So do tree frogs, which have to be able to jump from branch to branch. Nocturnal hunters like owls and cats have pupils that, when open wide, cover the entire front of the eye. How do animals see in the dark? For one, they have big eyes.
Yet humans flounder with the departure of daylight, while many animals are able to forage and hunt by night. Even when I looked carefully, I could barely discern the thin strands of wire in the gloomy evening light.Īll vertebrates share the same basic eye structure: a pupil that dilates or constricts to control how much light enters the eye, a lens to focus the image onto a light-sensitive retina, and nerves that relay the information to the brain. I was taking a shortcut through some woods, and the impact sent me tumbling. He retained a particular love for Third Eye Foundation and Flying Saucer Attack, in whose honour he wrote a 20th anniversary piece last year.I’ll always remember the time I ran into a wire fence at dusk. Fires in Distant Buildings was the closest Nick got to a rock album – an urban and world-weary recpod that propels its listeners through a half-alien, half-familiar world of dark uncertainty, best exemplified by ‘Velvet Cell’ and ‘Song from Under the Arches’.Īlthough Nick moved to Bristol just as the city’s ‘trip-hop’ music scene was taking off, he was more likely to be found at the shows of the city’s lesser sung lo-fi artists, mostly recording in their bedrooms. Similarly, 2005’s Black Holes in the Sand explores familiar country themes, but, in a similar fashion to Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads, uses traditional folk forms to tell tales of wanton murder that verge on black comedy. Flashlight Seasons is a collection of wistful songs with rich instrumentation, including ‘Bluebeard’ and ‘The Diver’ – the latter possibly his most famous song after it was picked up by Shane Meadows for the Dead Man’s Shoes soundtrack.įlashlight Seasons‘ songs proceed gently they’re pastoral, filled with space. He once said that his albums got successively darker as he moved east from the sunny environs of Bristol’s Clifton village, overlooking the Avon Gorge, towards Easton, a poor inner-city neighbourhood now bisected by a huge motorway bridge. His second album, 2004’s Flashlight Seasons, attracted the attention of Warp Records, where he remained for five albums as their much-loved black sheep.
The “dearest friend whose absence brings indescribable sorrow” emerged at the turn of the century with a string of often tender, often blackly funny songs, drawing on traditional folk themes, but ornamenting them with elements of post-rock or electronica. This small moment of a big life came back to me a decade later when I learned Nick had died at 37, days before I was due to see him on his band Gravenhurst’s first tour in years. The image stuck me, probably as I was still reeling from his wonderful performance in the gloom of the marquee that I’d caught by chance, drawn in by that big electronic drone that buzzed through the very quaint Lynmouth village. He spreads his arms to embrace a friend, perhaps a lover. Emerging onto the beach into a big and bright North Devon afternoon, Nick Talbot exits through the side of a white, windowless tent, smiling and squinting through his glasses.
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