Every Friday the men from b3ta host a radio show on London’s Resonance FM, and in true b3ta stylee the show’s content and music is compiled almost entirely from suggestions from the site’s regular contributors. This week’s theme was Flatmates from Hell, and although I didn’t submit a story at the time, I do have a tale to relate.
Dave was a Numanoid. Every morning Dave would rise at 7.30 am, switch on his stereo, and play Gary Numan’s White Noise, an live album recorded at Hammersmith Odeon in 1984. Dave had been in the audience the night the of the performance, and had developed a particularly unhealthy relationship with the record. It was a double-vinyl release, and all four sides were rotated on a daily basis, each full of cheery synth gems like “Me, I Disconnect From You” and the equally uplifting “I Die You Die”.
As if this weren’t reason enough to throw the man into the street, Dave was also a thief. At first it was minor league crime – a missing pint of milk here, half a loaf of bread there, but eventually Dave went big-time, intercepting mail and stealing cash-point cards. We called The Police after another flatmate’s bank account was emptied, and Dave confessed all after being found with a bedroom full of stolen items (mainly road-signs, flashing hazard lights and traffic cones, as far as I can remember).
The next day Dave was taken away by his father, an extremely born-again Christian, who screamed and wailed and gnashed his teeth and railed at the rest of us for turning his “god-fearing son into an agent of Satan”. We never saw either of them again.
And what, pray, is wrong with “I Die: You Die”? Granted, not played every morning for seventeen years.