kid, I remember having a Puffin anthology of horror stories called The House of the Nightmare, which I read when I was seven or eight. It was given to me as a Christmas present. And it was terrifying… it had old stories by M.R. James and Saki, as well as contemporary tales from the 1960s and 1970s. It wasn’t a problem for kids to have that stuff. It did leave a lasting impression on me… obviously! Things weren’t so mediated and categorised.”

Also left with a lasting impression was writer and graphic designer Richard Littler, whose “Scarfolk” project began life as an online blog, but – in 2014 – was picked up by publishers Ebury Press and turned into an acclaimed book, Discovering Scarfolk. Like the musical releases of Ghost Box, Scarfolk takes place in a fictional, parallel universe: the grim, North-Western town of the title. But its vision of the 1970s is considerably darker; with Littler’s unerringly accurate spoof book covers and mock government-issue pamphlets evoking the dystopia of an utterly unfeeling, authoritarian society. Scarfolk is the home of Pelican Science Books’ informative title How To Wash A Child’s Brain, the popular instruction manual Practical Witchcraft Today – How To Hurt People, SG Games’ Junior Taxidermy Kit, and SBC Cassettes’ 1973 best-seller Illicit Recordings of You and Your Neighbours.

“When I was a kid, I suffered from really bad night terrors,” admits Richard, “and they cast an almost trippy haze over my normal life; because when you’re three, four and five years old, you just don’t know the difference. And the most mundane things could trigger it; I remember the Ladybird book The Gingerbread Man scaring the life out me, because people were chasing him to eat him. Things like that were just horrific.

“I think I was a big baby, actually. Everything terrified me. And because of this strange, dreamy way that I had of seeing the world, things became blurred. And it didn’t help that I was being shown videos about being burned by fireworks, and that my parents were buying me books about horror… it was the 1970s, so I had Dracula and Frankenstein books. And I think it all just somehow merged. Very literally with something like the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water Public Information Film, where you have Death standing on the riverbank, drowning children.”

This 90-second film, produced in 1973 by the gloriously Orwellian-sounding Central Office of Information, has become an iconic symbol of this generation’s lingering trauma. A hooded Grim Reaper figure, his face unseen in monastical robe and cowl, drifts along the periphery of litter-filled pools and flooded building sites, claiming the souls of drowned children, their flared jeans and hooded anoraks sinking beneath the surfaces of brown, poisoned water: “This branch is weak, rotten… it’ll never take his weight,” it hisses gleefully, in the unmistakable tones of Donald Pleasence. And Richard is far from alone in seeing this amalgamation of the everyday and the terrifyingly supernatural as a defining characteristic of the decade. The 1970s has always struck me as a deliciously credulous era, when reported hauntings would be treated as semi-serious news items on regional TV programmes, when the works of Erich Von Daniken would be slotted onto suburban bookshelves alongside the latest Jilly Cooper, and when documentary series like Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World would wantonly traumatise a generation of primetime ITV viewers.

“From Ghost Box’s point of view, this is what really interests us in that period,” says Jim Jupp. “We don’t have a firm belief in anything… it’s a Fortean standpoint! But what’s interesting about that period is that you could believe in this stuff, and that that belief was less open to question. Especially as a kid, it seemed almost like… ‘well, it’s probably a fact that there are UFOs in the sky… or that there are ghosts.’ A fairly sensible newspaper might cover a ghost story… or something like the Loch Ness Monster, which would flare up every few years. It wouldn’t seem that unusual, it would seem just like news.”

So is this loose collection of musicians, writers and artists a bona fide aesthetic movement? Well, in the last decade, it has drawn in an substantial number of contributors and followers, and – since 2006 – has had a widely recognised name: hauntology. Appropriated from the writings of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who coined it in 1993 to describe the spectre of Marxism looming over post-Cold War Europe [in his book Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International], its use in the context of the retro-spooky movement seems to have come largely from journalist Simon Reynolds. “I think a bunch of us started using the word”, he tells me. “Mark Fisher was one of the other main writers, in his blog k-punk and in pieces for various magazines… so it was kind of a joint project. I think I might have proposed it as a genre name on my blog…‘We’ve got to call this something!’

