A Figure Walks

Lyrics

(1)

A figure walks behind you 
A figure walks behind you
A shadow walks behind you
A figure walks behind you

Days of booze and roses (2)
Shine on us, free us all   (3)
Who is not irascible
He is no genius (4)

A figure walks behind you
A figure walks behind you
A shadow walks behind you
A figure walks behind you

The old golden savages
Killed their philosophers (5)
Thought brought the drought about
Something followed me out
Goes out again

A figure walks behind you
A shadow walks behind you
A figure walks behind you
A shadow walks behind you

And if it grabs my coat tail
I will turn and hit it
It may remove the pegs
Keeping my eyes open

A figure walks behind you
A shadow walks behind you
A figure walks behind you
A shadow walks behind you

It's got eyes of brown, watery
Nails of pointed yellow
Hands of black carpet
It's a quick trip to the ice house
A quick trip to the ice house 

A figure walks behind you
A shadow walks behind you
A figure walks behind you
A shadow walks behind you
You

A figure walks behind you
A shadow walks behind you
A figure walks behind you
A shadow walks behind you

You 

And tales of terror
Which my father told me
They never scared me
But not only is it the blind
Who cannot see  (6)
That figure behind you
Behind you 
You 

That figure kept on walking
Behind you

There's a man on my trail
He's also behind you
Behind you

That figure kept on walking
Behind you

A figure walks

Notes

1.
From the interview Looking at the Fall Guise, by Don Watson, NME 1 October 1983, p.7:

 


[Dragnet's] saving grace is 'A Figure Walks', perhaps the funniest of Smith's distortions of industrial clichés - "a song written during a long walk home wearing an anorak which restricted vision by two thirds". It sounded like urban paranoia revisited.
"If you actually listen closely though," he points out, "It's not a human being at all that's following the character, it's actually this monster from outer space. I like to think of it as my big Stephen King outing."

And Dan reports:

At the gig at the Lyceum, London, 25 March 1979, MES introduces this song with these words:
 

This one's a slow one, dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft. The psychologist said that he thought the shadow was his father. The shad was his dad.

Dan reminds us that in Carl Jung's thought, the shadow is an aspect of the unconscious which represents the dark side of the self, which must be integrated into the personality for the sake of mental health, and remarks "Since MES dedicated the song to Lovecraft, maybe MES read something which psychoanalysed Lovecraft and linked his writing in some way to the fate of his father, who was declared insane and died in an asylum." See More Information for more Jung.

Also from Dan:

Some echoes here of William Blake's "My Spectre around me night & day": "My Spectre follows thee behind."

From the sleevenotes to the expanded edition: "A FIGURE WALKS (MES) ... a song written during a long walk home wearing an anorak which restricted vision by 2 thirds. Fiction breaks away from fact at the end i.e. it didn't catch me, obviously (?)"

Dan:

from TS Eliot's The Waste Land
 

And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

^


2. Days of Wine and Roses was originally a 1958 teleplay on CBS, and more famously a 1962 movie directed by Blake Edwards and starring Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick. The film is about a couple that gradually succumb to alcoholism. The movie also spawned a hit song sung by Andy Williams, and Merle Haggard later copped the title line for his classic "I Threw Away the Rose."  

The ultimate source of the phrase seems to be a poem by Ernest Dowson, as Aubrey the Cat points out on the Fall online forum:

The "Days of Booze and Roses" lift/quote/parody is duly noted on bz's Annotated Fall site as being the title of a film and song, etc., but that title came from a poem by Ernest Dowson (a friend of Oscar Wilde's, sticking with him through and after the trial and staying with him in France once he came out of prison):


THEY are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate: 
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream 
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream. 


Even kind of fits the song, kind of.

(A Dowson poem also provided the title for Gone with the Wind.)

