Dave Vanian: Coffins, Ghosts and a Sloping Bedroom

Dave Vanian talks like a man who treats the macabre as domestic detail. He begins with an absurd, practical image — he and his wife once took turns sleeping in a single coffin, and now he’s having a proper double one made — then carries on as if this is the most ordinary household upgrade.

When asked about getting too old for rock, he shrugs the question away with a name: just look at James Brown. The tone is breezy rather than bitter. Family life gets the same sideways humour: he claims no children “that know of,” and says he has no birthmarks fit for print.

His descriptions are full of texture. The bedroom sounds theatrical: it tilts so severely you slide across the floor, it’s hung with brocade and there’s a parachute over the bed. Small, specific details sit alongside grander flights of fancy — he speculates his previous life might have been Attila the Hun.

Vanian is also comfortable with the uncanny. He reports seeing a ghost: a rain‑coated, ’50s style figure who came across as friendly, not the sort to throw things. He mentions a recent visit to Bristol Cathedral simply as sightseeing. Asked about his epitaph, he picks an odd, comic line linked to W.C. Fields: “I’d rather be in Philadelphia,” and notes he’s been there.

The interview ends with the same playful morbidity it began with. He allows for the idea that flowers might scream, invoking the mandrake legend as if half expecting its truth. The overall mood is polite, sardonic and a little theatrical — Vanian mixing gothic imagery, deadpan wit and small domestic facts as if they were all part of the same comfortable eccentricity.