The Best Song about the Moon

Of course there are many, many songs that reference the Moon but most of them are not actually about the Moon at all. The one that springs to mind right away is the classic `Fly Me To The Moon`, a misleading title if ever there was one as Frankie is not instructing a pilot to actually carry out that task rather he is simply using it as a metaphor. His demeanour might have been far less cool had someone actually attempted to fly him to the Moon!  There’s old grumpy chops Van Morrison’s assertion that it’s a wonderful night for a `Moondance` but it is just too difficult to imagine him dancing. `The Whole of the Moon`, The Waterboys’ epic tribute to Prince takes its name from one of many comparisons writer Mike Scott makes between himself and the Purple one- “I saw the crescent, you saw the whole of the Moon”. And we have to mention `Dark Side of the Moon`, the best selling Pink Floy opus yet this once again uses the Moon as a symbol in a work about fulfilment or sanity (or otherwise). On the other hand the much less epic `Sleeping Satellite` sung by Tasmin Archer is actually about the Moon and not just that, it’s about the Apollo missions. Even more impressively it laments the ending of the missions and expresses the hope that they will one day resume. That’s quite an achievement for a chart topping single. 

Don't forget about Apollo 10

The lesser known Apollo 10.

This month is the fiftieth anniversary of the first Moon landing an event now so familiar that it has probably lost much of it’s sense of achievement. Nowadays people are more interested in trying to prove it was somehow faked than being  impressed that it happened which doesn’t say much for advancement in other areas of life. I don’t really recall much about it except that there was a buzz of excitement and families did huddle together watching grainy tv footage as events unfurled. When you’re a child it is hard to understand the technology and power of sending someone to the Moon, in fact I’d only just put aside the notion that the Moon was actually a giant luminous face in the sky. By 1969 I was probably formulating the idea that it was inhabited by alien beings of some sort. When Neil Armstrong’s boots touched the lunar ground those aliens had just stayed hidden.