Fortunately he recently gave me a very nice review for HELL SHIP; but even if he hadn’t, I’d still be delighted to feature this, his blogjay choice of the week.

Eric Brown writes:

Silver Machine by Hawkwind

Hawkwind released Silver Machine, composed by Dave Brock with lyrics by Robert Calvert, in 1972, and it reached number three in the hit parade. It was released again in ’76, ’78, and ’83. It must have been around ’78 that I became aware of it. I liked its energy, its allusion to SF – which I’d discovered a few years earlier while living in Melbourne.

Robert Calvert has written: “I read this essay by Alfred Jarrey called, “How to Construct a Time Machine”, and I noticed something which I don’t think anyone else has thought of because I’ve never seen any criticism of the piece to suggest this. I seemed to suss out immediately that what he was describing was his bicycle… I thought it was a great idea for a song. At that time there were a lot of songs about space travel, and it was the time when NASA was actually, really doing it. They’d put a man on the moon and were planning to put parking lots and hamburger stalls and everything up there. I thought that it was about time to come up with a song that actually sent this all up, which was ‘Silver Machine’. ‘Silver Machine’ was just to say, I’ve got a silver bicycle, and nobody got it. I didn’t think they would. I thought that what they would think we were singing about some sort of cosmic space travel machine.”

Well, I certainly did.

In the early eighties I went to a concert by Hawkwind at St. Georges Hall, Bradford. The only track I knew by them was Silver Machine – I’d heard a few others, but they did nothing for me. I was hoping to hear more tracks like Machine. As it happened I was wearing an old Hawkwind t-shirt, given to me by a woman I worked with in a factory in Keighley: her son was or had been a roadie with Hawkwind, and she was clearing out some of his rubbish… Anyway, there I was, an overawed fellow in my early twenties wearing this heavy metal t-shirt surrounded by what looked like a convention of Hell’s Angels in the bar of St. Georges Hall. At one pint I noticed a vast bearded guy staring at me, and I shrank into my half of bitter and wondered what I’d done to offend him. A minute later I felt a tap on my shoulder, and turned to find this hirsute giant glaring down at me. I felt, I can safely report, like shitting bricks and building myself a barricade. He said, “Like the t-shirt.” He went on to say that it was very rare and he’d give me a tenner for it. I was astounded. A tenner was a lot of brass to me, back in the early eighties. I said, “Ber-but… but I don’t have…” He vanished, to return a minute later by a new, cellophane-wrapped t-shirt that were on sale in the foyer. He gave me a tenner and I stripped off the t-shirt and donned the new one, a tenner the richer… All parties were happy.

That’s all I recall of the concert.

I haven’t heard Silver Machine for years.

I still don’t much like heavy metal, or Hawkwind.

I just took a ride
in a silver machine
and I’m still feeling mean
I got a silver machine
Do you want to ride
see yourself going by
other side of the sky
Well I got a silver machine
It flies sideways through time
It’s an electric line
To your Zodiac sign
It flies out of a dream
It’s anti-septically clean
You’re gonna know where I’ve been
In my silver machine

This week’s blogjay is Peter F. Hamilton, who in my view is one of the greatest writers of space opera around – master of widescreen storytelling but able to create brilliant vivid characters. And many of ‘em! Peter and I shared a panel at the recent Illustrious con, and I’m delighted he has this song to play for us.

Peter Hamilton writes:

One song? Really? Just one? You do know I’m somebody who can’t even pin down a top ten? Now give me a hundred favourites and we’re getting closer to it. And those would only be favourites, actually numbering the list is impossible.

Still only one?

Oh, all right then. I have to admit some ire that Starship Troopers has already been taken. My claim to that one was very legitimate, I actually saw Yes live back in the seventies and they played it. Ah well, I also saw Bowie, and Starman is definitely in the SF top ten faves. But, is that a cliche? I have to admit I nearly played my joker, and nominated Angels and Demons by Toya Wilcox, but one line “Ten thousand spaceships filled the sky” doesn’t really qualify it as true SF. Though it does mean I can dig it out again soon to check. Of course there is the easy option, and just yell out: 2112 by Rush. Nahh. Best not. It’s like original Star Trek, I don’t want to spoil the memories by revisiting it again, so let’s leave that well alone. What about something modern, a song that’ll prove I’m up there getting down with the youth of today. Humm, not a very convincing sight at the best of times, though Exogenesis part I by Muse is also high up there on that impossible list. Only, it doesn’t actually have words, even if it is the best late-night driving crank the volume to 11 song there’s ever been. This is getting quite hard now, can I have music that was played in an SF film? If so, the moody and magnificent Love Theme from Blade Runner would be the one. Again, no lyrics. Is this a theme developing here? No, I will chose one that’s evocative and yet still quite moody at the same time. In which case there really is no question: After The Gold Rush. Which then produces a whole new problem. Which version? No no, not the Dolly Parton one (you don’t believe me? Go ahead, try calling my bluff on that, I dare you). But I’ve got to say the k d lang cover is really very good. But no, I will be true to myself, and the quiet teenage dreamer and reader who first heard Neil Young singing about silver spaceships and mother nature on the run and carrying seeds to a new sun, and was hopelessly lost in the romance of the music in those far off days of youth when everything meant so much more than it does today.

Well, I dreamed I saw the knights
In armor coming,
Saying something about a queen.
There were peasants singing and
Drummers drumming
And the archer split the tree.
There was a fanfare blowing
To the sun
That was floating on the breeze.
Look at Mother Nature on the run
In the nineteen seventies.
Look at Mother Nature on the run
In the nineteen seventies.

I was lying in a burned out basement
With the full moon in my eyes.
I was hoping for replacement
When the sun burst thru the sky.
There was a band playing in my head
And I felt like getting high.
I was thinking about what a
Friend had said
I was hoping it was a lie.
Thinking about what a
Friend had said
I was hoping it was a lie.

Well, I dreamed I saw the silver
Space ships flying
In the yellow haze of the sun,
There were children crying
And colors flying
All around the chosen ones.
All in a dream, all in a dream
The loading had begun.
They were flying Mother Nature’s
Silver seed to a new home in the sun.
Flying Mother Nature’s
Silver seed to a new home.

Heard of a van that is loaded with weapons,
packed up and ready to go
Heard of some gravesites, out by the highway,
a place where nobody knows
The sound of gunfire, off in the distance,
I’m getting used to it now
Lived in a brownstore, lived in the ghetto,
I’ve lived all over this town

This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco,
this ain’t no fooling around
No time for dancing, or lovey dovey,
I ain’t got time for that now

Transmit the message, to the receiver,
hope for an answer some day
I got three passports, a couple of visas,
you don’t even know my real name
High on a hillside, the trucks are loading,
everything’s ready to roll
I sleep in the daytime, I work in the nightime,
I might not ever get home

This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco,
this ain’t no fooling around
This ain’t no mudd club, or C. B. G. B.,
I ain’t got time for that now
Heard about Houston? Heard about Detroit?
Heard about Pittsburgh, P. A.?
You oughta know not to stand by the window
somebody might see you up there
I got some groceries, some peant butter,
to last a couple of days
But I ain’t got no speakers, ain’t got no
headphones, ain’t got no records to play

Why stay in college? Why go to night school?
Gonna be different this time
Can’t write a letter, can’t send a postcard,
I can’t write nothing at all
This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco,
this ain’t no fooling around
I’d like to kiss you, I’d love you hold you
I ain’t got no time for that now

Trouble in transit, got through the roadblock,
we blended with the crowd
We got computer, we’re tapping pohne lines,
I know that ain’t allowed
We dress like students, we dress like housewives,
or in a suit and a tie
I changed my hairstyle, so many times now,
I don’t know what I look like!
You make me shiver, I feel so tender,
we make a pretty good team
Don’t get exhausted, I’ll do some driving,
you ought to get some sleep
Get you instructions, follow directions,
then you should change your address
Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day,
whatever you think is best
Burned all my notebooks, what good are
notebooks? They won’t help me survive
My chest is aching, burns like a furnace,
the burning keeps me alive
Try to stay healthy, physical fitness,
don’t want to catch no disease
Try to be careful, don’t take no chances,
you better watch what you say

 Tonight at Sci-Fi London in the Apollo Cinema we’ll hear the result of the Clarke Awards. Here’s the shortlist, with a host of fabulous writers, including fellow Orbit author Tricia Sullivan, author of the memorable and moving Lightborn. 

