Blind Youth

We recorded this nearly eight years ago. Crumbs.

In fact, it goes back even further - having checked my notes, it seems to go all the way back to the summer of 1997. It would be great to say something about how nice (or, more likely, awful) that summer was, but it was quite a long time ago, and I was sixteen going on seventeen (someone should write a song about that!)

The song was originally called In Another World. It was one of my tracks, and it had music and everything. Well, in a sense - the main downside was that it wasn't especially good. Neither was it too bad though - some of the better musical elements were reused for Noise Gate, one of the tracks for my solo project (more on that another time).

The lyrics, meanwhile, were heavily reworked into Blind Youth. It's about trying to be non-conformist, and ending up doing the same as everyone else, but it's presented in a nice chirpy way, thanks to the music.

My notes also tell me that Simon started work on the music in autumn 2001, taking inspiration from Family Affair by Mary J. Blige and California Love by Dr. Dre. Our influences used to be so contemporary...

It never even changed much from Simon's original demo, which seemed to have it pretty much nailed right from day one. It's got scratching effects on it. We'd done that before around 1996 on a track called Down, but these taken from one of the floppy disks (remember them?) which came with our first sampler. They're probably the same samples that everyone else has ever used...

The vocal which you may (or may not) have heard isn't quite that old, although I'm not sure when or where it actually was recorded. And here's a fascinating fact: Blind Youth was actually the first track for which the vocal was recorded on computer (our first track, that is - I'm not suggesting this was anything particularly groundbreaking). It wasn't completed, as the computer in question didn't have anywhere near enough memory, but in a sense this was where it all began for me!

We put it onto MyFace recently because we thought you might like something different. How wrong we were...