Top 10: Songs about space travel and aliens

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.

Devo: Space Junk (1978)

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.

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’.

Classic Album Review: Kraftwerk - Soest Live (2020)

Craig Stephen’s been on a Kraftwerk trip, discovering a hugely significant but largely unlistenable gem from deep within the German band’s archives. Soest Live was a long celebrated YouTube clip, but in 2020, 50 years after the fact, the rudimentary recording got the full vinyl treatment …

Following Kraftwerk’s stunning gig in Wellington late last month – which you can read about here – it seems apt to delve into a live album recorded more than half a century ago.

It’s only relatively recently that the show has been rediscovered showing the band at a primitive point in their existence.

A Kraftwerk show in 2023 is of four men performing behind synthesizers with computer-generated images and videos being shown on large screens behind them. Other than sole survivor Ralf Hutter the performers have changed often over the decades.

In November 1970, however, it was a vastly different Kraftwerk that performed at a cramped venue in the town of Soest in Germany’s northern industrial heartland as part of the local Winter Festival. The band’s line-up consisted of Hutter, Florian Schneider-Esleban (as he was then known), and Klaus Dinger, who would later form Neu! Hutter played organ and tubon, Dinger the drums and Schneider-Esleban flute, violin and vibraphone. Everything then was radically different from what the band would evolve into within a few years.

 Kraftwerk had only formed that year and had released their eponymous album a few months before this gig. All four tracks from that album were played this evening, and no other tracks made it onto the setlist.

As it was part of a festival, the performance was captured on camera and shown on regional TV station WDR-TV. It is worth investigating on YouTube especially to see the somewhat unusual layout of the venue (clip below). The band was crammed into a corner as the almost entirely student/youth audience sat awkwardly or stood passively facing the stage. A large screen is to the right of the band and in front of that two old-style (ie. massive) standing cameras pan in on the audience. 

The gig begins with ‘Vom Himmel Hoch’ which starts slowly and seems to be an attempt to replicate the sound of VW car trying to start up on a cold winter’s morning while a swarm of bees fight to get out. Eventually, the car starts and after eight minutes faces in the crowd that were showing bemusement and confusion suddenly become interested. Some even clap along to the rhythm of the beat. Someone in the crowd pulls out a whistle and blows it incessantly. English pop and Californian rock this is not.

After 16 minutes of this, they flow into ‘Ruckzuck’ which sees Schneider-Esleban let loose with his flute a la hippie rock band Jethro Tull. Dinger, who was positively restrained for much of the opening track, is now in his element, doing his finest Keith Moon impression.

‘Stratovarius’ is rockier, a little like one of the proto-metal bands that had surfaced a couple of years earlier. It is purely experimental, lacking in any melody at all, basically an amalgam of unsynchronised sounds. A few minutes in, it begins to truly get weird with Florian playing his violin in a manner that would have given a music teacher a cardiac arrest.

The final track, ‘Megahertz’, is most akin to what Kraftwerk would become a few years later with Hutter’s organ-playing and Florian’s violin combining to create that renowned esoteric and magical sound.

This performance is a period piece that provides little insight into the band that would release albums such as Autobahn and Trans Europe Express. But it certainly also parades the immense talents and creative minds of Hutter and Schneider-Esleban. Once they became a quartet with Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flur, they became a notable exponent of electro-pop that influenced multitudes of artists such as Bowie, Soft Cell and Depeche Mode.

Neither Kraftwerk nor Kraftwerk II (1972) have been officially re-issued and, if truth be told, if they were they wouldn’t captivate the current audience due to their raw and experimental nature. They would be of curious value only.

Nevertheless, Soest Live merits listening (and viewing) to see the massive developments the band would make in a relatively short time.

Gig Review: Kraftwerk @ TSB Arena, Wellington, 29 November 2023

You know that feeling you get when you’re under the weather, functioning at less than one hundred percent, but have an expensive ticket to a bucket list gig? You force yourself out and simply hope for the best, well aware that it’s a bucket list gig you’ll (likely) never again get a chance to tick off?

That was my dilemma last Wednesday evening as I headed for Wellington’s TSB Arena to sate a lifelong desire to see Kraftwerk up close and personal. I need not have worried too much, any fatigue factor was partially mitigated by it being an all-seated event, and naturally Kraftwerk’s arrival on stage soon made me forget about any of those initial concerns.

There they were, almost within touching distance. Four glowing figures. Standing behind their four customary lectern-like structures. No other band* equipment in sight. And none required. 50-plus-years’ worth of cutting edge electronic musical innovation standing right there. Well, founding member Ralf Hutter was there, at least, with support from three band* members with considerably less time on the clock. It was Kraftwerk nonetheless.

*are Kraftwerk a band? Discuss, show workings where applicable.

As the German technocrats worked through the opening phase of their set it immediately became obvious we were about to hear something close to a “greatest hits” show - opening with ‘Numbers’, ‘Computer World’, and ‘Home Computer’ hybrids - and I couldn’t shake the notion that much of this stuff was practically inter-planetary back in the late 1970s and early 1980s when it initially surfaced.