And, by happy coincidence, Tricia has also written this week’s SFF Song of the Week entry.

Tricia Sullivan writes:

Back in 1997 I woke up at about 5 am in a cheap B&B room in Grimsby.  My roommate had fallen asleep with the TV on, and it was now playing what I believe to this day is the most surreal and SFnal video I have ever seen: the Teletubbies theme song. (please link to this:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuiynIn-g9s  ) In my hypnogogic state, I was disturbed and frightened by these round, idiotic, cybernetic happiness junkies and their giggling sky-baby ruler.  It made me shudder.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the Teletubbies song was my personal equivalent of the shark theme from Jaws. 

Flash forward a bunch of years and you’ll catch me humming this very tune as I help my kids get dressed in the morning.  Tinky-winky!  Dipsy!  La-La!  Po. 

My life is a Philip K. Dick story. 

The truth is, my musical intelligence has been utterly flattened by nearly ten years’ exposure to the musical outpourings of CBBC, Nickelodeon and, even worse, the Disney Channel.  I could try to pass off Hannah Montana’s ‘Best of Both Worlds’ as some sort of deep statement about the nature of human existence, but that would be too feeble even for me.  So if I’m going to play you something, it has to be something I actually connect to in a way that’s at least tangential to SF.  I can think of loads of songs that I collected as a kid specifically because of their SF connotations: ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ by U2, ‘Invisible Sun’ by the Police (I took it the title literally), ‘Friends’ by the Police (a tribute to Heinlein, and the only song I’ve ever heard with ‘grok’ in the lyrics), ‘Dazzle’ by Siouxie and the Banshees, ‘Indiscipline’ by King Crimson, ‘Star Power’ by Sonic Youth…I could go on and on but Phil said I had to pick one.  Damn.  There’s even ‘I Know What I Like in Your Wardrobe’ by Genesis, which I’d read in a magazine was written from the point of view of a lawn mower, and in my suburban American ignorance I thought this meant, like, a singing gas-powered push mower?  Yeah.  Maybe not.  (I still like my interpretation better than yet another early 70′s prog-rock assault on the English class system).  But Peter Gabriel’s meditation on relativity in the supermarket car park, ‘One Way World’ is genuinely SFnal and I thought about playing it here.

But those songs are all so ooooooolllldddd.  And even stuff like Public Enemy’s ‘Hazy Shade of Criminal’ is no longer groundbreaking or even close, so the aspects that made it science fictional to me when I first heard it are now all water-under-the-bridgey and unconvincing for the purposes of this post.  The fact is, I’m a middle-aged mum with little time or money to explore new sounds.  I sing Teletubbies and Noddy in the car, even when I’m alone.  I’ve been colonized and I can’t pretend otherwise. 

All I can do is play you something that I used to love.  This is Soundgarden, and the track comes from the record Superunknown, which I used to play on headphones a lot.  Over and over.  Really loud.  While writing.  While running.  In the dark.  I have no idea what this song is supposed to ‘mean,’ but I do know that, like everything I love to hear or read or see, it opens a door in what seems to be a wall, and makes new space for the listener.  This track stretches the interior dimensions of my head.  And I figure that’s what the SFnal ethos is all about.

In my eyes,
Indisposed,
In disguise
As no one knows.
Hides the face,
Lies the snake,
And the sun
In my disgrace.
Boiling heat,
Summer stench.
‘Neath the black
The sky looks dead.
Call my name
Through the cream,
And I’ll hear you
Scream again.

Black hole sun,
Won’t you come
And wash away the rain?
Black hole sun,
Won’t you come?
Won’t you come?
Won’t you come?

Stuttering,
Cold and damp,
Steal the warm wind
Tired friend.
Times are gone
For honest men
And sometimes,
Far too long
For snakes.
In my shoes,
A walking sleep,
And my youth
I pray to keep.
Heaven send Hell away,
No one
Sings like you anymore.

Black hole sun,
Won’t you come
And wash away the rain?
Black hole sun,
Won’t you come?
Won’t you come?
(Repeat)

Black hole sun
Black hole sun
Won’t you come?
(Repeat x3)

Black hole sun
Black hole sun

Hang my head,
Drown my fear,
Till you all just
Disappear…

Black hole sun,
Won’t you come
And wash away the rain?
Black hole sun,
Won’t you come?
Won’t you come?
(Repeat x2)

Black hole sun,
Black hole sun,
Won’t you come?
(Repeat x6)

Won’t you come?

Stephen and I both have stories featured in Ian Whates’ new anthology Further Conflicts which by the way, lest I forget to mention it, IS BEING LAUNCHED AT 4.30/5PM AT THE ILLUSTRIOUS EASTERCON IN BIRMINGHAM THIS FRIDAY, 22ND APRIL. If you’re there, do say hi.

Stephen is also a musician, and his passion for music clearly shines through in this song intro.

Stephen Palmer writes:

I Dream of Tangerine

I discovered Tangerine Dream when I was at school – over thirty years ago now – and my life was never the same again.

Tangerine Dream are the most important musical influence you’ve probably never heard of. Formed in the late ‘sixties in Berlin by Dali-protege Edgar Froese, their debut album Electronic Meditation featured such luminaries as Klaus Schulze and Conrad Schnitzler, but it was their second album Alpha Centauri – named after the star – that put them on the musical map, selling an extraordinary 20,000 copies. By the time of this release in 1971 Schulze and Schnitzler had departed, Schulze for a ground-breaking career in electronic music which continues to this day, and the youthful Chris Franke had just joined, leaving only Peter Baumann, the third member of the classic ‘seventies line-up, not yet arrived. Tangerine Dream were the synthesizer pioneers. They explored electronic music for us all.

I first heard Alpha Centauri when I was eighteen. Having already heard and been blown away by the band’s two sequencer-based, ‘mid-seventies classics Phaedra and Rubycon, I decided to try the albums they made earlier in the ‘seventies. But Alpha Centauri, it turned out, was a different kind of music…

‘Sunrise In The Third System’ evokes the loneliness of space, with bare organ, freezing guitar and little else; I imagined dying spaceships floating between planets in this third system. Occasionally the VCS3 synthesizer that Chris Franke had just acquired makes an appearance, and then a mysterious flute, but the overall mood is of a tranquil, planetary journey. I was well into SF by this time, and the track was a perfect accompaniment.

‘Fly And Collision Of Comus Sola’ opens with the oscillating VCS3, before funereal guitar and Floydesque organ emerge from the mix, and then the strange flute of guest musician Udo Dennebourg. Two thirds of the way through the piece a reverb-laden drum beat played by Franke begins, slowly approaching through the mix, as the cosmic effects and the organ depart. I imagined a cruiser approaching a planet, touching the outer edge of the atmosphere as the drum beat intensifies and the cymbals begin to crash. It’s a fantastic piece of music, retaining to this day all its original power. Nobody knows if the sudden end was deliberate or if the tape ran out.

The title track of the album sprawled over a whole side of vinyl on the original release. Now the listener is transported away from the planet back into bleak, isolated, deep space. Organ notes vibrate like flakes of comet debris, and everything – percussion, flute, effects – is deeply reverberated. But after eight minutes the piece, which seems to float toward the listener like a curious alien, departs to leave a miasma of sound, space, and nothingness… except at the end, where a spoken word section concludes in suitably kosmische style. This track owes most to the late ‘sixties sound of Pink Floyd, notably their classic second album Saucerful Of Secrets.

Alpha Centauri is a perfect album for the gothic space leaps of Alastair Reynolds or the hyper-inflated imaginaria of Robert Reed. No matter that the music is in places primitive, minimal: this adds to its atmosphere. No matter that you can hear the tape hiss and a razor-blade edit or two: this too adds to the atmosphere. It’s kosmische, and that’s all you need to know.

Tangerine Dream influenced my own early music with my band Mooch, and they influence me to this day, with the band and in my solo output. Their music is unique, and I never tire of it.

