The house where Bruce Springsteen wrote Born to Run
The property in Long Branch, New Jersey – which is new on the market – is a Boss-sized bargain. For just $299,000 (£193,000) – slightly more than surrounding properties – you can own the two-bedroom abode in which the great American rocker wrote the entire Born to Run album. The asking price does not include suicide machines, but gives prospective buyers a rare opportunity to sweat it out on the actual street of a runaway American dream.
The house where Ian Curtis hanged himself
“This is the way, step inside,” sang the Joy Division singer on 1980’s The Atrocity Exhibition, providing a useful intro for estate agents in years to come. The terraced house in Barton Street, Macclesfield, in which Curtis lived with his wife Debbie – and hanged himself in the kitchen – fetched £200,000 this year. Buyer Hadar Goldman intends to turn it into a museum.
The house where Kurt Cobain grew up
If you’re short on ultimate Nirvana collectibles, never mind – you could always put in a bid for the singer’s childhood home. The four-bedroom house in Aberdeen, Washington – complete with a wall punched by young Kurt and “shag carpeting” – is surprisingly not hot property: earlier this year the sale price was dropped by $100,000 to just $400,000.
The ranch Michael Jackson built – complete with llama
For those seeking a higher-end property, they don’t come much pricier than Neverland, Michael Jackson’s infamous ranch-cum-children’s-fantasy-land, which went on the market in May. Prospective buyers will need $100m, and it’s even less of a thriller without the late star’s long-gone fairground, personal fire station, zoo or Bubbles the chimp. What you do get, however, is 2,700 acres, with a six-bedroom main house, a four-bedroom guest house, a tennis court, a basketball court, a 50-seat cinema, a swimming pool and a magic stage. Oh, and a llama.
The house Noel Gallagher lived in at the height of Britpop
From 1995 to 1999, Noel Gallagher lived in a handsome townhouse in north London – strictly speaking, closer to Chalk Farm or Belsize Park than the usually mentioned Primrose Hill – named Supernova Heights, after the song Champagne Supernova. This house became a byword for 90s excess and partying. “You could hear them in there until all hours; people getting drunk and shouting. This is not normally an area associated with that kind of behaviour,” a neighbour told the Observer after Gallagher sold it for £2m in 1999. The price reached a supersonic £3.25m when Little Britain’s David Walliams bought it in 2005, the price of having to live forever with a Footballers Wives-style interior.
The house where Amy Winehouse died
The three-bedroomed “villa” (actually quite a sizeable house) in Camden Town in which Amy Winehouse lived and died was originally put in the market for £2.7m. But a series of buyers – perhaps put off by its status as a shrine for fans – dropped out before it was snapped up for £2m late in 2012 by Leslie Balfour-Lynn. Her husband, vineyard owner Richard, said he quite liked Winehouse, but “no more than anyone else”, but was fond of properties with “interesting histories”, which the house in Camden Square certainly has. Winehouse property aficionados might also consider her previous property, a few minutes’ walk away in Prowse Place, which was on the rental market for £3,030pcm earlier this year.
The house where Jimmy Page was rumoured to practice the dark arts
Ozzy Osbourne insisted he preferred Milk Tray to Black Magic, but Jimmy Page’s interest in the occult led him to purchase Boleskine House, formerly home to the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley, in 1970. Despite owning it until 1992, he spent just six weeks in the property on the shores of Loch Ness. Crowley used the house to perform “the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage” and other rituals, but while its reputation attracted Page, other buyers have been less keen: it was back on the market in 2009 for just £176,000, complete with sinister history of rituals and death.
The house and pool where Brian Jones died
In the macabre rock-property stakes, they don’t come much darker than the Grade II -listed farm in Cotchford Lane, Hartfield, where Brian Jones was found dead in the swimming pool in 1969. The farmhouse, formerly home to AA Milne, the author of the Winnie the Pooh stories – was recently offered for sale at £2m, estate agents Savills highlighting the pool, though more for it being heated than having hosted a death that spawned a thousand conspiracy theories.
The house where John Lennon lived as a child
Fancy a fab Beatle bargain? Lennon’s first home on Newcastle Road, Liverpool – he lived there from 1940 to 1942, and then again from 1943 to 1946 – sold at auction in October 2013 for £480,000, three times the expected price, but still a snip for a house in an area that inspired numerous Beatles songs. The lucky American buyer received a “modest family home” in Wavertree, near Penny Lane, complete with blue suburban skies and not far from the old Strawberry Field Salvation Army children’s home. Imagine!
The houses the Beatles lived in after they were fab
Any houses associated with the post-superstardom Beatles that come on the market tend to fetch high sums. Kenwood, the mock-Tudor Surrey mansion in which Lennon wrote much of Sergeant Pepper’s, was on the market in 2013 for around £13m. Ringo Starr’s 200-acre 17th-century Surrey bolthole, Rydinghurst, fetched the same sum (several times the asking price) earlier this year. The cheapest Beatled property of all, sadly, is unlikely to be sold. Starr’s birthplace at 9 Madryn Street, Liverpool, is subject to a demolition order, and the city council (which reprieved the boarded-up house after a campaign by fans) are unlikely to sell it, not even for its recently reported value: just £600.
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