“It has all these associations with Jacques Derrida, which are interesting, and I read his book about hauntology… but it doesn’t really apply here. I just like the word, because ‘haunt’ obviously deals with ghosts and the idea that memories linger and creep into your thoughts without you having any control over them. And ‘-ology’ has this idea of science and lab coats and people experimenting. There was a sort of faux-scientific aura about some of the stuff that Ghost Box was doing; the imagery was to do with science and planning and technocratic, bureaucratic order. So the combination of the ‘-ology’ and the ‘ghosts’… I like that clash of the two things.”

Richard Littler, however, does see a vague lineage stretching back to Derrida’s work. “Obviously popular hauntology doesn’t have much to do with Derrida’s idea about the ghost of communism haunting the present. But I think certain aspects of that are reflected in it. Particularly the idea of the ‘dream of the future’, where we were all going to be living in houses that looked like they were designed by [James Bond set designer] Ken Adam, and we’d all be heading to the moon. That dream of the perfect, utopian future that we were all aiming for… well, it never happened. When we were kids, there were so many books on how we would be living in the year 2000. But have you seen any recent books or TV programmes predicting a utopian future? They don’t exist any more. Basically, we’ve realised that it’s foolish to try and guess how good the future is going to be… because it’s going to be shit!”

But it isn’t all supernatural trauma and failed utopias. Frances Castle’s Clay Pipe label releases albums and artwork with a more bucolic feel; redolent of a 1970s childhood inspired more by The Famous Five than The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, but still with an undercurrent of lost, haunted melancholy. Early releases included the beautiful Tyneham House, an anonymously-created concept album whose folky, flute-infused passages are a wistful tribute to the titular Dorset village, requisitioned by the War Office in 1943 and deserted ever since. “I think it’s influenced by the Children’s Film Foundation, that album,” Frances tells me. “It’s a brilliant record.”

So too are Shapwick and 52, a brace of evocative ambient albums recorded for Clay Pipe by Ghost Box regular Jon Brooks. “52 is very much an album about his childhood, in quite an abstract way,” says Frances. “When I first spoke to him about it, he was trying to create the sound of lichen in his grandmother’s garden pond! And when I heard it, I thought ‘Yes, that’s it… that sounds like lichen!’ So I think it’s quite a personal album, but he’s so good at what he does, that it’s something everything can relate to.”

Shapwick, meanwhile, tells the story of an epiphanic car journey undertaken by Brooks one autumnal evening in 2011, veering away from a gridlocked motorway to find unexpected inspiration amongst the twilit country lanes of Somerset. “We headed through several miles of unlit roads, with nothing but gnarled trees and woodland either side, the car headlights suggesting the twists and turns ahead,” Brooks himself wrote in the album’s press release. “I felt a certain energy around the place…” Recorded on hissing analogue cassettes, the album’s elegiac piano pieces, woozy synths and tinkling music boxes create a dreamlike atmosphere of almost overpowering melancholy.

This gentler, more rural school of disquiet has also brought Jonny Trunk under its mystical spell, and Trunk Records’ 2006 compilation Fuzzy Felt Folk collected 15 long-forgotten recordings of vaguely eerie, but utterly entrancing, childrens’ folk songs from the late 1960s and early 1970s, many of them intended for use in school hall Music and Movement lessons. Between softly plucked guitars and hooting ocarinas, we hear the Barbara Moore Singers harmonising softly around the more whimsical end of British folklore (“Down amongst the daises in the glen, lives a little elf called John…”) and Irish actor Christopher Casson issuing dire warnings amidst a sea of folky wrongness; ‘My mother said that I never should, play with the gypsies in the wood. If I did, she would say, naughty girl to disobey…” (he chants, in a rich, male baritone)

“The whole Fuzzy Felt Folk thing is very much harking back to things like Play School,” Jonny tells me. “It wasn’t normal, that telly. You had these weird rag dolls, and Toni Arthur… this woman who was quite spooky, making albums around the same time called Hearken to the Witches Rune!