Froese and Franke went on to explore many aspects of electronic music, but by the mid ‘eighties they were done. They had explored everything. They were tired. But we, the listeners, still have their recorded output, and we can follow their sonic footprints through that distant era in Germany when anything was possible. It is a journey I urge you to take.

Over to you Rob…

Robert Jackson Bennett writes:

It’s difficult to say much about Tom Waits, because the image precedes the man every time. Which is really quite marvelous, as he’s got at least three images attached to him, depending on which part of his back catalog you’re pulling from: he’s the lovable, down-and-out hipster with a perpetual five o’clock shadow, a walking homage to Kerouac and Bukowski; or, he’s the avant-garde, junkyard carnie barker who works nights as a Weimar-era cabaret performer; or, he’s the dust-covered, hangdog-faced, mythical bluesman who seems to have walked right of the Great Depression, his voice filled with Biblical doom and sorrowful longing. Maybe he’s got yet another metamorphosis up his sleeve, and he’s waiting for the right time to surprise us all.

There are many versions of Tom Waits, and the first thing most people will zero in on is his voice, which critics seem to really enjoy cooking up metaphors for. But there’s another constant underneath all these images, one that usually doesn’t utilize his raspy, savage growl: his ballads. No matter who Tom’s been, he’s always had a sentimental streak, and it always shows up when it comes to one of his ballads, which rarely use the subhuman registers of his pipes.

And for my money, there’s no ballad of his better than “Time,” an unearthly, confusing, fantastical song about… Well. I’m not sure what it’s about. I’m not sure it’s even about time, really, but listen for yourself. [SEE BELOW - Ed]

It’s an unusual song, an impressionistic nonsense-poem full of poignant images tossed among faint but persistent strands of logic, similar to Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” Which brings me to another favorite touchstone of Tom’s: children’s stories, songs, and rhymes, and he almost always juxtaposes them against subjects better suited to, say, a Raymond Chandler story or a Bukowski poem. You can hear quite a bit of that influence in “Time,” as certain lines have the same structure as a nursery song rhyme: “…and the band is going home, it’s raining hammers, it’s raining nails,” and “…so put a candle in the window and a kiss upon his lips, as the dish outside the window fills with rain,” are both personal standouts for me. But the melody itself is the most glaring evidence: this is a lullaby, but it’s not one you’d ever sing to a child.

And now, I’m delighted to say, Ian has chosen this week’s SFF Song of the Week:

Ian Whates writes:

I recall when I was 12 and 13 finding the music scene increasingly frustrating. This was 1972 -73, long before the internet or downloads, long before MTV. Radio ruled and the airwaves were full of The Sweet, Slade, Elton John, and Chicory Tip. Glam Rock (heavy on the glam, light on the rock) had arrived, and I found the whole scene deeply unsatisfying.

I kept hearing talk of ‘different’ music – ‘underground’ music, ‘rock’ music, performed by groups that were never played on the radio and who spurned the idea of singles. Groups with exciting names like Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Genesis (no, a colour in the name wasn’t compulsory), ELP, Jethro Tull and King Crimson. Two names above all others were spoken with particular reverence by Those In The Know: Led Zeppelin… and Yes. But how did you discover these groups, how did you hear their music when the radio stations seemed determined to pretend they didn’t exist?

Only one option. You bit the bullet, saved your pocket money, and splashed out on that most expensive of items: an LP. So it was that I (usually) or my friends (sometimes) started buying albums by groups whose music we’d never heard, simply so we could. I recall buying ‘Houses of the Holy’ by Zep, and ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ by the Sabs and being amazed, of borrowing ‘Machine Head’ and ‘In Rock’ by Purple and ‘Genesis Live’ with similar results. This was a revelation. This was exciting, intense; this was flailing guitars and soaring keyboards underpinned by thumping, tight rhythm sections; this was interesting time signatures and stunning musicianship. This was so different from the formulaic songs churned out on the radio that it might as well have been a different discipline all together. This was music!

The high point of all these purchases came when I took the plunge and bought ‘The Yes Album’. The group’s third release, recommended as a suitable starting point for the uninitiated by a much older teen who Knew. For some reason, I started by putting side 2 on the turntable, so the very first Yes I ever heard was the dramatic chopped power chords that herald the Western-movie-theme-inspired ‘Yours is No Disgrace’. Those first notes were jaw-dropping, as exhilarating as an electric shock. Then came the floating perfect harmony of the vocals. I was hooked, mesmerised with the song barely begun. Immediately following that opener comes a brief virtuoso performance on acoustic guitar by Steve Howe: Clap, recorded live at London’s Marquee Club. As the final applause of that track dies away, there’s a brief drum roll, like the drawing of a breath, before we’re launched full pelt into the album’s finale, the powerful majesty of ‘Starship Trooper’. Whereas the opening track is intense, tight and dramatic, this is soaring, beautiful, evocative. I wanted to like the song from the off (after all, it was named after an SF book, a Heinlein no less) but my predisposition didn’t come into it. I couldn’t help but love this song. Jon Anderson’s voice soars over the music, propelling us towards the stars. Three movements: the expansive, celestial first, segueing into the faster melodic chuckle of the second – like some bubbling mountain brook – leading into the instrumental magnificence of the third, Wurm. This was Yes in flight with all thrusters burning. This was musical heaven.

I finally saw Yes live in 1978, during one of three sold-out nights at Wembley, with a revolving stage at the centre of the arena. Starship Trooper was included in the (3 hours) set to rapturous applause, with Wakeman and Howe feeding off each other in the crescendo of Wurm… as Yes jammed! I’ve seen them ten times since. Starship Trooper hasn’t always been there (with such an extensive catalogue of songs, not even a 3 hour set can accommodate everything) but is included more often than not, and it was performed when I last saw them, at Birmingham’s Symphony Hall in 2009. It’s always a crowd pleaser.

Long may Starship Trooper fly.

Sister bluebird flying high above
Shine your wings forward to the sun
Hide the myst’ries of life on your way
Though you’ve seen them, please don’t say a word
What you don’t know, I have never heard

Starship trooper, go sailing on by
Catch my soul, catch the very light
Hide the moment from my eager eye
Though you’ve seen them, please don’t tell a soul
What you can’t see, can’t be very whole

Speak to me of summer
Long winters longer than time can remember
The setting up of other roads
To travel on in old accustomed ways
I still remember the talks by the water
The proud sons and daughter
That knew the knowledge of the land
Spoke to me in sweet accustomed ways

Mother life, hold firmly on to me
Catch my knowledge higher than the day
Lose as much as only you can show
Though you’ve seen me, please don’t say a word
What I don’t know, I have never shared

Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever
All I know can be shown by your acceptance of the facts there shown before you
Take what I say in a different way and it’s easy to say that this is all confusion
As I see a new day in me, I can also show it you and you may follow

Speak to me of summer
Long winters longer than time can remember
The setting up of other roads
To travel on in old accustomed ways
I still remember the talks by the water
The proud sons and daughter
That knew the knowledge of the land
Spoke to me in sweet accustomed ways

Love that elephant god…

NOTE:  This one isn’t available on iTunes I’m afraid, but just follow Ricardo’s link (ie click on Angels and Visitations)  to listen to an excerpt under the ‘fair use’ legislation – and if you like it, buy the album!

Ricardo Pinto writes:

When I am ‘actually’ writing I rarely listen to music, finding that
its rhythms can interfere with those of the prose I am composing.
However, when I am working on planning I often have something on in the
background. I use playlists to accompany general ‘thinking’ – Harold
Budd, Brian Eno, etc – and much baroque – Bach, Rameau, Couperin, Byrd
etc. During more intense ‘thinking’ I might listen to Tangerine Dream,
Piazzolla, Varese, Philip Glass.

When more focused on actual scenes, I have developed a habit of
assembling pieces into a ‘soundtrack’: sometimes music that represents a
specific theme or character in a process somewhat analogous to what Wagner’s leitmotifs;
or that I use to accompany a particular chapter. It is one of these last
that I would like to present here.

