We'd trash hotel rooms, then tidy up!

THE MESSAGE from the Ouija board was blunt. “It spelt out ‘House Dirty’,” Belinda Carlisle recalls. She and her friend, Pleasant Gehman, “a world-renowned belly-dancer/ghostbuster”, were using it in an early 80s Los Angeles punk clubhouse called Disgraceland.

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“We said ‘That's rude’ and the board replied ‘Shut up sluts’. It freaked us out. I don't use Ouija boards now. I had lots of strange experiences.

“I think they can be a portal for weird things.”

By her own admission, Belinda, who recently turned 67, was a feral teenager, agonising her parents by taking LSD, running away from home, and immersing herself in LA’s nascent punk scene.

She found fame with The Go-Go's before becoming a global solo star with her 1987 platinum-selling chart-topper Heaven Is A Place On Earth.

Back then Belinda was fuelled by alcohol and cocaine, but she’s a different woman now.

Sober for 20 years, she meditates daily and has found her earthly heaven in Mexico City.

“I will probably live here for the rest of my life,’ she tells me. She and Morgan Mason, her film producer husband of 39 years, moved to the Mexican capital in 2020.

“We love the people, the culture, the art, the food...it’s exciting. There's so much history.

“The mixture of paganism and Catholicism is unique.

“The smells, the sunshine...it reminds me of my childhood.”

Belinda grew up in Thousand Oaks, Greater LA, with a stepdad who drank his wages and a mother hooked on lithium. “We were among the poorest of the poor — we ate oatmeal and Bac-O-Bit sandwiches for dinner’ she says.

At school, kids called her “Belimpa” and mocked her for having only one outfit.

Born in Hollywood, the eldest of seven, Carlisle was just five when her carpenter father left.

Her ultra-religious mother remarried an older alcoholic petrol station attendant.