If only it really were forbidden.

When I was perhaps 16, I got into reading Anne Rice’s vampire novels and took to wearing all-black clothes, dark purple eyeshadow and my hair in dishevelled rat’s tails. (I imagined this looked ‘romantic’.)

This sartorial madness unfolded over a mercifully brief period, perhaps even shorter than my previous teenage episode of vampire literary fandom during which I’d inexplicably decided to type out Bram Stoker’s Dracula in its entirety.

These days, I can only feel grateful that I haven’t succumbed to the alluringly inept prose of Stephenie Meyer, because who knows how I might have embarrassed myself. Also, vampire fandom seems much more commodified now than the simpler times of the mid-’90s when a kid could borrow a library book and then bash away at her Mac Classic for hours at a time, or just ‘dress vampirey’ in stuff she already owned.

Not only can you purchase a raft of vampire-themed fiction, but you can also buy DVDs of vampire movies and TV series, film soundtracks and guides and handbooks about vampires. You can kit yourself out in prefab emo-wear and even waste your money on other people’s crappy fan arts and crafts.

And you can waste even more money on Universal’s shameless cash-in album, Forbidden: Songs of Love, Lust & Blood. We noticed an ad for this double CD on telly last week. It is probably an excellent Christmas gift for the sooky teenager in your life, but as a survey of vampire-themed music, it’s really terrible.

The album appears evenly divided into songs with vampire/supernatural references in the titles, emo songs, and bog-standard love songs. Of course these must have been harvested from Universal’s back catalogue, but still there appears to be little care to make sure these compilation strategies overlap in a satisfying way. So many songs appear weirdly out of context.

Radiohead’s angst anthem ‘Creep’ is the album opener, but it doesn’t really make sense. Who’s the ‘creep’ – a vampire? the Twihard listener? Also painfully literal are ‘Darling I’ll Be Your Werewolf’ by Short Stack (which I can’t help singing to the tune of ‘I’ll Be Your Shelter’ by Taylor Dayne) , ‘Blood To Bleed’ by Rise Against, ‘If I Was Your Vampire’ by Marilyn Manson and ‘Love Song For A Vampire’ by Annie Lennox. The Living End’s ‘Moment In The Sun’ is a pretty silly inclusion, given that a moment of daylight will kill a vampire. Most absurd, however, is ‘Black Hole Sun’ by Soundgarden. Because vampires wear black, sleep in holes in the ground and don’t like the sun?

Other well-known emo-pop tracks need a fair bit of creative lyrical interpretation to make sense here. In ‘The Reason’, Hoobastank’s passive-agressive moan “I’m not a perfect person” becomes a massive understatement when applied to a bloodsucking supernatural creature. We’ll pay ‘Thnks Fr Th Mmrs’ by Fall Out Boy because of the line “See he tastes like you, only sweeter”, but perhaps 3 Doors Down’s ‘Kryptonite’ is confusing matters to suggest Superman is a vampire.

Still other songs appear more weighted towards the “love” and “lust” aspects of the title: we’ve got ‘Desire’ by Ryan Adams, ‘Here With Me’ by Dido, ‘Lay Me Down’ by the Audreys and the skin-crawling ‘Lips Of An Angel’ by Hinder. But what is Kisschasy’s ‘Generation Why’ doing on this album? And does Jeff Buckley’s cover of ‘Hallelujah’ only make the cut because Buckley is dead… or perhaps undead, given his posthumous releases?

Still, it’s easy to criticise, isn’t it? So let’s be good sports and have a go ourselves at making a sooky vampire album. And here it is!

Our mad sweding skills also extend to album covers.

We, The Wretched: The Enthusiast Presents Songs Of Hankering, Ecstasy, and Exsanguination

1. Bruce Springsteen – Hungry Heart
2. The Murmurs – You Suck
3. Evanescence – My Immortal
4. Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds – Red Right Hand
5. De La Soul – Stakes Is High
6. Toto Coelo – Dracula’s Tango
7. Vampire Weekend – Horchata
8. Slick Rick – I Sparkle
9. Foreigner – Cold As Ice
10. The Darkness – I Believe In A Thing Called Love
11. Nine Inch Nails – With Teeth
12. Chris De Burgh – Lady In Red
13. Spice Girls – The Lady Is A Vamp
14. Patti Smith – Because The Night
15. Roky Erickson – Night Of The Vampire
16. My Chemical Romance – Blood
17. Pearl Jam – Blood
18. Bon Jovi – Blood On Blood
19. My Bloody Valentine – Feed Me With Your Kiss
20. Kevin Bloody Wilson – Wow, Did I Get Whacked!