It’s such a beautiful thing, that moon. I’ve been consciously obsessed with it since the third year of Junior School, when I did a project about space. I stayed behind in the small library reading about the Apollo missions, and pestering the off-duty teachers and cleaners about Apollo 11 (pronounced, for a while, ‘A polo’) and how it landed on the moon.
I remember every feature of the day the Moon blocked out the Sun. It was cloudy, but it went from early afternoon light to twilight in a moment. And the birds stopped singing. And, like the moon landing 40 years ago, you had this sense of everyone watching the same thing. I can understand why there are ‘Eclipse chasers’ in the world. I don’t blame Brian May for running after them, not one bit.
I remember a couple of years ago watching the Lunar Eclipse. The full moon went from white to red. Deep red. Devil red. It glowed, and I looked at it through binoculars remembering the often forgotten thing that you can actually see a hell of a lot of the moon through binoculars. This photo of the lunar eclipse is one of my favourite photos.
I love ambient music. It makes me think of the moon. None more so than Brian Eno, Harold Budd, and Daniel Lanois’ soundtrack to the moon. In fact, that was made to a go with a collection of archive film NASA put together in the eighties. I bet that’s floating around now. Mental note – find that film, stick it on a projector in a dark hall and get lost in the moon. But yeah, music that makes me think of the moon or is about the moon or sounds like it’s about the moon. Hum’s ‘Apollo’ is a favourite. Not just because it’s very lunar and restrained and has a tender tension to it that gets stretched out over it’s duration until the final drop down as ‘the tether is slipping from its knot’.
It’s got everything that song. It’s about the thing I think about more and more as I get older and read about psychology and philosophy more and more – the effect of seeing the Earth from outside of it, of being far away, of being completely alone, of being one of only a few to go to a place that everyone can see but no-one can get to. Then, on the return, of being so ridiculously famous, heroic, flawed, misunderstood, commoditised and maybe even betrayed. It’s also a love song – it’s about the astronaut’s wife. Not the film. It’s about missing someone and wanting them not to risk their life, and it’s about not being able to not do that.
In a way, the song is kind of trivial in that he’s going away, she’s pissed off, but he’s got to do what he’s got to do and by god he’ll do it, but she’s pissed off, and that’s on his mind. But then there’s the second verse about “blankness and darkness like underneath the leaf, has settled on me here and scraped away the sound”. It’s the solitude that gets me I think. Love songs can talk all they want about being alone, there’s no-one aloneness more complete than that in space. Not in my imagination anyway. And it’s presented lyrically and musically by Hum in the most perfect way when, like the Derby Playhouse production Moon Landing, it could be over the top, dramatic, garish, and down-right cheesy. There’s none of those things in the story of the Apollo missions.
So as a hats off to the boys on the moon, and what that meant, and everything that happened afterwards, I knocked up a cover version of that song that I like about people who went to the celestial body that I love. It probably needs a good old mastering to squash the bass but I didn’t have the time, and I wanted it to be ready for today.
To the moon.
