Here’s your mission, should you choose to accept it: make a list of the best songs about space travel, aliens and giant monsters from space, without mentioning either that bloody song by Bowie or that effin song by Elton John. Sure thing, Ed.
10 of them? … nah, let’s make it an
OCD-defying 11.
The B-52s: Planet Claire (1979)
From their esoteric but brilliant
self-titled debut is a song about a mysterious woman who has just arrived on
Earth. “Planet Claire has pink air/All the trees are red/No one ever dies there/No
one has a head.”
Released as a single in 1979, it
failed to sparkle in the commercial world, partly, or even wholly, due to the
nearly two-minutes of instrumentation before the lyrics kick in. Radio DJs were
never going to be enticed by that. The Foo Fighters have been known to do a
heavier live version.
Radiohead: Subterranean Homesick Alien
(1997)
Radiohead’s finest album is definitely
subjective, but for myself, you can’t go beyond their superb OK Computer, from where
‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’ can be found. The title is a play on Bob Dylan’s ‘Subterranean
Homesick Blues’, one of the great observations of the 1960s counterculture. But
there’s no similarities in the slightest between them.
Rather, Thom Yorke sings of isolation and wishes that an alien colony can take him away just so he could be a silent observer instead of an active participant in the game of life.
Kraftwerk: Spacelab (1978)
A star turn on the Man Machine album, ‘Spacelab’
was performed by Kraftwerk with an astronaut in-orbit live in 2018. The
collaboration, with German astronaut Alexander Gerst, who was on the
International Space Station, closed out Kraftwerk's set at the Jazz Open
Festival in Stuttgart.
With Kraftwerk co-founder Ralf Hütter,
Gerst played the robo-emotional melody from the song. The time lag made for a
few hiccups, but few in the audience were caring.
The Pixies: Motorway to Roswell (1991)
In 1947 debris from a military ballon
crash in New Mexico led to various suggestions and rumours that it was a space
craft and aliens on board were taken into a US military facility in Roswell. The
accident has spurned countless TV series and movies. Pixies singer Frank Black
is fascinated by aliens and space and wondered if the visitor(s) “ended up in
army crates?/And photographs in files.”
The Buchanan Brothers: (When You
See) Those Flying Saucers (1947)
This was written shortly
after Kenneth Arnold shot to global fame after claiming to have
seen nine silver-coloured discs flying in unison near Mount
Rainier, Washington state. Arnold even estimated their speed at being 1200
miles an hour.
‘(When You See) Those Flying Saucers’
ponders the objective of those aliens in the sky and finds a novel of way of
surviving. “You’d better pray to the Lord when you see those flying saucers/It
may be the coming of the Judgement Day/It’s a sign there’s no doubt of the
trouble that’s about/So I say my friends you’d better start to pray.”
The Byrds: Mr Spaceman (1966)
Taken from Fifth Dimension, ‘Mr
Spaceman’ had surprisingly modest results with this single failing to chart in Britain. Music
journalists dubbed it space-rock.
The protagonist wakes up in the middle
of the night and sees a UFO in the sky. He then dreams of being taken along
with the inhabitants. “Hey, Mr Spaceman/Won't you please take me along/I won't
do anything wrong/Hey, Mr Spaceman/Won't you please take me along for a ride.”
Parliament: Mothership
Connection (1975)
Here’s an entire
album with an outer-space theme, but with black people at the core. The album's
concept would form the backbone of Parliament and the sister band Funkadelic’s
concert performances during the 1970s, in which a large spaceship prop known
as the Mothership would be lowered onto the stage.
As well as the
title track, there were songs with titles such as ‘Unfunky UFO’ and ‘Supergroovalisticprosifunkstication’.
The cover featured a spaceship and the sounds were very much … out there.
From Devo’s 1978 debut album, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We are Devo!,
generally regarded as the weirdo post-punk band’s finest hour. Even back in the
1970s the amount of discarded space craft parts was beginning to became a
problem ... and in this track, it resulted in tragedy. “Well, she was walking
all alone/Down the street, in the alley/Her name was Sally/I never touched her,
she never saw it/When she was hit by space junk/When she was smashed by space
junk/When she was killed by space junk.”
Destroy All Monsters soundtrack (1968)
Akira Ifukube can be considered to be
Japan’s equivalent to Ennio Morricone, a composer extraordinaire who has scored
so many of the country’s greatest films, including several Godzilla ones. Among
the best of the series of magnificently bonkers keiju movies is this classic
from 1968 which features Gojira up against a series of guest opponents. This
soundtrack is regarded as one of his finest and in many ways set new standards
for film-scores in monster movie making.
Pink Floyd: Set the Controls for the
Heart of the Sun (1968)
Syd Barrett played on guitar on this, which
was quite an achievement in its own way as by mid-1967 he had begun acting
extremely strangely and would play one chord for an entire gig – or none at
all. It is said that it is the only song that the first five members of Pink
Floyd played together.
Songwriter Roger Waters borrowed the
lyrics from a very old book of Chinese poetry and the title was
derived from a 1965 novel by science fiction writer Michael Moorcock.
Jonathan Richman & the Modern
Lovers: Here Come the Martian Martians (1976)
The Modern Lovers are often included
on proto-punk albums heralded as one of the many bands that were instrumental
in fanning the flames of the punk movement.
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Richman’s debut album Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers
is light-hearted with child-like backing vocals and a curious version of ‘Amazing
Grace’. ‘Here Come the Martian Martians’ is certainly in that vein following
two songs entitled ‘Abominable Snowman in the Market’ and ‘Hey There Little
Insect’. |
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