Hello, this is Simon Tesler with more great sounds from the Music Archive, and a few of the stories behind them. The theme of this week's show is SPACE. The Final Frontier indeed. All my tracks today have a distinct interplanetary flavour. We'll hear from Prince, Echo & The Bunnymen, Jamiroquai, Earth Wind & Fire and many more but first, welcome to Planet Earth with Duran Duran.
That was Duran Duran's storming debut single Planet Earth, released almost exactly 45 years ago, but still an absolute cracker. In fact that's the Night Version remix of the original single, which brings John Taylor's phenomenally funky basslines right up high in the mix. Although as front man Simon Le Bon is certainly the most visible member of the band, Duran Duran is very much the invention of John Taylor and keyboard player Nick Rhodes, who were its original creators and are still really the guardians of its legacy, together with Le Bon.
In 2012, Taylor told webzine Complex "I call Planet Earth funky punk. I was really a punk rocker. Then I discovered disco. When I discovered disco, I didn't want to be a guitar player in a punk band. I wanted to be a postman in a funk band. But I was a punk and I never was going to be able to play like Chic. So 'Planet Earth' for me, as a bass player, was an expression of sort of my punky aspiration to be danceable, to have that disco thing going on." It’s a fanfare. It’s like, ‘Planet Earth, meet Duran Duran. Duran Duran, meet planet Earth.’ It’s one of those, ‘all are welcome’ songs.”
Now for another planet, and another girl too. In a few minutes, Echo & The Bunnymen make their debut on Sounds with The Killing Moon from 1984. But first, the breakthrough song from one of the greatest British bands of the 80s who never quite made it, The Only Ones. Another Girl Another Planet.
Another Girl Another Planet by The Only Ones, and then The Killing Moon from Echo & The Bunnymen. Received wisdom about Another Girl is that it's not about space travel at all, but about drugs, mainly because of singer and guitarist Peter Perrett's subsequent and long-running struggles with heroin. However he denies that is the case.
He told Uncut magazine in 2017, "I always enjoyed writing ambiguous lyrics that could be taken on two or three different levels. You know, it’s like Love Is The Drug or Addicted To Love. I put in drug-related imagery, but it wasn’t about drugs. At that time I was more addicted to sex and infatuation than I was to drugs. It was inspired by this girl from Yugoslavia. I didn’t go out with her, but she was like a total space cadet, which when I was really young I found interesting. She was just a bit weird – she’d say crazy things, and it just got me thinking that every girl has something different to offer."
The Killing Moon, from the Bunnymen's 4th album Ocean Rain is often described as their greatest ever song. Writer and guitarist Ian McCulloch told the Guardian, "It’s about everything, from birth to death to eternity and God – whatever that is – and the eternal battle between fate and the human will. It contains the answer to the meaning of life. It’s my To be or not to be …”
He said the core lyric 'Fate Up against your will' came to him in a dream. That's never happened to me before or since, he said. Perhaps even more surprising is the fact that the song structure is actually inspired by Bowie's Space Oddity... sort of... It's actually the Space Oddity chords played backwards.
"The rest of the lyrics came quickly," he said, "almost as if I knew them already. The title and a lot of the astronomical imagery, such as 'your sky all hung with jewels', came about because, as a kid, I’d always loved The Sky at Night and Star Trek, and I remembered the moon landing. I was up all night wishing I had a telescope." Haha, didn't we all, Ian.
Back in time to the 1960s now for two more songs about the moon. In a few minutes, Creedence Clearwater Revival with Bad Moon Rising, but first one of the more unusual versions of the classic song Blue Moon, first written in 1934 by Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart. It's usually performed as a ballad, but this is a wonderful and more uptempo version recorded almost 30 years later by blues legend Bobby Bland, the so-called Sinatra of the Blues.
Here's a fun fact. Both those songs were used for the astonishing transformation scene in John Landis's movie An American Werewolf in London -- a sequence once seen, never forgotten. These were the days before CGI so all the effects are physical, and were achieved in front of the camera. Quite incredible. You'd literally never seen anything like that before. Bad Moon Rising comes just before, then Sam Cooke's version of Blue Moon during, the transformation of the main character David into a werewolf. Funnily enough Creedence's Bad Moon Rising was itself inspired by a movie. John Fogerty wrote it just after watching the film The Devil & Daniel Webster in which a hurricane wreaks destruction on everything but the farm belonging to the main character, who has sold his soul to the devil.
What now? Well it's time to get space funky. First up Jamiroquai makes his debut on Sounds with Space Cowboy, followed by the fabulous Space from Prince and then the wonderful Jupiter by Earth Wind & Fire.
So we had Jamiroquai's Space Cowboy Jay Kay up first and travelling at the speed of cheeba no less into outer space; then Prince's Space from the 1994 album Come -- it wasn't a hit but it's a gorgeous track -- and finally Earth Wind & Fire with Jupiter from their 1978 album All'n'All. EWF founder Maurice White was a big believer in astrology, and the band's songs and album sleeves are packed with cosmic and mystical references.
We'll have a couple more planets namechecked in a few minutes but first a bit of real space for you. Electronic duo Lemon Jelly -- Fred Deakin and Nick Franglen -- based all the tracks on their three great albums on different sound samples. One of the most affecting tracks on their second album Lost Horizons is built around an actual recording of the first space walk, in June 1965, by the astronaut Ed White. He spent more than 20 minutes floating in space, and as you will hear from the recording, he enjoyed it so much he had to be told repeatedly to return to the Gemini 4 space craft. After coming back to the spacecraft he said This is the saddest moment of my life. In a few minutes the title track from the Venus & Mars album by Wings, but first, Lemon Jelly and Ed White and Space Walk.
If you know the Venus & Mars album, you'll have worked out that was actually a medley of the two slightly different tracks that open side 1 and side 2 of the album, both called Venus & Mars. Is there a meaning? Is Paul McCartney Mars and Linda Venus? McCartney denied that, saying it's just about an imaginary friend who's got a girlfriend who's the kind of person who asks what your sign is before they say hello. That's it.
OK, to close the show this week let's ramp up the tempo again with two fabulous electronic tracks from the late 1990s. You might want to get your dancing shoes on for these.
In a few minutes, Phat Planet from the electronic duo Leftfield. Even if you don't know the track, you'll recognise its thumping drumbeat bassline from the classic ad Surfer for Guinness -- yes, the days when TV ads were good enough to watch not just fast-forward. It's been named the greatest TV ad of all time. Actually, the drum beat came first. The ad agency were looking for a track that sounded like blood pulsing in the surfer's head as he waits for the perfect wave to arrive. Their music researcher knew the Leftfield duo Neil Barnes and Paul Daley, who were just about to release their second album Rhythm & Stealth, and it had one track on it that sounded just right.
But first, another duo Jon and Helena Marsh, better known as The Beloved. Jon Marsh had started The Beloved in the mid-80s as an indie rock band but the birth of rave culture and a series of trip to holiday island Ibiza caused a gradual evolution in the band's sound. In 1996 he teamed up with his wife Helena to write and record The Beloved's final album X. This is Satellite.