Opinion: No thank you to the neighbours, for forcing your music on me

When I think back on all the neighbours I’ve loathed before, and wished ill upon – and there have been many – it’s their musical taste, or lack thereof, that burnt me the most. That and the fact they weren’t clinically deaf, which would have at least been some excuse for how loud they played their awful ear porridge. 

It also strikes me that the kind of people who listen to classical music must be just nicer, more considerate human beings, because in all the years across all the homes I’ve lived in (I count 20) I can’t remember ever barking at someone about their Bach, or telling someone their ebullient Ode to Joy was filling me with rage.

The other thing that has become clear over the years is that sometimes you just can’t tell by looking at your neighbours what kind of hideous musical taste lurks within their otherwise unassuming skulls. 

I am still getting used to my new suburb, and while most of the people around here are so lovely and friendly I find they hurt my teeth – it sometimes feels like I’ve just eaten too much sugar after talking to them – there are, of course, some cold and prickly weird-beards.

The house a few doors down looks like a museum, or possibly a mausoleum, and the people who live in it are exhibits of whatever the opposite of exhibitionism is. They’re the kind of folks who will pretend they’re not home if you knock on the door, even though you can see them through their entirely glass walls.

They are, at least, very quiet and thus easy to live near, once you’ve stopped stressing over why they don’t like you. Or they were, until a recent weekend when, just after 11pm, their highfalutin house turned into a thumping, bass-booming nightclub.

Previously, if I’d been asked to imagine their musical tastes, I would have gone with something I really hate, like jazz – I picture them wearing berets and pince-nez while stroking their goatees – or possibly Mongolian throat singing or, worst of all, Celine Dion. Whatever they were listening to, I was sure it was being done quietly, possibly at a pitch only dogs can hear.

Dance music – and I mean proper, trancy doof-doof – was thus the kind of surprise you’d experience if you found out that Scott Morrison was a goat-sacrificing Slayer fan.

Now, I happen to quite like dance music, in context – when I’m in a nightclub rather than my street – but it doesn’t matter how much you like a certain oeuvre when your head’s under the doona and you can still feel its bass vibrating your mattress. There is simply no sleeping through rudeness like that, and I’ve had plenty of previous neighbours who just about turned me off rave music with their selfish late-night party habits.

In this recent case, I was almost too shocked to know what to do, and I knew there was no point knocking on the door, so I just had to ride it out, distracting myself by pondering how I’d been so wrong about them. (In the end I decided they must have gone away and the people in the house were Airbnb guests.)

I also soothed myself by remembering that I’ve had far worse and louder neighbours in the past, particularly in apartment buildings, where the sound of angry thrash metal from the floor below used to cause all the cutlery to dance in my drawers, not to mention the fillings in my on-edge teeth.

Sure, sometimes you do have to call the police, but it’s not a resort you want to visit, because it does damage relations with those people in perpetuity. 

Far and away the worst neighbours I ever made the mistake of living near, however, were the owners of a restaurant on a high street in London, above which we foolishly agreed to rent a small shoebox – or what might previously have been a storage cupboard – because it was cheap, and London is not.

It was a Mexican restaurant, and thus smelt annoyingly lovely, because we couldn’t afford to eat there, but the owners would hit their own margaritas hard every evening and begin to ramp up the music to ear-bleeding levels, finishing every night – and I mean Every Single Night, usually around 1am – with the same song: Thank You for the Music by Abba.

To this day I can’t hear its word-salad lyrics without wanting to cry. And so I say, to all my neighbours gone but not forgotten, no thank you for the music, for forcing it on me.