Pre-Microsoft, pre-Windows ’95, pre-Apple, magnificence. And quite visionary when you stop to consider how relatively peripheral to our day-to-day world that kind of technology would remain for at least another decade.

The lightshow effectively amounted to projections on the super-sized screen behind the stage, which was more than enough, with each graphic or image perfectly synchronized with what we were hearing. ‘Spacelab’ courted us momentarily with screen shots of Aotearoa and Wellington itself, garnering an additional cheer from many, yet oddly provoking an involuntary bout of inner cringe from yours truly (why does it always have to be about “us”, huh? – Cynical Ed).

And it may have just been me, but five tracks into it, when ‘The Man Machine’ launched itself upon us, it felt like the gig suddenly took on another gear. Was it just a not-so-subtle increase in volume? … or had the pill I didn’t take somehow just kick in? It wasn’t just me, there was an immediate buzz all around me, and I felt sure the entire arena had instantaneously lifted itself couple of feet off the ground, at the very least.

Then the mid-set run: a veritable feast of everything that’s great about technology, and perhaps, 1970s Germany – visually and aurally … ‘Autobahn’, ‘Computer Love’, ‘The Model’ and ‘Neon Lights’, followed immediately by the weightiness of the always relevant but hopefully no longer quite-so-relevant ‘Radioactivity’, which ended with quite a crunch. Deliberately or otherwise (ie. slight technical glitch?), the bass-driven crescendo felt like it fair blew a hole in the very foundations of the venue itself.

‘Tour de France’ took us on a journey, a retro-trip in fact, back to when the world existed only in black and white, whilst simultaneously, musically, steering us well into the distant future. The less familiar ‘Vitamin’ followed, before what might have been the only programming or sequencing hiccup of the night, right at the start of a still quite sensational ‘Trans-Europe Express’; it seemed for a moment as though one of the quartet had briefly fluffed his lines, Hutter glancing sideways at the offender, but no real damage was done.

From there it was distinctly end-game stuff, and the slow build in tension to that earlier mid-set mini-peak was given wider context by a rush of pure unadulterated electro to end the show – after the relatively sedate, but still glorious, ‘The Robots’ had given us the calm before the climactic storm: a ‘Boing Boom Tschak’ / ‘Techno Pop’ / ‘Musique Non-Stop’ hybrid beast of a thing ending a show that will live long in the memory.

No encore, none called for, and none required. Everyone in that crowd had had their fill. And more. It was a gig well worth getting off my woe-is-me lethargic arse for, and one truly befitting the bucket list tag I’d long since given it.

Just a final word for Ralf Hutter himself: that man is 77, yet he stood there for a full two hours directing proceedings, amid the heat, the noise, the visual bombardment, and the pressure to perform; singing, vocoder-ing (is that a thing?), and fiddling with all manner of synthetic gadgetry. But at the end, there he was, the last man standing. Remarkable.

Gig photos courtesy of nothingelseon. With thanks.

EP Review: FRTG13 – Supersymmetrie (2021)

Here’s a thing. Another great recommendation from Fabrizio Lusso’s excellent White Light // White Heat website. Another great name-your-price digital download on Bandcamp. Dark industrial synthpop crossing over seamlessly with more orthodox forms of post-punk. Coming to you by way of Hanover, Germany. With a nod and a definite debt to compatriots Kraftwerk. Five tracks, the best of which are the title track, ‘Supersymmetrie’, and the more than vaguely familiar ‘Computer Welt’. 

Grab a copy from the link below, and if you like this, why not go back further and pick up a copy of last year’s Corona Sessions, which is also name-your-price.

Classic Album Review: Kraftwerk – Minimum-Maximum (2005)

The death last month of Kraftwerk’s founding member Florian Schneider prompted an outpouring of love and respect for the phenomenal achievements of the pioneering German electronic act.

Kraftwerk has been a constant source of inspiration in my own little world of music consumerism across more than 40 years, but where does any newcomer start when it comes to discovering the music of Kraftwerk?

Well, the lazy way, and certainly the most cost effective way of doing it, is to start right here, with Minimum-Maximum, because virtually all of Kraftwerk’s key tracks are to be found in one form or another on Minimum-Maximum.

But that, of course, would be to deny yourself the pleasure of experiencing fine studio albums like Autobahn, The Man Machine, and Computer World. So while I’m about to strongly recommend Minimum-Maximum as a first-class example of Kraftwerk at its best, I also feel compelled to point out that nobody (and certainly no newbie) will totally “get” Kraftwerk purely on the strength of listening to one live compilation album, albeit a double album set. So do yourself a favour, you know what needs to be done, and the three aforementioned albums are all ideal tasters.