Angels and Visitations is
by the Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara, one of several modern
composers that I have found myself gravitating towards more and more as
I have grown older. He creates soundscapes that I find exquisitely
atmospheric and that mesh fruitfully with the images in my mind.

I listen to all my music from hard disks and have been unable to find
the original CD with its booklet, however, what I remember (perhaps
erroneously) is that Rautavaara wrote this piece as a reaction to a time
when he was lying ill and perceived an angel to be standing at the foot
of his bed; a being that utterly terrified him. This story found strange
resonance with the Masters in my Stone Dance trilogy
who consider themselves angels and are a terror to those they rule.
Angels and Visitations formed part of a particular
constellation of themes, but became the dominant soundtrack for the
chapter Blood Gate in my book The Third God in
which my trilogy reaches a final crisis of the utmost violence and
atrocity.

Angels and Visitations is in itself a drama that it seems to
me could only have been written post Freud. For beneath its Hieronymous
Bosch surface (The Garden of Earthly Delights perhaps?) I sense
there moves the leviathan of what Jung would call our collective
unconscious, so that this piece does with sound what I feel works of
fantasy seek to do with words.

(I have included a link above (and here) to Angels and Visitations because it seems
to me rather pointless to discuss a piece of music without it being
possible to listen to it. I realize that this may be seen as breaching
copyright, however, I do this with the hope that it may cause people to
go out and buy some Rautuvaara and thus that what I am actually doing is
promoting his work)

His choice this week is REALLY eerie…

Jim Burns writes:

Music..where would I be without it? Although music, in my studio, has mutated somewhat of late into ‘soundscapes’ and ‘noise’ and aural…’something or other’…

I think..I know…from talking to fellow ‘creative types’ – that artists and writers tend to listen to, OK – let’s call it music for now…in quite different ways..at least whilst ‘working’.

For a writer, music can surely drift dangerously close to being a major distraction? It has to be gauged, tempered, adjusted to collide in a way with the writer’s sensibility..a way that doesn’t throw an aural spanner into the churning imagination. I cannot see that it’s in any way possible to construct coherent sentences or plotlines whilst one’s earholes are being assaulted by discordant (or serious melodic come to that) sonic waveforms….other than the most innocuous of ‘background music’. Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony or Verdi’s Requiem belting out at high volume is hardly conducive to developing, say, a quietly romantic thread in a gentle tale. I’m not a writer..but I do on occasions write stuff..and when I do..I simply have to turn off the radio, the cd, tell people to shut the f..k up as I’m writing!!

So am I not right? Writers are at most listening QUIETLY to stuff in the background…pump it up when they take a break…

It’s not like that with artists. At least not with this artist..and from chats with other artists of the fantastical persuasion I’ve discovered that music …and sometimes quite loud intrusive or disturbing music is actually quite essential to the creative process. And strangely enough..a lot of artists who work in similar territory to my own appear to have not wildly differing tastes.

Apart from listening to a great deal of ‘quality rock’, folk, old stuff, new stuff – a hell of a lot of classical including opera – I’m drawn rather nerdily towards some ‘synth’ music..electronic stuff generally, Eno and post-Eno ambient, Berlin School (Tangerine Dream have a lot to answer for all the way back to ‘Phaedra’ in the early 70’s)..in fact all the material that has cascaded out from these genres catches my attention these days..and some of it is most emphatically listened to as a rather precise aural analogue to the things I am attempting to paint..or at least that’s how I perceive it at the time of painting. The sound I am hearing, perhaps the dramatic drive of a section or the bizarre effect of some cleverly sampled and altered piece seems to meld in my imagination with the gestural strokes of the brush or the precise squirt of the airbrush. It’s hard to define in words precisely what is going on – but on frequent occasions (not all the time..sometimes silence is a pre-requisite)..it is essential to have some rhythmic drive or abstract weirdness or familiar tunefulness going on in order to maintain creative momentum. Am I making sense?

So recently my work (rather deliberately) has taken a slightly darker, more personal turn. I want to go further down this road. Investigating in the meantime, music I think I might be interested in (and I do listen to a lot of music for its own sake)..I’ve discovered the extraordinary resource that the Internet is – as it is with everything – and the wild cornucopia of musician websites and ‘netlabels’ that is sitting there waiting to be investigated and where desired, downloaded. This is how I came to my current little musical obsession..’Dark Ambient’ music..and various sub-genres related to it, sometimes inclining towards the heavier, more atmospheric end of ‘Space Music’. So acts like ‘Nagual Art’, ‘_Algol_’, ‘Nors’klh’, ‘Between Interval’, ‘Astral Light’, ‘Dahlia’s Tear’, and many many more are really capturing my attention at the moment. But perhaps most of all a guy named Brian Williams, a fellow Welshman who records under the name of ‘Lustmord’. His 1990 album ‘Heresy’ is often considered the first true dark ambient release, but he has gone on since then pursuing ever darker material, some of it quite disturbing at times.

So what I’ve selected for this rather good idea of Philip Palmer’s is a piece which is here called ‘Main Title – Infinite Space’ – the first track in an unfolding and horrifically effective soundtrack to a short film directed by Charlie Deaux called ‘Zoetrope’..based on Franz Kafka’s disturbing story ‘The Penal Colony’. I recommend the whole soundtrack..‘The Harrow’ is particularly effective as an aural impression of the dreadful torture machine of the tale’..but one reason I’ve gone for the Main Title is because I get somewhere sampled into the guts of the piece a second much-loved old piece, I-won’t-call-it-a-tune…a chunk of Georgi Ligeti’s incredible music as used for the soundtrack to 2001 A Space Odyssey back in 1968. Which brings a very satisfying circularity to the choice from my perspective. At least I’m pretty sure it’s Ligeti’s ‘Requiem’ I’m hearing. You can’t always be sure with the tease of sampling…but at its best it’s a wonderfully synergistic process..and Lustmord is very good at this. I post this stuff regularly on Facebook..but response comes there none most of the time..so this might well be very ‘minority audience’ stuff! Hopefully you will enjoy this..but ‘enjoyment’ is perhaps not quite the right word with this kind of scarily portentous, brain-numbing, apocalyptic, heavy industrial ‘soundscaping’!

But it’s back! Today! With a wonderful choice by a fine writer & pal, Chris Beckett, author of The Holy Machine. To read about his work, click here. To read what he has to say about a song from that fantasy epic Yellow Submarine…look downwards…

Chris Beckett writes:

The Beatles: Hey Bulldog

from the movie soundtrack of Yellow Submarine

I suppose it is not very adventurous to pick a Beatles song but this is at least a relatively obscure one.  I absolutely loved this song when I first heard it in the movie Yellow Submarine. After that I didn’t hear it for many years, but I looked it up recently and still found it quite delightful.  It isn’t a particularly original observation, but the Beatles really were good.  As my son Dom commented, most bands would have been glad to release a song like this as a single (and one can imagine bands quite happily settling for this as the trademark song of their career) but the Beatles never even included it on a ‘proper’ album (only on the soundtrack album of the film).  The words, like many Beatles lyrics, engage only intermittently with meaning, but who cares?  The song works, it is full of energy, and it is a perfect showcase for Lennon’s rasping voice.

I like this video too.  Lennon was a bit of a prat in many ways, but I sort of loved him.  I don’t buy, even slightly, into the whole maudlin cult of him as a prophet of peace.  His pronouncements on such matters are usually frankly cringe-makiing.  But there was something sweet and lovable about the man, and something touchingly vulnerable, all of which comes over (for me) in this video.  The first LP record I ever bought for myself as a teenager was Lennon’s solo album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, which lacked the lush arrangements both of Beatles records and of Lennon’s subsequent, rather dull solo efforts.  The rasping voice seemed to have found its natural home in songs expressing childhood pain, and as an angst-ridden teenager I absolutely lapped it up.

One odd thing I notice about my reation to this video.  Almost in the way that the child of a troubled marriage is happy and relieved to see his parents getting on, I still find myself curiously reassured to see John and Paul so obviously having fun together, even after all this time. How sad is that!