So when did this all start? Was there a distinct beginning and an end for the “haunted” era? “For me,” says Richard Littler,  “if we want to talk about hauntology and that kind of odd, underlying unease, I think it starts with The Beatles. In 1967, you had Sgt Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour, both of which were about that particular generation harking back to the generation of their parents and grandparents. So there was a lot of Victoriana… Sgt Pepper is a Music Hall act, essentially. What they did was to look back, and – in the same way that myself and Ghost Box have done with the 1970s – mix it with a modern sensibility. Which at that point, was psychedelia, so you have all of this history clashing together in the same artistic artefacts. And if you’re harking back to Victoriana, it’s inevitable that you’re going to hit the Spiritualist Movement, so you’re going to have séances and ectoplasm, and that filtered through… to things like The Ghosts of Motley Hall and Rentaghost.

“And it goes to Threads, in about 1984-ish. After that, the culture turns to money.”

Jonny Trunk, however, thinks the origins of the era go back further: “I think you can see it earlier,” he says. “In Quatermass, and in a lot of early science-fiction, in late 1950s and early 1960s British experimental film-making. And the more you dig around, the weirder it gets. There were a of lot avant-garde music-makers around the UK in the late 1950s, and their music would have been creeping into radio broadcasts in the 1960s”.

Frances Castle also takes inspiration from a pre-psychedelic generation of British artists. Clay Pipe Music’s releases are accompanied by Castle’s own distinctive artwork, and although the imagery is frequently redolent of Richard Littler’s feared Ladybird Books, a mainstay of every primary school’s library, Frances herself cites earlier influences: “The stuff that I’ve been inspired by was pre-1970s, and I’ve looked at a lot of print-makers from an earlier generation,” she says. “But a lot of those books were still around during our childhoods… those school book covers, printed with very limited colour palettes. British artists of an earlier generation had that weird atmosphere to their paintings and pictures. People like Eric Ravilious had a hauntedness to their work”. She does, however, concur with Richard Littler’s pinpointing of the end of the ‘haunted’ era: “I think it goes away when the digital age arrives, and everything becomes very crisp and clean. So I guess the early to mid 1980s.”

One curious aspect of the phenomenon is that not everyone gets it. Throughout the decades that I spent attempting to articulate these memories to my contemporaries, I was frequently met with bafflement, and for the majority of 1970s children, the decade seems to be remembered as an era of boundless fun, of endless summers spent bouncing on Space Hoppers while listening to the Bay City Rollers. I have these memories too, but when I ramble about the sense of ill-defined ‘wrongness’ I got from watching Bagpuss, I am sometimes accused of adult revisionism, of retrospectively applying haunted qualities to experiences that I found perfectly normal at the time. But I maintain that I absolutely remember experiencing these feelings as a child, and I asked Jonny Trunk if he thought it possibly took a certain type of youngster to appreciate them. “Totally,” he replied. “If it affected everybody, we’d all be millionaires. Because everyone would say ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to have every single record, because it reminds me of all the spooky stuff!’ You were either open to it, or you didn’t take any notice of it.

“I think there probably is a certain type of child,” agrees Richard Littler, “I’ve a feeling that if I asked my sister, who is only two years younger than me, whether she responds to these things in the same way… I don’t think she would. I meet people who grew up in the 1970s, and they remember Abba. But I remember Top Trumps Decapitation Cards. The Horror Cards, every single one was a decapitation! I remember Abba as well, but they were cast in the light of all this horror.”

