Too Curious by Edward J. Goodman, 1887.
Michael J. Nelson is Captain Janeway.
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scrambledsignals replied to your photo
great characters! I want to know about their daily lives & mundane secrets
Thank you! If they sparked that curiosity I have accomplished the highest achievement on character design hahaha
I drew those using a character description generator online and now I don’t remember nothing about what prompted each of them and now I want to flesh them out somewhere somehow
Curiosities of The Fall - No 10 of 15(ish) - Blindness
"Blindness"? A curiosity? For sure it is…
It’s less a song than a bass riff and, as Jim Watts later admitted, said riff is copped from “Witness (1 Hope)” by Roots Manuva. The Fall pitch it down a semitone and sharpen the note at the 7th beat, thus avoiding a lawsuit and adding a sense of menace their inspiration lacked.
The version given here is from “Interim” and sounds as if it has a synth bassline, thus connecting it even more closely to “Witness” - it’s a loose dubwise thing, speculative but exploratory. It’s a good lead into the classic recording of the song, made for their 24th (and sadly final) Peel Session. The song has no structure as such - the same 8 bar measure is simply repeated throughout but the arrangement is what makes this the essential cut. Taken at a light skip, Spencer Birtwistle’s drumming is magnificent, his cymbals a dramatic device, his toms deployed to add weight and density (ie. at 1m 37s). Steve Trafford keep the bass fuzzy and dark, dropping out completely at 2m 28s only to roar back in 20 seconds later to superb effect. Watts persues a mock-backwards e-Bow guitar line which allows Ben Pritchard to do what he does best, chug away tightly to the left of the sound picture, just out of the spotlight. If there are any keyboards on the track, they are mixed so low as to be inaudible to me. Anyway, presented with such an impressively dense brew, Smith brings his game, running his trusty tape machine around the group to brilliantly disorientating effect and providing a lengthy, winding, curious lyric, full of knots and side-references (“from Narnack Records it came”). His performance is superb, especially where he meets the group as theycoming out of one of Birtwistle’s tom-dominated sections at 4m 10s, wherupon Smith ramps up the tension with a panicky, high-pitched verse which is absolutely thrilling. It was rightly picked out as the highlight of the session and as proof that The Fall were fit and working again. The news - and indeed mp3s - spread quickly and the group’s rehabilitation continued.
It would be over a year before the song made its way to an album “proper” and this is where “Blindness” becomes a curiosity. The rendition on “Fall Heads Roll” falls completely flat. The sound is too empty, the arrangement too sparse, totally lacking all those character touches that made the Peel take such a joy. Smith has pared his lyric back to a few disconnected phrases with only the observation that “99 percent of non-smokers die” raising even so much as a vague chuckle. Watts, of course, is gone with Elena Poulou taking over his lead line on synth but it doesn’t quite connect in the same way. Smith left his tape machine at home too. They sound, well, a bit bored. And I suspect this is the problem - Peel 24 catches the song new, fresh, evolving, open. By the time we come to “Fall Heads Roll”, they know the form that bit too well and result feels like Take 159, like hard work, a chore. An alternate take on the US vinyl LP fares a little better with an extra guitar adding some crunch and noise but it still doesn’t quite catch light. Smith complained in a contemporaneous interview that he was being pressurised into releasing “Blindness” as a single. He didn’t sabotage it on purpose, did he?
"Blindness", of course, gave us that hilarious appearance on Jools Holland’s "Later" and remains a highly popular and effective encore (the rendition on "Last Night At The Palais, taken at a higher pace by the "Reformation Post TLC" line-up is a blast) but what it proves most of all is how quickly MES moves on and that his core strategy of capturing songs (and indeed musicians) quickly and early can be not just effective but defining.
I doubt I can afford the license to do this movie showing thingy, but out of curiosity I contacted the company with deals with that stuff and not only they had not answered me back in a week, their website has “copyright @ 2008” on the bottom.
Sounds like a good sign.
darkarfs replied to your post: Im not googling anything anymore, Ill just make…
dont Google, just speculate, like in the old days.
I wish I could follow this advice but Graham already ruined the aura of mystery surrounding Lockie Leonard.
grahamsig replied to your post: Im not googling anything anymore, Ill just make…
Australian
I hope you are right, this is very important.
It would be cool if Telltalle made murder mystery games set in the Roger Rabbit universe, but I won’t give them the idea because I’ve drained all my blind optimism by sending an email to Boom! Studios suggesting a Maui Mallard comic book and now I just suffer in silence with my desires.
i’ve put twenty-something in my sidebar because soon i would have to change the number, and by putting this way i don’t have to write it again for more 6 years. Also, you don’t get to see my race, gender, etc etc anymore to further add to this newfound aura of mystery.