Sheep dog standing in the rain
Bull grog doing it again
Some kind of happiness is
measured out in miles
What make you think you’re
something special when you smile

Childlike no on understand
Jack knife in your sweaty hands
Some kind of innocence is
measured out in years
You don’t know what it’s like
to listen to you fears

You can talk to me
You can talk to me
You can talk to me
If you’re lonely, you can talk to me

Big man walking in the park
Wigwam frightened of the dark
Some kind of solitude is
measured out in you
You think you know but you haven’t got a clue

You can talk to me
You can talk to me
You can talk to me
If you’re lonely, you can talk to me

Hey Bulldog

Keith is the author of a wide range of SFF books of the adult and younger adult variety  including The Unlikely World of Faraway Frankie and Genotopia, and also writes as Nick Gifford. Here’s a cool interview with him.

And here’s his song choice:

Keith Brooke writes:

The Coral
Time Travel
Hidden track on their debut album The Coral
Some authors have music playing while they work; others need absolute silence. I used to be the fussy kind: one of my fondest memories is the moment when my young son finally understood that if I was upstairs with the door shut it meant I was working and didn’t want to be disturbed. The way he conveyed this? He came and stood outside the door and shouted, “I’m being QUIET, Daddy!” He was so proud. And so was I, really.

I’ve mellowed since then. Now, I can sit in a coffee shop — or better, a pub — and write, regardless of all the distractions.

Music, though, can be a distraction too far. As long as I can’t hear the words I’m fine. And being part-deaf, it’s quite often that I can’t quite make out the words (they just don’t sing clearly these days: such poor diction). But when I can hear the words… Like reading a story, I get carried away. I’m following *their* words, not mine.

Even when I’m not trying to write, songs tap into that part of my mind that might otherwise be writing. Some do this more than others: for example, if I listen to Lloyd Cole, Kirsty McColl or Ben Folds (love the new album he did with Nick Hornby) I often find I’m itching to be writing – so many stories to be told!

The Coral’s first album did this for me. The songs aren’t necessarily as story-based as someone like Kirsty McColl might write, and I wouldn’t claim to understand them, but there’s something about them that fans that creative spark. Hidden at the end of the album is a song called “Time Travel”. “Time travel will be the death of man” apparently. No idea what they mean by that, but hell there must be a story in it! There’s a wonderfully dystopian undercurrent to the lyrics, but it’s not just the words that get through to me, it’s the lazy, jazzy, ska backing. It’s a dark, twisting dream of a song, and it sets my mind racing in all the best ways.

Time travel will be the death of man
Only the devil fools with
the best laid plans
The best laid plans best left unplanned
Time travel will be the death of man

What’s done is done
So you must see
You can’t bring back
What’s already been
Technology’s tempting the public eye
Do you wanna know why when who and why
We’re cloaked in indecision
Concealed by lies
I wanna know why we’re really alive
Well you might say we got no proof
There’s one thing I know
Is that I’m younger than you
And I can see through your eyes
And I can see through your lies
hypocrisy is your only disguise
Better tell us why we’re really alive

Time travel will be the death of man
Only the devil fools with
the best laid plans
The best laid plans best left unplanned
Time travel will be the death of man

In my darkest day
I thought this through
A change in the weather
Could be made by you
And all the information
You’re holding back
Is it hidden in the water
That runs from my tap
When few had the proof
That Jesus Christ
Was no more of a man than you or I
Would you tell the people?
Would you try to deceive?
For fear of undermining
Their religious belief
Well there’s a war going on!
It’s obvious one!
It’s between magic and medicine

Time travel will be the death of man
Only the devil fools with
the best laid plans
The best laid plans best left unplanned
Time travel will be the death of man

Never give up the fight!

James Lovegrove writes:

“Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise)” – David Bowie

Bowie is music’s presiding sci-fi genius. Every one of his albums is suffused to a greater or lesser degree with SF references and flourishes. Two of them even feature him on the sleeve in his best-known big screen role as Thomas Jerome Newton, the alien visitor from The Man Who Fell To Earth. His son makes SF movies, for heaven’s sake. The man has SF running through him like the wording on a stick of high-tech quantum seaside rock from the future.

Hence there’s an embarrassment of Bowie tracks one could cite for their science fictional content. But rather than select one of the obvious – “Space Oddity”, “The Supermen”, “Saviour Machine”, “Five Years”, “Starman”, “Life On Mars?”, “Ashes To Ashes”, “Hallo Spaceboy” – I’m opting for something a little more obscure.

“Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise)” is to be found on Bowie’s most SF-ish album, Diamond Dogs, released in 1974. It forms the backbone to side one, a bridge between the head-rush of the title track and the foot stomp of “Rebel Rebel”. It’s a tale of love amid the ruins whose collage-like lyrical content – at times jaded and melancholy, at others a helter-skelter parade of Dadaist imagery – reflects its creator’s fascination at the time with William S. Burroughs’s “cut-up” technique of writing.

Diamond Dogs started life as a proposed musical based on Nineteen Eighty-Four, but the Orwell estate wouldn’t play ball. Their intransigence led to Bowie revising his initial concept, and it evolved into something stranger and richer: a post-apocalyptic song suite that’s like nothing so much as a trashy 70s sci-fi film in musical form – and I mean this as a compliment.

“Sweet Thing…” begins slow and sepulchral, Bowie crooning in his best baritone over a two-chord piano motif with pedal bass. It’s his finest vocal performance bar none. After a breathy saxophone break the song shifts into the rockier “Candidate” segment, which accelerates and escalates as its lyrics grow ever more bizarre and frantic. Then, just as everything seems in danger of slipping entirely out of control, we’re back to the original tune, now adorned with some of pianist Mike Garson’s extraordinary trills and runs. This swoons to a climax and is followed by a chaotic outro laced with fuzzed guitar.

In all, it’s nigh on nine minutes of juxtaposed bliss and bonkersness that makes the collapse of civilisation seem liberatingly sleazy and wonderfully desirable.

Part One: Sweet Thing

It’s safe in the city to love in a doorway
To strangle some screams from the dawn
And isn’t it me, putting pain in a stranger?
Like a portrait in flesh, who trails on a leash
Will you see that I’m scared and I’m lonely?
So I’ll break up my room, and yawn and I
Run to the centre of things
Where the knowing one says:

“Boys, boys, it’s a sweet thing
Boys, boys, it’s a sweet thing, sweet thing
If you want it, boys, get it here, then
For hope, boys, is a cheap thing, cheap thing”

I’m glad that you’re older than me
Makes me feel important and free
Does that make you smile, isn’t that me?
I’m in your way, and I’ll steal every moment
If this trade is a curse, then I’ll bless you
And turn to the crossroads, and hamburgers, and:

“Boys, boys, it’s a sweet thing
Boys, boys, it’s a sweet thing, sweet thing
If you want it, boys, get it here, then
For hope, boys, is a cheap thing, cheap thing”

Part Two: Candidate

I’ll make you a deal, like any other candidate
We’ll pretend we’re walking home for your future’s at stake
My set is amazing, it even smells like a street
There’s a bar at the end where I can meet you and your friend
Someone scrawled on the walls “I smell the blood of les tricoteuses”
Who wrote up scandals in other bars
I’m having so much fun with the poisonous people
Spreading rumours and lies and stories they made up
Some make you sing and some make you scream
One makes you wish that you’d never been seen
But there’s a shop on the corner that’s selling papier-mâché
Making bullet-proof faces; Charlie Manson, Cassius Clay
“If you want it, boys, get it here, then”

So you scream out of line:
“I want you! I need you! Anyone out there? Any time?”
Très butch little number whines “Hey dirty, I want you
When it’s good, it’s really good, and when it’s bad I go to pieces”
If you want it, boys, get it here, then

Well, on the street where you live I could not hold up my head
For I gave all I have in another bed
On another floor, in the back of a car
In the cellar of a church with the door ajar
Well, I guess we must be looking for a different kind
But we can’t stop trying ’til we break up our minds
’Til the sun drips blood on the seedy young knights
Who press you on the ground while shaking in fright
I guess we could cruise down one more time
With you by my side, it should be fine
We’ll buy some drugs and watch a band
Then jump in the river holding hands

Part Three: Sweet Thing (Reprise)

“If you want it, boys, get it here, then
For hope, boys, is a cheap thing, cheap thing”

Is it nice in your snow storm, freezing your brain?
Do you think that your face looks the same?
Then let it be, it’s all I ever wanted
It’s a street with a deal, it’s got taste
It’s got claws, it’s got me, it’s got you…

This has been a high adrenalin week, by my standards (I speak as a professional writer – we really DON’T don’t have very exciting lives.)  Firstly – this is a long boring story, but to me it’s fascinating – my computer crashed. Which meant I had to buy a new one.  (It’s an Acer All-in-One and it is SO cool. It’s a computer, a telly, a DVD player, and a teleportation device rolled into one.)  As an unexpected consequence I am now able to access the songs on my ITunes, which were trapped on an external hard drive which my previous computer (very VERY old with no functioning USB slots) was unable to play.

