Fingertips is an odd little song. It was buried at the end of 1992’s “Apollo 18” album. If you played the CD straight through it was an odd collection of choruses – which sounded like parts of 21 different songs crammed together. According to TMBG’s John Linnell that’s exactly what it was:
“The project was to write a bunch of choruses and nothing else. In other words, I had to restrain myself from writing any other parts of the songs. I wanted a collection of choruses that’s something like what you see on TV late at night, like that old K-Tel commercials. I was thinking about how you know a lot of songs from these ads, but the only part you know is maybe one line, which is half the chorus. And yet they stick in your head in the way a whole song would. in a way, these tiny chips of songs seem complete, because you don’t know the rest of the song.”
However, straight through wasn’t the idea. The song was actually designed for the “shuffle” feature on CD players. So, if you loaded 5 cds into your player and pushed shuffle (as was the fashion in 92) it would add 21 songs consisting of a single chorus and ranging in length from 4 to 61 seconds to the mix.
Now YouTuber David Taylor has taken the “song” or .. songs as a single track and mashed it up with Star Wars. It actually works pretty well. It is, at any rate, fun!