I’ve used words like “fuzzy”, “vague” and “nebulous” repeatedly throughout this article, and it’s hard not to speculate whether the generation that grew up before the technological watershed of the 1980s might be amongst the last to remember their childhoods in this fractured, dreamlike fashion… simply because we were the last “analogue” generation, reaching adulthood before the era when our everyday lives – and the popular culture we consume – were able to be constantly, digitally recorded and archived. I’d estimate that, during the first sixteen years of my life, fewer than 100 clear photographs were taken of me; many of them now faded and orange-tinted, stored in musty albums in a battered, brown suitcase in the loft. No moving footage of me exists from before 1990, when I was seventeen years old. And many of the most profoundly affecting television experiences of my childhood were viewed once, forty years ago, in an era when I had no means of recording them, and no expectation that I would ever see them again.

Much of popular hauntology has a yearning quality, and I wondered whether the movement was, at least partially, an attempt to rationalise (and fill in the blanks of) a collective childhood that has become a delicious, jumbled mish-mash of fleeting memories; inaccessible and unverifiable. And whether the modern childhood; where everything is recorded and accessible in pristine quality; where a thousand school bus journeys are documented on Facebook every day; and where every single TV programme is available for repeated, on-demand viewing; would result in a generation of 21st century youngsters for whom childhood nostalgia will be a much more clinical experience, bereft of that feeling of longing for lost things…

“Yeah, everything they want, they can have and see,” says Jonny Trunk. “It’s where the word ‘haunt’ comes from – we’ve got these memories that do haunt us, and we can’t get back there. I once put on [Youtube channel] Trunk TV a thirty-minute edit of thirty-second TV title sequences, because when I saw them I thought… everything in this thirty minutes is what I love about British TV, and my youth, and growing up. They were exciting and weird, and I hadn’t seen them until I started doing some research into a TV project and I managed to blag a load of DVDs of these things. And I thought ‘Sod it, I’ve got to put them online’, because there was stuff there that you never, ever see. To me, it was a thrill getting them… because I wasn’t allowed them. They’re not available. And you’re right, part of what you’re talking about is the fact that we can’t get back to what we had, and we can’t see it again…. but the memories are very vivid. And the fact that you can’t get them is almost a good thing. Because that frustration results in creativity.”

“What makes nostalgia work is information that’s missing,” agrees Richard Littler. “You have to have enormous gaps in your memory to create that strange mood. And if it’s available to you online, in High Definition, then you lose that sense of dreaminess and that feeling of ‘Did I imagine it?’. The more we have completely exhaustive databases of information and media, the less chance we have of forming these completely odd disconnections.

“Before I started Scarfolk, I spent years having these single, bizarre memories… almost like a whiff on the air. ‘I recognise that!’ And that’s one of the reasons I chose the 1970s for Scarfolk… it means I can give people a slight hint of a memory. The way the brain works is that, if you give it a piece of information, it will then try to extrapolate that to a full piece, to decide what something actually is. That’s why I choose visual images that most people will have forgotten. I wouldn’t choose things that are still relevant, like Abba or lava lamps or disco… I have to choose things like a Programmes for Schools and Colleges test card, something that people might have a vague memory of… but there are gaps. And you fill the gaps with absurd fiction.”

For Jim Jupp, this essence of “lostness” is a pivotal part of the Ghost Box aesthetic, and a chief factor in rooting the label’s releases in the fictional, parallel world of Belbury. “What became interesting for us was the idea of keeping a world where that sense of mystery – that ‘what the hell was that piece of music?’ feeling – was still there,” he says. “Because that feeling is impossible in the internet age, and we’re keenly aware of that. So our focus became keeping that sense of mystery… but making it up! So the label had, from the outset, a fictional setting, where our images and sounds were familiar, but you couldn’t look up the answers on the internet. We had to kind of drag this stuff into a fictional realm where it couldn’t be cross-referenced, and there would still be questions marks about the artists, the images and the sounds.”

