Ian wins the prize! Whatever the prize is...
I'm going through the oldest Pulp songs with Jim Sellars. He hadn't heard - or doesn't remember hearing - Refuse to be Blind. But he was quite emphatically clear about the title it used to have. Says he came up with the drum part, too.
Yes, I love it! That's why I was so surprised to.find out where the music came from. Even the title 'message to the Martians' makes me.cringe a bit. I never expected it would sound any good!
Wow. I did say in a review I wrote of "Refuse to Be Blind" which was included on the Bar Italia site that "The instrumental in the middle brings to mind Space... Space indeed, this is probably another Message to the Martians". Who would have thought that I was actually spot on?
Well, he was "brought up on the space race" after all! It would be good if some audio jiggery-pokery could remove the vocals from Refuse to be Blind.
Jim's finished his reminisces now. I'll compile them and stick them on the wiki as soon as I'm able...
Yes, it's interesting to note how many recurring themes there are in Jarvis's lyrics, such as space, as you mention.
The other day I happened upon this image of The Leadmill and it reminded me of how many of Jarvis's songs (especially young Jarvis's) mention the sky, the moon, the stars, the night, nocturnal walks, etc, and you can just imagine him wandering the dark, empty streets of Sheffield in the early hours of the morning after a night out at The Leadmill.
Roofs, roof-tiles and especially curtains crop up a lot, too. I find this quite funny and it makes me nostalgic, as well, since curtains seem to be dying a death these days, if modern estate agent pictures are anything to go by. Curtains have associations with night-time, too, of course, particularly in the winter, and also of the curtain-twitching suburbs which Jarvis is so fond of writing about.