Kraftwerk’s musical influence can be seen everywhere – they are to electronic music what Microsoft and Windows ’95 were to operating systems, yet these four geeky German blokes somehow managed to anticipate the technological age way back when Bill Gates was still just a goggle-eyed naval-gazing schoolboy wearing oversized shorts. If Kraftwerk’s music was futuristic in the mid-to-late Seventies and throughout the Eighties (and it was), it has lost little of its impact thanks to all of the advances in technology that have taken place since … and hey, there’s been a few.

Consequently, it might be said that Kraftwerk as a “live” act has never sounded better than it has in recent years, even better perhaps than it did in its so-called prime – and what better way to test that theory than to pack up the laptops, processors, and synthesizers and take them on the road, on a world tour no less? ... something that ultimately led to the Grammy Award-winning Minimum-Maximum, a 22-track live extravaganza recorded in 2004 at a variety of venues across the globe (see London, Paris, Moscow, Tokyo, San Francisco, Berlin, and several other less exotic locations).

It is, to cut a very long story short, a superb album; a live document and a Greatest Hits rolled into one, by one of the most important “bands” of all-time. Yes, all-time. I can’t really say much more than that.

Note – the album comes in two versions – English and German.

Ten Essential Kraftwerk tracks found on Minimum-Maximum: ‘Tour de France’, ‘Autobahn’, ‘The Model’, ‘Neon Lights’, ‘Radioactivity’, ‘Trans Europe Express’, ‘Computer World’, ‘Pocket Calculator’, ‘The Robots’, and ‘Aéro Dynamik’.

Kraftwerk: Classic Albums – The Man Machine & Computer World, Vivid 2013, and Free Mixtapes

The annual Vivid Festival in Sydney has just come to the end of its spectacular near three-week-long run. Described as an extravaganza of “light, music, and ideas”, it really does look like a must see event.

This year’s Vivid Festival was made all the more exciting by the fact that legendary German technocrats Kraftwerk performed EIGHT times in just four days at the Sydney Opera House, rolling out what is otherwise known as The Catalogue – eight exceptional albums (one per gig, two gigs per day/night) from Autobahn (1974) through to Tour de France (2003). I’d be a liar if I said I wasn’t totally jealous when I learned that local ‘Stuff’ music blogger Simon Sweetman had attended. Simon’s experience is well documented here …

 

Blog On The Tracks - Covering The Vivid Festival

Anyway, it got me thinking more and more about Kraftwerk. The organisers of Vivid must have been pinching themselves when they secured Kraftwerk’s participation in the event because no other musical outfit across the globe (individual, band, DJ, or “operator”) could possibly provide a better fit for the “lights, music, and ideas” ethos than Kraftwerk. Across the past four decades this German phenomenon has been at the forefront of the electronic music evolution, proving instrumental in the development of many sub-genres, not the least of which have been Hip hop and techno.

Beyond the obvious untouchable pop culture markers such as Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Velvet Underground, it is doubtful there has ever been a more influential act than Kraftwerk. The group’s longevity and ability to set new trends knows no bounds. As a unit, they continue to astound.

With that in mind, I revisited a couple of key Kraftwerk albums in my collection and wrote a brief review for each (below). I also stumbled across a collection of fairly cool freely downloadable Kraftwerk related mixtapes featuring the group and a whole range of different artists as compiled by DJ Food here ...

 

DJ Food/Kraftwerk Free Mixtapes

Kraftwerk – The Man Machine (1978)

The Man Machine (or Die Mensch Maschine) is one of several truly great Kraftwerk albums released during the group’s heyday of the late Seventies/early Eighties.

 

With just six tracks clocking in at around 36 minutes, The Man Machine is also one of Kraftwerk’s shortest albums, but with typical German efficiency (generalisation alert!) there is no shortage of quality with the “band” (are Kraftwerk really a band, or a group of IT geeks?) somehow managing to squeeze as much into those 36 minutes as possible.

There’s no real need for me to wax on about what this sounds like – Kraftwerk being the synth Gods they are – but this is the album that gave us ‘The Robots’, ‘Neon Lights’, and the very belated hit single ‘The Model’. It also gave us perhaps the most iconic album cover of Kraftwerk’s entire career.

Kraftwerk – Computer World (1981)

Like so much of Kraftwerk’s storied output, Computer World (aka Computer Welt) was light years ahead of its time.

The album – following on from the success of 1978’s The Man Machine – was several years in the making, yet it could have been made any time between its 1981 release date and say, the turn of the new Millennium some 20 years later, and still sound relatively fresh.

It’s worth remembering that back in 1981 computers weren’t quite the everyday item they are today, and back then they were very much a big deal. Indeed, I recall my own sense of excitement when buying something as basic as a “space invaders” pocket calculator around that time!

For a bunch of German cycling obsessives to dedicate an entire album to this new electronic phenomenon seemed rather indulgent in the extreme.

But of course, we now know different. If they (computers) haven’t exactly taken over the world, then they most certainly have taken over the lives of a large portion of its inhabitants - which is exactly what Kraftwerk were banging on about all those years ago.

Highlights: ‘Computer World’ (both parts 1 & 2), ‘Pocket Calculator’, and ‘Computer Love’.