 

^

3. The lyrics of Todd Rundgren's 1977 song, "Love is the Answer" (from the Utopia album, "Oops! Wrong Planet") contain the following:
 


Light of the world, shine on me
Love is the answer
Shine on us all, set us free
Love is the answer  

^

4. There is a 1964 biography of Charles Babbage (1791-1871) entitled Irascible Genius: The Life of Charles Babbage. Babbage was a mathematician and inventor who is credited with being the first programmable mechanical computer. Whether or not Smith had this in mind, it may be where he encountered the phrase; on the other hand, a Google search reveals that "irascible genius" is not an uncommon combination of words. There is probably something in the way we conceive of genius that makes such a phrase likely; geniuses are often assumed to be difficult people in many ways, and MES himself, if we consider him a genius, certainly fits the bill. As is so often the case with Fall lyrics, it may be possible to detect an echo of William Blake here; in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, one of the "Proverbs of Hell" runs: "Improvement makes strait roads, but crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius." It's notable, however, that Blake's proverb does not imply a cult of great men; he talks of genius as a quality or capacity, rather than saying what is required to be genius.   

^

5. Possibly a reference to the death sentence doled out to Socrates in 399 BCE; although the Athenians were hardly "golden savages," 500-300 BCE is sometimes called the "Golden Age" in the Greek culture (although the phrase in Hesiod refers to more ancient times).

The phrase also recalls Nietzsche's "blond beast," the unreflective and nobly born ancient who is likened to a lion, although the Nazis read a racial descriptor into it. From Nietzsche's perspective, the citizens of 4th-century Athens could be seen as upholding the "noble ideal" against the incursion of Socratic rationalism. Nietzsche is one of the authors that MES has mentioned appreciatively in interviews (his laconic but hilariously effective takedown of Shane McGowan on the subject is well worth checking out ).  

Also, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who unlike Hobbes and Locke thought that human beings were pretty decent folk in their natural state, is often referred to as having an idea of a "noble savage" or, less commonly, "golden savage," probably in reference to a purported "golden age" (the periodization of ages in terms of metals comes from Hesiod). Neither phrase actually appears in Rousseau. 

Dan: "Difference between savage and civilized man: one is painted, the other gilded." That's Mark Twain, usually cited to More Maxims of Mark (1927). I think it comes from his notebooks.

SRH wonders if there's an allusion to Frazer's Golden Bough, which speaks of primitive cultures sacrificing kings and/or priests...

^

6. This is a line that MES may have heard or picked up somewhere; it's not unique to this song, in any case. Dan cites an instance;  this is the earliest of several he found, but it's not particularly likely it's directly a source here:

In The Best of Herb Caen: 1960-1975, published in 1991 by Chronicle Books (Caen was a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle:
 

Another April in the city, and it is not only the blind who cannot see. 

^

More Information

A Figure Walks: Fall Tracks A-Z

Dan submits, from Carl Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections:
 


About this time I had a dream which both frightened and encouraged me. It was night in some unknown place, and I was making slow and painful headway against a mighty wind. Dense fog was flying along everywhere. I had my hands cupped around a tiny
light which threatened to go out at any moment. Everything depended on my keeping this little light alive. Suddenly I had the
feeling that something was coming up behind me. I looked back, and saw a gigantic black figure following me. But at the same
moment I was conscious, in spite of my terror, that I must keep my little light going through night and wind, regardless of all dangers. When I awoke I realized at once that the figure was a "specter of the Bracken," my own shadow on the swirling mists, brought into being by the little light I was carrying. I knew, too, that this little light was my consciousness, the only light I have. My own understanding is the sole treasure I possess, and the greatest. Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light.
 

Dan points out that MES has quoted, or alluded to, the "Proverbs of Hell" from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell numerous times:
 

"The selfish smiling fool and the sullen frowning fool shall both be thought wise" (quoted in "So-Called Dangerous," also on Code: Selfish; also, in "Mere Pseud Mag. Ed.": "Beware the sullen smiling fool/And the shallow frowning fool/Both will be thought wise")

"He thinks at dawn / He acts at noon / He stays alone / And in the evening.." (paraphrased version of "Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.", "Two Face!," from Code: Selfish)

"Folly is the cloak of knavery", ("Ed's Babe," 1992, the Code: Selfish era)

"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom" (adapted for "Lost in Music," which is on the next album, The Infotainment Scan)

Also there are a bunch of references to Blake, including a reference to "Heaven and Hell" in "W.B.."

See also "That Man" and "A Figure Walks" for lines that appear to be nods at this source.

Anyway, it is interesting that so many lines emerged c1992.

