The video for Travel Blind is taken directly from Peel’s 29/5/93 show, so I will let him tell you all about how he came by the track, while attending a Tsunami gig.
What strikes me about Travel Blind is the way it manages to combine the euphoric with the funereal. There’s some crisply exciting synth lines and a driving beat to get the Norfolk clubbers up and out onto the dancefloor, but a downbeat bassline and lyrics which - when they can be made out - seem fixated on notions of death and dying, conjure up something which sounds like it’s trying to put the rave into grave.
On the upside though, I don’t think the sentiments are especially morbid. Despite references in the first verse to The killing time, the track doesn’t feel as though it’s about death as an ending. Rather, it feels more like a walkthrough into the process of reincarnation. Musically, this is conveyed by the pan pipe samples - and if the lyrics are following Buddhist philosophy, then the instrument could well be a paixiao.
The third and fourth verses go particularly strong on this, as though the travelling soul has to go through the ritual of death before it can begin its next chapter:
It’s wonderful to be inside
Your body and your tortured mind
And I close my eyes and wait to die
And we’ll walk over the shining light.
In the fourth and final verse, the track moves from the spiritual to the human, with lyrics that sound like someone talking to a loved one in their final hours of life. It’s the hardest conversation that a person can have but the sentiments expressed sound like they offer mutual comfort both to the person going into the beyond and those being left behind:
And if you travel blind,
I won’t be so far behind,
And I’ll meet you in the sunshine,
And I’ll tell myself, I’m feeling fine
The implication being that whether death is followed by eternity in Heaven, or rebirth in a new body, eventually we will find our way back to our loved ones again; either when we are reunited in Heaven or through our souls leading us to meet up again in our new lives. We won’t remember our previous existences with them, but if you find yourself meeting or falling in love with someone and feeling like you’ve known them all your life, it may well be that you have done; only it was a previous life.
For myself, I already have Across The Universe by The Beatles and the Peel Session version of Quite Spectacular by Hint* earmarked as music to be played at my own funeral service. I think I may give instructions in my will for Travel Blind to be played at some point during it, as well.
The Noisebox EP that Peel was given was, at least going by this list, the first one that Noisebox Records put out. Despite his promise to play other tracks from this EP in the following week’s programme, a look at my notes and the John Peel wiki suggests that Travel Blind was the only track that Peel ever played from the EP. If whoever the person/people behind Resistance have themselves died, I hope that they used that memory as an example of a great thing that they achieved in this life, before going on to their next one.
Interestingly, Travel Blind was played on this programme after another airing for Box Hole by Jacob’s Mouse, another record which, when I previously blogged about it, convinced me that it was also about death.
*Starts at 10:37 on the video.
Video courtesy of John Peel.
All lyrics are copyright of their author.
