ONLY musicians and students can indulge in being wilfully obnoxious as a personality. Each of these brings back memories of an arsehole housemate:
Florence + The Machine
You’re pretty sure Florence Welch was the self-proclaimed ‘white witch’ who set off the fire alarm in your housing block with a sage cleanse, costing every other resident £45. She claimed it was worth it because she’d ‘cleansed the building of negative energy’. She then kindly offered to burn some juniper if you still sensed spiritual impurities.
Axl Rose
Obsessed with alternative medicine, you couldn’t double-drop paracetamol without a lecture from this pious housemate on the evils of Big Pharma. He filled every available surface with brown bottles of homeopathic nonsense. And everyone knew, but nobody was allowed to mention, it was because he’d spent his freshers’ year off his bollocks on drugs.
Kevin Rowland
That housemate with a destructive, addictive personality. One minute he’s joined a religious cult announcing the end of the world, the next he’s sold the communal telly to fund his new girlfriend’s modelling career. Cross-dressing was only another phase in a journey which also took in Buddhism, Just Stop Oil and the inevitable trip to India.
Jim Morrison
Constantly munching psychedelics and dabbling in black magic, he hooked up with an equally unhinged acid freak and invited her to move in without asking anyone in the house. Which led you uttering the sentence ‘Look, I don’t mind mutual blood-drinking ceremonies behind closed doors, but please clean up the shared bathroom after you.’
Bjork
The wilfully eccentric art student who comes down for breakfast dressed as a swan, sits quietly until until her brief, unexplained high-pitched chuckle makes you jump, and who nobody crosses because there’s footage of her slamming someone’s head against a concrete floor doing the rounds of the group chats.
Ed Sheeran
Chirpy and amiable enough but also insufferably bland and dull, the only aspect of this generic student that stood out was that he, while eating noodles and watching Ipswich games on illegal streams, was convinced he was bloody brilliant and would earn millions within a few years of graduating. And irritated the f**k out of everyone by doing just that.