Comments (48)

dannyno
  • 1. dannyno | 28/10/2013
The link to the infamous NME interview with MES, Cave and McGowan is broken. Here's one that works, for now: http://shanemacgowan.com/press/nme-talks-to/
bzfgt
  • 2. bzfgt | 29/10/2013
I fixed it, but that's a bummer; my site is probably going to be riddled with dead links as the years go by, and some of the sources will be totally lost, which sucks. It would be good to put up a site which reproduces all the sources I use here and just link to that, but that is a huge job in itself, and I wouldn't even know how to do it.
MerelyGifted
  • 3. MerelyGifted | 09/03/2015
https://archive.org/web/ ? Granted, not everything is (yet!) archived.
bzfgt
  • 4. bzfgt | 28/03/2015
Thanks, MG...in a couple years there will be a lot of work to do checking links and looking for ones that work, if I can be bothered...
testtes
  • 5. testtes | 29/05/2015
test
teechur
  • 6. teechur | 17/07/2015
B-
Antoine
  • 7. Antoine | 06/11/2015
I had never realized this before, but Captain Beefheart's Abba Zaba has a lot in common with this number - listen to the tribal-sounding drumming that sticks to the toms and the spidery guitar work over it, made even more significant by lines like

"Two shadows at noon, abba zaba zoom
Gonna zaba her soon
Babbette baboon abba zaba zoom
Gonna catch her soon"
Martin Gammon
  • 8. Martin Gammon | 21/09/2016
From Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge:
Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread
And having once turned round walks on
And turns no more his head
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread
bzfgt
  • 9. bzfgt | 15/10/2016
Ah, good one, Martin!
dannyno
  • 10. dannyno | 22/11/2016
This song debuted live in February 1979.

On 25 December 1978, the BBC aired a short film entitled "The Ice House" as part of its "A Ghost Story for Christmas" series, which ran each Christmas from 1971-1978. It's not really a ghost story, mind you.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ice_House_(short_film)

I suspect a lyrical influence!
dannyno
  • 11. dannyno | 26/01/2017
Rousseau is supposed to have said something about "golden savages", but I haven't been able to find out exactly what.
bzfgt
  • 12. bzfgt | 11/02/2017
Dan, although he never actually said it, the notion of a "noble savage" is often imputed to Rousseau. Could that be what you're thinking of?
dannyno
  • 13. dannyno | 04/03/2017
Yes, the noble savage thing is Rousseau. But I'm finding "golden savage" mentioned too. Maybe it's an alternative translation.
dannyno
  • 14. dannyno | 04/03/2017
But here you, a new discovery.

"Shine on us, free us all"

The lyrics of Todd Rundgren's 1977 song, "Love is the Answer" (from the Utopia album, "Oops! Wrong Planet") contain the following:


Light of the world, shine on me
Love is the answer
Shine on us all, set us free
Love is the answer


The song was a hit for England Dan & John Ford Coley in 1979.
dannyno
  • 15. dannyno | 04/03/2017
At the gig at the Lyceum, London, 25 March 1979, MES introduces this song with these words:

This one's a slow one, dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft. The psychologist said that he thought the shadow was his father. The shad was his dad.


https://sites.google.com/site/reformationposttpm/pithy-smithyisms/in-the-1970s
dannyno
  • 16. dannyno | 08/03/2017
Golden savages: seems to have been a different Rousseau, now I've looked more closely. Was a bit confusing since JJ Rousseau doesn't seem to have used the "noble savage" phrase at all.
bzfgt
  • 17. bzfgt (link) | 19/03/2017
You're right, some people seem to refer to the phrase as though it's an idea of Rousseau's. And although I see it once in a kind of oblique connection with a George Rousseau or something (not imputed to him as far as I can tell, just mentioned in a note of a book about him) they are usually thinking of JJ when they say it, I'm pretty sure.
bzfgt
  • 18. bzfgt (link) | 19/03/2017
A book blurb:

Reminiscent of Rousseau's Golden Savage, the setting is 1839 in Bass Strait, and the most celebrated explorer of the age and his wife adopts a young aboriginal girl, Mathinna as an experiment to prove that the savage can be civilised -- only to discover that within the most civilised can lurk the most savage.