Cutting to the chase: I can now play all the songs on my ITunes again, after a period of several months using my 14 year old daughter’s ITunes’ library (way cooler than mine – no Free! No Santana! No Eagles! No – stop, I’m embarrassing myself here.) (Deep Purple! Black Sabbath! Cher!)

The other exciting thing is that I lost my lucky gym towel. But now I’ve found it again!

Okay, that second thing was totally off the scale, in terms of notinterestingness, even for me. I fear I’ve lost my audience here.

Anyway, the reason for this rambling nonsense is that while running in the park this morning, my IPod played a song which used to be one of my all time favourites – Things I’ve Seen by Spooks. It’s a haunting and wonderful song with extraordinary lyrics. This song was one of my inspirations when I wrote Debatable Space. The chorus goes:

You won’t believe the things I’ve seen
Far beyond your wildest dreams
I’ve seen chaos and order reign supreme
I’ve seen the beauty of the universe
so peaceful and serene
in seconds turn to violence and screams

I adore these lines, and to be honest assumed a science fictional meaning to them, which in fact I don’t think is truly there. Never fear! I’m including this song as an SFF Song of the Week anyway ‘cos it’s, ahem, my website.  And this song is closely interwoven with the history of Debatable Space, which at one time was called Far Beyond. , until I was told not to be so stupid. And in fact, in my “final” draft of the book, there’s a scene in the Pirates Hall when Flanagan actually sings the Spooks song – though at the last minute, we couldn’t get the rights so I had to substitute an original lyric instead.

You know, this truly is a pathetic intro, by the very high standards set by other authors and bloggers on this site. I offer no insights into the band, or its musical history, nor do I analyse the many levels of meaning of the words. I just happen to love it.

So here it is:

“Things I’ve Seen”

[Chorus:]
You won’t believe the things I’ve seen
Far beyond your wildest dreams
I’ve seen chaos and order reign supreme
I’ve seen the beauty of the universe
so peaceful and serene
in seconds turn to violence and screams

I’ve seen true genius, too often to lose the meaningless
appreciation of this mediocre nation
I’ve heard the mind is repetition,
of empty words without tradition
Turned original verbs into submission
I smelled this malignerance addiction,
but I guess I wouldn’t be right
if I said the blunt was like a baby pipe
There ain’t gon’ be no revolution tonight
Half of my warriors as high as a kite
Lost and they lost all they fight
And I’ve tasted, the bitter tragedy of lives wasted
And men who glimpsed the darkness inside, but never faced it
And it’s a shame that most of y’all are followin sheep
Wallowin deeper than the darkness, you’re fallin asleep

[Chorus:]
You won’t believe the things I’ve seen
Far beyond your wildest dreams
I’ve seen chaos and order reign supreme
I’ve seen the beauty of the universe
so peaceful and serene
in seconds turn to violence and screams

I’ve seen and experienced things
that’ll push the average to the edge and swan dive to death
I’m two guys, multiplied by ninety-three guys
Evenly balanced seein evil equally in each eye now
Maybe I’m the most thorough worker on the job to you
or maybe I’m the one, who was plottin to rob you
The fear of this beatdown, the women on no cash to floss
makes most of y’all hustle ya ass off
From nothin to two mill’, in five years I’ll live to see it
vanish in six months, with no tears believe it
I’ll rock, twenty-eight years before the Feds can lay a trace
See they plan is to erase me, just to replace me

Life! Your heart is one with your brain
Emotional or reason, now which one do you obey?
Life! Somebody callin you insane
When overwhelmed and blessed, burst in tears of happiness

Yo, yo, I’ve seen relationships that’s so sick
Life long friendships so cha-o-tic
Thug cat bangin this chick but won’t kiss
Drinkin her spit, when coppin a fix for dope bliss
I got a knife and a bat, to bust your brain, put a knife in your back
“Once in the Life” I was trifle like that
like my man Troy, who lost his days
shootin dice on worldly ways
and ended up in a early grave
Because once in a lifetime is rough
Twice in a lifetime you combat the ghost of mistrust
Mentally cuffed, thrust by a cop thinkin he tough
You bust, Amadou Diallo is us, and what
now I’m on my knees, beggin’ “God, please!
Save me from the fires of hell!
Let water water soul prevail” – cos I can’t take no more
Who’s that knockin, at, my door?
Is that you, Pete from Cobb’s Creek, who died in my sleep?
We was playin for fun, now it’s keeps
Like my man Mark I beat to death wrapped in a carpet
and left in the garbage, now that’s cold-hearted
Ask Book he saw it, “Yo black I ain’t seen (shit)
Kids in the 6, they flip for nonsense”
Poke an icepick, smokin that (shit) since preschool fool
and packin a tool, (fuck you) Mom Dukes it’s cool

[Chorus:]
You won’t believe the things I’ve seen
Far beyond your wildest dreams
I’ve seen chaos and order reign supreme
I’ve seen the beauty of the universe
so peaceful and serene
in seconds turn to violence and screams

Life! Your heart is one with your brain
Emotional or reason, now which one do you obey?
Life! Somebody callin you insane
When overwhelmed and blessed, burst in tears of happiness

This weeks’ choice is from one of the smartest SF writers around, Adam Roberts, who is an academic of distinction and author of subtle and brilliant novels like New Model Army, Stone and Salt. His recent novel Yellow Blue Tibia is a particular favourite of mine. It’s a political fable and a thriller and is wonderfully funny. In fact, it may even be the second funniest things ever; second only to me at, ahem, my 21st birthday party.

Over to you Adam…

1979: Gary Numan ‘Are “Friends” Electric?’

The crucial, telltale feature of the title of Gary Numan and Tubeway Army’s doleful synth-anthem ‘Are “Friends” Electric?’ is found in the inverted commas isolating the word ‘friend’. Could anything be more expressive of the surly, teenage, miserabilist frame-of-mind than that little trick of punctuation?

Ah, but I love this song: the epitome of New Wave synth-pop, with its wonderful octave-striding bassline, its long-held whining treble notes, and Numan’s own half-gulped, slightly nasal vocals. It is supposedly based on Philip K Dick’s masterpiece 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (hence the ? in Numan’s title); the book was also of course turned into the film Blade Runner, which, I’ve always thought, really ought to have been called ‘Blade Runner?’. But that said, I’ve always thought it hard to see the parallels between song and source here, over and above a flavour of paranoia and a downbeat tone.

In the late 1970s fans (like me) marvelled at the sheer Power of Glum that Gary Numan was able to convey through the rudimentary portal of a single Top of the Pops performance. Now, looking back, I find myself thinking: ‘hey, you were having sex with several hundred gorgeous female fans, you had more money than the Pope and your own private plane, you were globally famous and adored … so what, precisely, were you so fucking miserable about, you knob?’ But, see, that’s hindsight for you.

