“I freaked.” Creedence Clearwater Revival – ‘Bad Moon Rising’ Five years later, it became the first ever song to be played on the Moon after Buzz Aldrin grabbed the aux cord (sorry, cassette) and put on Sinatra’s Quincy Jones-arranged take on ‘Fly Me To The Moon’ just before stepping off the spacecraft. “The first music played on the Moon…” Jones reflected to The New York Times in 1990. Originally written in 1954 by jazz composer Bart Howard, his creation really took flight (sorry) and grabbed imaginations when ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’ released his version of the crooner classic in 1964 - just as the Apollo program was starting to get serious. Did the Moon landing really happen? Is Elvis really dead? He was kind of an ephemeral figure at that point so he was the perfect guy to tie all this stuff together as you journey through childhood and touchstones of life.” Still, it’s got a good chorus, right? Björk – ‘Moon’ “He’s the perfect ghost to lead you through this tour of questioning things. As such, as someone that you couldn’t really pin down in terms of what he was and what he was not. Some of what he did was funny, some of it was annoying, some it was irritating – but it was always provocative.
“He wasn’t a comedian, he wasn’t a comic, he was a performance artist. Written about the surrealist entertainer Andy Kaufman, Michael Stipe utilised Kaufman’s life story as a vehicle to briefly explore a range of subjects which include the Moon landing (and the tiresome conspiracy theories about whether or not it actually happened). “Andy Kaufman was a performance artist,” bassist Mike Mills told NME in 2017. Rather than lauding Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins’ achievement, the actual meaning behind the title of R.E.M.’s country-rock classic is instead a far more ambiguous affair. – ‘Man On The Moon’Ī classic and a curveball to kick us off. Here’s our selection, then, of some rather excellent Moon tunes to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Moon landing. The success of the US’s world-renowned Apollo program, typified by that moonwalkin’ Apollo 11 crew half a century ago, has proved to be a creative catalyst for many a songwriter in the years since, with our enduring fascination with the Moon and space having been brought that little bit closer to home by Armstrong and co.’s antics in 1969. From Frank Sinatra to Arctic Monkeys, plenty of our favourite musicians have been, and will likely continue to be, inspired to pick up their pen and/or instruments after looking up at the soothing yet curious glow of the Earth’s all-natural satellite. This weekend marks 50 years since NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong boldly took mankind’s first step on the surface of the Moon, so make sure you toast one to Buzz Aldrin, the oft-forgotten Michael Collins (who, despite going all the way into space, didn’t actually get to join his esteemed colleagues for a casual lunar stroll) and the late Armstrong at some point this week.