If it's George that would be like saying "When Washington crossed the Delaware..." and meaning when the students on "Welcome Back, Kotter" took a field trip to Philadelphia.
dannyno
  • 19. dannyno | 26/03/2017
Some echoes here of William Blake's "My Spectre around me night & day" (http://erdman.blakearchive.org/#b5.31)


My Spectre follows thee behind
dannyno
  • 20. dannyno | 16/04/2017
Dragnet sleevenotes (helps with note #1):

Image


A FIGURE WALKS (MES) ... a song written during a long walk home wearing an anorak which restricted vision by 2 thirds. Fiction breaks away from fact at the end i.e. it didn't catch me, obviously (?)
dannyno
  • 21. dannyno | 13/08/2017
Note 1: "the shadow was his father"

In Jungian terms, the shadow is an aspect of the unconscious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_(psychology)

Since MES dedicated the song to Lovecraft, maybe MES read something which psychoanalysed Lovecraft and linked his writing in some way to the fate of his father, who was declared insane and died in an asylum..
dannyno
  • 22. dannyno | 08/12/2018
"The old golden savages
Killed their philosophers"

I still think there's an Athenian reference in there, but I also found this:

"Difference between savage and civilized man: one is painted, the other gilded."

That's Mark Twain, usually cited to "More Maxims of Mark" (1927). I think it comes from his notebooks.
bzfgt
  • 23. bzfgt (link) | 12/01/2019
Yes Socrates was killed at the end of what is sometimes called the Golden Age, I'm terrible with this historiographical stuff. Of course still "golden savages" doesn't really fit, but I got it in there.
dannyno
  • 24. dannyno | 19/03/2019
Note #1,


MES, quoted in TBLY no.8 (February 1997): "A song written during a long walk home wearing an anorak that restricted my vision by two-thirds...if you actually listen closely, though, it's not a human being at all that's following the character. It's actually from outer space. I like to think of it as my big Stephen King outing."


This quotation in fact comes from the interview Looking at the Fall Guise, by Don Watson, NME 1 October 1983.p.7:
http://thefall.org/news/pics/83oct01_nme/83oct01_nme.html

The actual original quote is slightly different than as reproduced at Reformation! (or in TBLY which is their proximate source). The "Its saving grace bit", by the way, is in relation to Dragnet:


Its saving grace is 'A Figure Walks', perhaps the funniest of Smith's distortions of industrial clichés - "a song written during a long walk home wearing an anorak which restricted vision by two thirds". It sounded like urban paranoia revisited.

"If you actually listen closely though," he points out, "It's not a human being at all that's following the character, it's actually this monster from outer space. I like to think of it as my big Stephen King outing."
dannyno
  • 25. dannyno | 19/06/2019

But not only is it the blind
Who cannot see


I don't know and cannot establish whether this is the source, but it is similar to something Herb Caen wrote. He was the famous and long serving San Francisco Chronicle columnist. The line in question I found in The Best of Herb Caen: 1960-1975, published in 1991 by Chronicle Books (so where might MES have read it, if he did?).

Anyway, the line is:

Another April in the city, and it is not only the blind who cannot see.


From the SF Chronicle, 12 April 1964.
dannyno
  • 26. dannyno | 19/06/2019
I guess it's unlikely to be unique to Caen. However, although I have found similar usage after him, his is the earliest I've found. I haven't gone into a lot of depth, mind you.
bzfgt
  • 27. bzfgt (link) | 03/07/2019
Worth noting with due caution.
dannyno
  • 28. dannyno | 05/03/2020
From Carl Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections:


About this time I had a dream which both frightened and encouraged me. It was night in some unknown place, and I was making slow and painful headway against a mighty wind. Dense fog was flying along everywhere. I had my hands cupped around a tiny
light which threatened to go out at any moment. Everything depended on my keeping this little light alive. Suddenly I had the
feeling that something was coming up behind me. I looked back, and saw a gigantic black figure following me. But at the same
moment I was conscious, in spite of my terror, that I must keep my little light going through night and wind, regardless of all dangers. When I awoke I realized at once that the figure was a "specter of the Bracken," my own shadow on the swirling mists, brought into being by the little light I was carrying. I knew, too, that this little light was my consciousness, the only light I have. My own understanding is the sole treasure I possess, and the greatest. Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light.
dannyno
  • 29. dannyno | 08/08/2020
From TS Eliot's The Wasteland

And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
bzfgt
  • 30. bzfgt (link) | 16/08/2020
There's no such poem
dannyno
  • 31. dannyno | 17/08/2020
Gah.