It’s cold outside
And the paint’s peeling off of my walls
There’s a man outside
In a long coat, grey hat, smoking a cigarette

Now the light fades out
And I wonder what I’m doing in a room like this
There’s a knock on the door
And just for a second I thought I remembered you

So now I’m alone
Now I can think for myself
About little deals and issues
And things that I just don’t understand
A white lie that night
Or a sly touch at times
I don’t think it mean anything to you

So I open the door
It’s the friend that I’d left in the hallway
‘Please sit down’
A candlelit shadow on a wall near the bed

You know I hate to ask
But are ‘friends’ electric?
Only mine’s broke down
And now I’ve no-one to love

So I found out your reasons
For the phone calls and smiles
And it hurts and I’m lonely
And I should never have tried
And I missed you tonight
So it’s time to leave
You see it meant everything to me

Today’s choice is from a writer who is a hero of mine – master of noir nastiness – creator of hitman hero Avery Cates. Yes it’s the wonderful Jeff Somers. Jeff and I have become e-buddies over the last few months; I admire him and his work hugely. And, thanks to those great guys at Orbit, Jeff and I are currently cooking up a joint venture together, which looks set fair to be a marriage made in heaven. More of that anon…

Over to you Jeff…

Jeff Somers writes:

Queen “’39”

One of my fave songs overall, and a rare folky-rock song that tells a
story. A sad, shattering story (“For my life’s still ahead, pity me.)
OMFG, it makes me weep every. time. I. hear. it.) of time dilation and
dying earth, which is my favorite type. I was actually unaware of it for
an embarrassingly long time despite being quite devoted to much of
Queen’s catalog; I came across it in a random Googling of something or
other and my life has been different ever since. I hear it’s quite a
fave for buskers to play on the streets of London, though that’s hearsay.

What I love about the song, too, is that it has a short-story
sensibility, telling the story and then hitting you with the crushing
final line – no epilogue, no repeat of the chorus, just that chilling
thud and you’re left sitting there, tears streaming down your face,
bottle of courage clutched in one hand. Er, I assume. It’s never
happened to me, of course, as I laugh in the face of danger and
soul-chilling emotionally charged songs of dark SF.

The fact that Brian May is an honest-to-god Astrophysicist just makes
this all the better.

In the year of thirty-nine
Assembled here the volunteers
In the days when lands were few
Here the ship sailed out into the blue and sunny morn
The sweetest sight ever seen
And the night followed day
And the story tellers say
That the score brave souls inside
For many a lonely day
Sailed across the milky seas
Ne’er looked back never feared never cried

Don’t you hear my call
Though you’re many years away
Don’t you hear me calling you
Write your letters in the sand
For the day I’ll take your hand
In the land that our grand-children knew

In the year of thirty-nine
Came a ship in from the blue
The volunteers came home that day
And they bring good news
Of a world so newly born
Though their hearts so heavily weigh
For the earth is old and grey
little darlin’ well away
But my love this cannot be
Oh so many years have gone
Though i’m older but a year
Your mother’s eyes from your eyes cry to me

Don’t you hear my call
Though you’re many years away
Don’t you hear me calling you
Write your letters in the sand
For the day I’ll take your hand
In the land that our grand-children knew

Don’t you hear my call
Though you’re many years away
Don’t you hear me calling you
All your letters in the sand
Cannot heal me like your hand
For my life’s still ahead, pity me.

Jennifer Rardin writes:

Warning: If you are a fan of The Killers, or somebody who’s really into grammatical correctness, or even interpreting stuff the way artists say it should be done—you will be pissed off by the following. So don’t read it. At all. Go pick up a comic book. Preferably something by Bill Watterson because he’s hilarious and will make you feel better pretty much instantly. As for the rest of you? Strap in, baby. We are about to go alien hunting.

The Killers – Human
I did my best to notice
when the call came down the line
up to the platform of surrender
I was brought but I was kind
and sometimes I get nervous
when I see an open door
close your eyes, clear your heart
cut the cord
are we human or are we dancer
my sign is vital, my hands are cold
and I’m on my knees looking for the answer
are we human or are we dancer
pay my respects to grace and virtue
send my condolences to good
give my regards to soul and romance
they always did the best they could
and so long to devotion, you taught me everything I know
wave good bye, wish me well
you gotta let me go
are we human or are we dancer
my sign is vital, my hands are cold
and I’m on my knees looking for the answer
are we human or are we dancer
will your system be alright
when you dream of home tonight
there is no message we’re receiving
let me know is your heart still beating
are we human or are we dancer
my sign is vital, my hands are cold
and I’m on my knees looking for the answer

Are we human or are we dancer
my sign is vital, my hands are cold
and I’m on my knees looking for the answer
are we human
or are we dancer
are we human or are we dancer
are we human or are we dancer

As an English major I was brainwashed, uh, trained in the ways of interpretation. I could, by golly, read a buncha words and tell you exactly why the author mentioned shadows forty-seven times among all those other words. Which is why I’ve taken the liberty of becoming your expert in song interpretation for the next five minutes. After which you can burn me in effigy if you want. Just remember, because detail is always important (even in effigy-related projects) that my hair is red.

Here’s the thing. I don’t think Human is about how Americans have raised their kids to be manipulative shits, i.e. “dancers” at all. I don’t even buy the theory that the song is inspired by the work of Nietzsche, despite the fact that it would give us something fun to debate over coffee and scones (mmmm, scones) for the afternoon. I’m here to suggest that Human is actually about aliens.

First clue: One time I read this cool sci-fi short about an alien who came to earth and danced with a perfectly average woman, who then shot out of her shell and became a fabulous painter. He came back to dance with her the day she died. It wasn’t even sad, because you knew without his dance she never would’ve led such a momentous life. My point? The Killers get it. We are dancer—but only after we’ve been activated by the touch of our alien kin.

Second clue: Remember that old, awesome TV series, V? Holy crap I loved that show. Anyway, most of the lyrics reminded me of those moments when the aliens would peel off their human skin to reveal their true nature, riding just beneath the beautiful outer layer. I always knew, deep down, that people were a lot more like those lizards than they were the rebel heroes who fought them. Which is why neighbors of serial killers are always so surprised that awful smell wasn’t a gas leak but rotting corpse instead. “Because Bob was such a quiet, respectful man”—who kept his mask on nice and tight dontcha know. I bet his hands were cold all the damn time. Are we human? Do we even really know what that means anymore?

Third clue: Ghosts. Come on, my friends. You know they’re really shadows of people from parallel universes who’ve stepped into the thin air between our worlds. And who have already figured out that we’re actually the aliens. We are, as usual, the last to know.

And my final bit of proof? Here ya go:

Even stripped down to our essentials we can’t help but decorate ourselves. Because it’s too scary, too real, to look at what we are. But being human’s not scary. It’s freaking wonderful. So then, really, what are we?

My theory? It’s not complete yet. I’m not an old, wise woman. But no, I don’t think we’re human. We simply aspire to that calling. A rare few have made it. But generally we manage to assassinate them before they can force the rest of us peel off our skins and face the steady drumbeat of our own alien music. Maybe it’s best that way. I think The Killers, at least, have figured that out.

Over to you Richard…

Richard Morgan writes:

Song of the Week: Beat the Devil’s Tattoo.

I’m far enough into my forties now that I can’t pretend I’m a young man anymore, and I’ve been waiting for this album like a sixteen year old. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club are – no hype – the finest rock band in the world. They define exactly the edgy mix of soul and power that rock music delivers whenever it gets loose of market defined trends and complacent power chord pomp. For every blasting, feedback howling track in BRMC’s armoury, there’s a plaintive, lyrically defined acoustic ballad to match – and as often as not you’ll find those two contrasts co-existing in the same song. References to the Jesus and Mary Chain are inevitable, but for me the best point of comparison is the Rolling Stones circa Beggars’ Banquet and Let it Bleed – it’s the same dark energy, the same virtuoso guitar work, the same re-working of blues heritage, and the same subtle political and cultural echo chamber. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club provided me with the soundtrack to both Black Man/Thirteen and The Steel Remains, and this title track from their upcoming release showcases every reason why. Listen here:

Here’s a song I LOVE, chosen by the gifted Emma Adams, screenwriter and stage dramatist. Over to you Em:

Emma Adams writes:

Carpenters – Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft

Thought One – Karen Carpenter, you’re really weird but I think I love you.