Ghost Box celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2015 with a In A Moment, a lovingly-compiled anthology of its most representative work, and a timely reminder that – amidst the theorising and psycho-sociological pondering – what really matters is the art. And what fabulous art it is, too; the product of a uniquely fun and evocative movement, where The Focus Group’s Hey Let Loose Your Love evokes daydreams of Pan-worshipped maidens dancing naked around a gaily-coloured maypole, where Belbury Poly’s Owls and Flowers attempts to navigate the hitherto uncharted passage between Alan Garner and Ultravox; and where – oddly enough – original synth pioneer John Foxx teams up with both Jupp and Jon Brooks for Almost There, a requiem for – I assume – a lost (or even ghostly) lover, but with a lyric that could just as easily be an elegy for our own receding, collective childhood experiences:  “I see you walking past the waters, I glimpse you floating on the air…”

Speaking to Jim Jupp, I get the impression that In A Moment actually marks the beginning of a new era for Ghost Box, and he tells me that he’s keen to consider the possibility of younger musicians mining hauntological feelings from eras much later than those typically referenced by the movement. “There’s only so much you can explore within those few years of popular culture, so we’re working with some younger artists, and pushing that world out to incorporate peoples’ experiences of the 1980s and even the 1990s. It’s good to have a fresh take on this idea of the misremembered and the undocumented past.

“One of our artists is about ten years younger than us, he’s a guy called Martin Jenkins, and he records as Pye Corner Audio. A lot of his take on this stuff comes from the early 1980s, particularly VHS horror films, and John Carpenter videos. And even though it’s outside of our initial period, it’s still firmly in our territory. And when I think back to the 1980s, when I was a teenager, the medium of VHS in particular had a kind of haunted feel. There was a lot of distortion and degradation, tapes would change hands and you weren’t sure where they came from, and there were rumours of things being illegal. It was still that era of mystery and strangeness on TV.”

Associated artists like Moon Wiring Club, the prolific musical project of archive TV buff Ian Hodgson, have already begun to nudge the movement gently into the world of 1980s analogue computer gaming, with the track Console Yourself – on the splendidly-named 2014 album A Fondness For Fancy Hats – drawing heavily on the distinctive loading sounds made by a vintage ZX Spectrum. And Simon Reynolds, too, is hopeful that younger generations will keep the hauntological flame burning: “Every age will have its substrata of things you don’t consciously register at the time, that you only register in retrospect; like the production or format qualities of the media you’re consuming. You don’t notice it at the time, but you can now look at a 1990s film and say ‘Oh, that that is a period’. And even early 2000s movies can seem a bit clunky and dated. So maybe people will feel nostalgic towards the early days of pop music with autotune, and you can imagine a fetish for clunky early digital music, or early sampling. Maybe that will come to seem nostalgia-inducing in time. For old ravers, those things already do impart nostalgia…”

Like Richard Littler and Frances Castle, my own personal “haunted era” began to dwindle in the mid-1980s, when the rustic, folky vagueness of my early childhood surrendered to the addictive advance of console games and the march of digital music before – ultimately – being killed off by the mystique-eroding power of the internet. And, if I’m honest, by my own adulthood itself; even when exposed directly to the music, TV and film of later eras, I find it virtually impossible to experience a frisson of genuine nostalgia for anything that happened beyond the mid-1990s. But I’m thrilled to discover that younger generations – despite the hindrance of growing up in a multi-media, information-soaked age – are still finding hauntedness in the most unlikely of places: Richard Littler tells me of a young friend who recently claimed to be so traumatised by a half-forgotten childhood experience that they were unsure as to whether they’d imagined it or not. On further investigation, it transpired to be the Judderman television advert for the Bacardi-related alcopop Metz, first screened on British television in the year 2000.

As Jim Jupp says, “Maybe the future of it is the fact that childhood itself is a bit weird, and there’s stuff lodged in people’s memories that troubles them, that they can’t quite explain… even in an era when they can look stuff up. Hopefully not all of the answers are there, and there’s still some mystery and a sense of wonder.”

For further information visit ghostbox.co.uk, claypipemusic.co.uk, trunkrecords.com and scarfolk.blogspot.co.uk; and Simon Reynolds’ blog (containing much of his writing about hauntology) is at blissout.blogspot.co.uk.