From T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land:

From TS Eliot's The Wasteland

And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
dannyno
  • 32. dannyno | 17/08/2020
Bugger, careless C&P.

From T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land:

And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
dannyno
  • 33. dannyno | 25/12/2020
MES expressed admiration for Satan in Goray, a novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer (see entry for Fantastic Life).

From the interview with Escape (http://thefall.org/news/990314.html#escape), Spring 1989:

I'll tell you who's a good writer - Isaac Bashevis Singer. I used to read a lot of Yiddish literature, still do. Singer wrote a great story called Satan In Goray. It was a true story about what happened in 1666 in this Polish village called Goray. It's all been covered up in Jewish history but Yiddish people still remember it. All the Orthodox Jews got out of hand, because they were so oppressed by the bastard racist Pole and Russians, that they had to keep to themselves, cut off. All these weird Jewish sects sprang up. One of them believed that if you did evil on the outside, your inside would be good - almost like a Rasputin scenario. They believed that doing evil was the best thing to do, because the inverse maths says your inside would therefore be pure. Can you believe this?!


Anyway, I found this in another novel by Singer, The Slave (1962, my edition is a Penguin reprint, 1974) (p.153):


As Jacob walked, his shadow paced with him, a double shadow, composed of a light shell and a dark kernel.


I just offer it as another echo. We don't know whether MES read The Slave, and there are after all several other notable literary echoes.
SRH
  • 34. SRH | 23/02/2021
"The old golden savages
Killed their philosophers"

Possibly a ref to J G Frazer's The Golden Bough.

Terribly outmoded as an anthropological work, it was highly influential on literary figures in the 20th century. Frazer saw the killing of kings/priests as central to older forms of religion:
"The man-god must be killed as soon as he shows symptoms that his powers are beginning to fail, and his soul must be transferred to a vigorous successor before it has been seriously impaired by the threatened decay. The advantages of thus putting the man-god to death instead of allowing him to die of old age and disease are, to the savage, obvious enough. For if the man-god dies what we call a natural death, it means, according to the savage, that his soul has either voluntarily departed from his body and refuses to return, or more commonly that it has been extracted, or at least detained in its wanderings, by a demon or sorcerer. In any of these cases the soul of the man-god is lost to his worshippers, and with it their prosperity is gone and their very existence endangered. Even if they could arrange to catch the soul of the dying god as it left his lips or his nostrils and so transfer it to a successor, this would not effect their purpose; for, dying of disease, his soul would necessarily leave his body in the last stage of weakness and exhaustion, and so enfeebled it would continue to drag out a languid, inert existence in any body to which it might be transferred. Whereas by slaying him his worshippers could, in the first place, make sure of catching his soul as it escaped and transferring it to a suitable successor; and, in the second place, by putting him to death before his natural force was abated, they would secure that the world should not fall into decay with the decay of the man-god. Every purpose, therefore, was answered, and all dangers averted by thus killing the man-god and transferring his soul, while yet at its prime, to a vigorous successor."

T S Eliot mentions the book in his notes to 'The Waste Land' and H P Lovecraft mentions it in 'The Call of Cthulhu'.
dannyno
  • 35. dannyno | 06/03/2021
bzfgt
  • 36. bzfgt (link) | 13/03/2021
I always thought he meant the morgue. It seemed so obvious I didn't think to annotate it. But is it? Now I'm having doubts.
dannyno
  • 37. dannyno | 01/04/2021
"Days of booze and roses"

The first documented performance of this song dates to 14 February 1979, which perhaps may be significant in terms of lines like this - Valentines Day, after all. I've listed to the bootleg and the lyrics were in place.

Also, and it's surprising I haven't checked this until now, Days of Wine and Roses was shown on BBC 2 on Friday 29 December 1978. For The Fall, that night was a day off between a gig at the Electric Ballroom in London on the 28th, and a gig at The Vanue, Manchester, on the 30th.

So I think it's likely MES watched the film on TV on that day, just a matter of weeks before the debut of the song.
dannyno
  • 38. dannyno | 01/04/2021
Comment #37, "The Vanue" = "The Venue", of course.
dannyno
  • 39. dannyno | 26/04/2021
This bit:


And if it grabs my coat tail
I will turn and hit it
It may remove the pegs
Keeping my eyes open


The suggestion seems to be that the shadow will put the narrator to sleep, which suggests we should see the "figure"/"shadow" as a Sandman or Sandman-like being.

I wondered if that thought might lead us to Freud (see the psychologist comment in note 1), whose essay "The Uncanny" takes Hoffmann's short-story The Sandman as its starting point. But while there may be echoes I don't see anything more substantive than that.
bzfgt
  • 40. bzfgt (link) | 01/05/2021
Right. Of course it could "put him to sleep" like a sap would or something...
dannyno
  • 41. dannyno | 01/05/2021
Another ice house:

This one is at Worsley Hall, Salford. Further away than the one at Heaton Park, but better condition.

https://britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/101162987-worsley-hall-ice-house-worsley-ward

https://s3.britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/lbimg/101/162/987/101162987-261-800.jpg
dannyno
  • 42. dannyno | 11/05/2021
Note #2, the Dowson poem, origin of the "days of wine and roses" phrase.

The poem is quoted in Colin Wilson's The Outsider (p.222 of my 2001 Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Orion reissue of the 1997 updated edition).. Specifically these lines:


They are not long, the days of wine and roses
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.


While the original name of the Bramah-Friel-Baines-Smith group was "The Outsiders", it is usually said by all involved that this was because of the Camus novel rather than Wilson's book. However, Smith et al would hardly have been unaware of Wilson's book in this connection, and we know Smith at least was a reader of Wilson.

It still strikes me as plausible that MES might have been paraphrasing the film title, which as I pointed out above had been shown on TV not so long ago.

But the fact that Colin Wilson also quotes the Dowson poem could mean that MES adapted the phrase from there instead. Or perhaps that the one reminded him of the other.

MES might have read Dowson, of course. Or he might not have been quoting anyone deliberately.

But the point here is that the phrase comes up in a book that MES surely read, and in a film he could have watched only a few weeks before the song's debut. Perhaps we might say it's part of MES' culture.
dannyno
  • 43. dannyno | 12/05/2021
Turns out that the William Blake line in Before the Moon Falls, ""I must create my own System or be enslaved by another man's" is also quoted by Colin Wilson in The Outsider (p.160 of my edition). So that's two such lines on the same album.
dannyno
  • 44. dannyno | 27/12/2022
The YMCA 15 September 1978 gig included on the Cherry Red 1970s box set includes an extra line or two after the golden philosophers verse. Hard to hear, but it seems to end "strange men from sea attack our village."
dannyno
  • 45. dannyno | 28/12/2022
... which of course once again suggests a connection between the themes of this song and the plot of Lovecraft's The Shadow over Innsmouth.
Neville Harson
  • 46. Neville Harson | 02/03/2023
Given Mark's affinity for M.R. James, I think it's likely this song was at least partially inspired by James' short story "Casting the Runes." It's about a shadowy and demonic figure that follows certain individuals, and also quotes the lines from the "Ancient Mariner" poem that Martin mentioned above.
Hexen Blumenthal
  • 47. Hexen Blumenthal | 18/04/2023
Episode 2 of sci-fi series "Tales from the Loop" has 2 lads trying to play this

"I'll go back in"
"Danny, no"
(later in same ep)
Oleary1599
  • 48. Oleary1599 (link) | 26/08/2023
I don't think it's too much of a stretch to see the links to the M.R. James story Canon Alberic's Scrap-book where the illicit purchase of said book leads to a pursuit by an unseen figure. "in the house had closed the conversation all this time a growing feeling of discomfort had been creeping over him a nervous reaction perhaps after the delight of his discovery whatever it was it resulted in a conviction that there was someone behind him and that he was far more comfortable with his back to the wall." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bb6VD4BpaYQ I'm well aware that the trope is far from unique to this story, but given MES's James references in this era...who knows?

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