So while I’m happy to admit to my big love for Suzie Quattro in her rock and roller jump suits, I have never been able to bring myself to admit my secret-weird-soft-spot crush for Karen Carpenter. Until now that is. Because, there is something very very wrong with Karen isn’t there? Her terrifying blank, too cute all American grin. Her skinny, get a meal boneyness and of course her really really strange hair and terrible frocks… But still, I find I can forgive her all of this because of two things. Her total cool ass drumming and her absolutely amazing beautiful voice. A voice that is instantly recognisable in a way that only a handful of voices are. And no matter how bubblegum light the lyrics are, she conveys great warmth and tenderness when she sings. There I’ve said it. I’m out of my Carpenter Closet. Karen Carpenter may not exactly rock but she gently sways my world.

Thought Two – I’m so glad that the Carpenter’s believed recording this strange song was a good idea. It probably wasn’t, but nevertheless it gives me hope.

It’s not so much a song as a series of pompous musical postures that get more and more ridiculous as it goes along. It is to my mind a fantastic example of pop genius gone mad and for this reason alone I take great delight in it. For me the descending Beatlesy orchestration at the end is just fantastic. It’s the bit I wait for. And it always makes me smile.

Thought Three – The CIA refer to unintended misfortunes coming out of ‘well meant’ foreign policy moves as ‘Blowback’. I wish Karen had known this before she went into the recording studio.

You will have noticed by now that the lyrics of this song are very bad. But when I listen to it, I can’t help worrying that they could create a consequence far worse than mere aesthetic unpleasantness, promoting as they do a dangerous untruth. To be specific, Karen on several occasions directly addresses Aliens, reassuring them in no uncertain terms that:

“We are your friends”.

Now let’s be clear. I don’t think for a minute that lovely, skinny, mixed up Karen was actively lying when she sang these words. She had a lot of issues in her life. But we also know that sometimes those who have the best intentions can create the most harm.

I can’t help worrying what could happen if Aliens actually heard this song.

Will they know that humans when encountering new civilisations always announce “We are your friends” just before embarking on a big stealing, killing frenzy?

I can only hope that they are more clued up about human history than Karen was.

In your mind you have capacities you know
To telepath messages through the vast unknown
Please close your eyes and concentrate
With every thought you think
Upon the recitation we’re about to sing

Calling occupants of interplanetary craft
Calling occupants of interplanetary most extraordinary craft

Calling occupants of interplanetary craft
Calling occupants of interplanetary craft
Calling occupants of interplanetary, most extraordinary craft

You’ve been observing our earth
And we’d like to make a contact with you

We are your friends

Calling occupants of interplanetary craft
Calling occupants of interplanetary ultra-emissaries

We’ve been observing your earth
And one night we’ll make a contact with you

We are your friends

Calling occupants of interplanetary quite extraordinary craft

And please come in peace, we beseech you
Only a landing will teach them
Our earth may never survive
So do come, we beg you
Please interstellar policeman
Oh won’t you give us a sign
Give us a sign that we’ve reached you

With your mind you have ability to form
And transmit thought energy far beyond the norm
You close your eyes, you concentrate
Together that’s the way
To send the message
We declare world contact day

Repeat (*)

Calling occupants
Calling occupants
Calling occupants of interplanetary, anti-adversary craft

We are your friends

Jesse Bullington writes:

Metal and fantasy have long been confederates but few bands have fused the two as successfully as Bal-Sagoth. They take their name from a story by Conan creator Robert E. Howard and their creative cues from him, as well as H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and other pulp favorites, but rather than simply regurgitating the works and words of their heroes Bal-Sagoth has gone on to create their own complex SFF mythology that allows them to explore the farthest reaches of the cosmos as well as the forgotten empires of the earth. Further differentiating themselves from other bands, each album by Bal-Sagoth is an epic collection of tales, not a random assortment of songs…and when I say epic, I mean it: how else do you describe a record titled Starfire Burning Upon the Ice-Veiled Throne of Ultima Thule? What’s more, a single album is often not sufficient to contain the glorious legends in their entierty and so a single tale will span several albums–the heroic archaeologist Caleb Blackthorne III appears on two albums, and those dread Guardians of the Astral Gate feature prominently on five. In selecting a single song from their body of work I decided on “Arcana Antediluvia” because in many ways it captures the essence of the band while still standing alone, so that the novice may appreciate the tale without foreknowledge of the mythology at hand–though a sequel track on an upcoming album is rumored…

[Act I: The Argosy on the Eldritch Sea]

[The Antediluvian Oracle:]
And so it was written, that rage would carry him like a howling wind, leaving only frozen corpses,
Their bones rattling in hollow armour, to tell their tale in his wake.

[The Black Mariner:]
Behold, my blackened, grim and gory axe, the searing glow of trenchant steel.
I’ll notch another widow to my haft, and wreak red vengeance ‘cross the waves.
Tales of black-sailed argosies, bedeviled by base treachery!

[The Antediluvian Oracle:]
His gaze is as fire, his words are as spear-points, his voice is as thunder, his touch as the plague!

[The Black Mariner:]
Storm-prow cleaving, dragon rending, nighted deeps far, far below,
Hail-scur scouring, sea devouring, sunken realm’s ethereal glow.

[The Antediluvian Oracle:]
And one night, there came a storm, a storm with searing red winds.
Fire and steel rode within it, and vengeance writ in thunder and blood!

[The Black Mariner:]
Down sixty fathoms, from stygian coral-clad tombs, the pitiless abyssal sea disgorges its shambling mold-mottled dead,
Dank innards blackly acoil with nests of slithering things!
Ghosts aglide upon the eldritch seas, unfathomed voyage to ascendancy,
Traitorous blood, the surf roils red, churning crimson, thrice-cursed dead.

[The Antediluvian Oracle:]
‘Tis enough that men might dream of being kings without aspiring to the power of gods.

Stephen Hunt writes:

As a child of the 1970s (and the 80s), the quote ‘The past is a
foreign country: they do things differently there’ was, I venture,
never so appropriate. It was pre-internet, pre-video recorder, pre-PC,
pre-mobile phone, heck, it was just about pre-everything. Teens and
tweens didn’t spend seven hours solid with their eyes locked on the
screen of a DS or playing MMOGs, or texting, or happy slapping, or,
for that matter, scoring free music tracks using P2P software.

We did have hoodies, but they were called parkas and made you look
like Kenny from South Park, never a good look at the best of times,
even then.

But we had other consolations.

Hot summers and jumpers for goal posts, perhaps? No. Dungeons and
Dragons had just crept into the UK’s model shops alongside all the
Airfix kits and Hornby railway sets, disco was sweeping the country,
and the Vietnam war was just winding down, as, regularly, was the
electricity, when rolling strikes turned the country’s lights out.

Ah, indeed, the bookshops had maybe half a shelf of fantasy & science
fiction books (Poul Anderson, Robert Silverberg, James Blish, E. Doc
Smith, Philip Jose Farmer, Isaac Asimov, Brian Aldiss, Gordon Dickson,
Tolkien, Clifford D. Simak, Arthur C. Clarke and a few other
stalwarts), and for a decent selection of comic-books you could only
go to ‘Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed’ in London’s Soho. Yes, slap
bang alongside all the sex shops – scoring SFF was a lot like scoring
porn in those halcyon days, and equally sniffed at.

Them were the days. And alongside Thunderbirds, Space 1999 and Doctor
Who (some things never change), we also had the consolations of a
bunch of lycra-wearing leotard-clad lovelies prancing about our newly
colour TV set with its three solitary channels. Yes, Hot Gossip. A
dance group that appeared on The Kenny Everett Television Show and Top
of the Pops, along with some strange new concept called the music
video.

As a burgeoning fan of the female form (we lived in the world of Gene
Hunt, so being politically correct was de rigueur), Sarah Brightman –
before Andrew Lloyd Webber sunk his supine claws into her soul –
cleverly managed to combine two of my favourite interests: girls
poured into their skin suits and science fiction. A feat not repeated
until Erin Gray slinked into the TV series Buck Rogers in the 25th
Century.

Beautiful raven-locked Sarah Brightman, who thumped out a 1978 single
written by Jeff Calvert and Max West of ‘Typically Tropical’ fame (who
also wrote Barbados, covered by the Vengaboys in 1999 as We’re Going
to Ibiza.).

So, pop fans, tone up, prepare for a blast of static electricity as
you slip into your cat suit, because you are now clear to go
hyperspace on the disco dance floor with…

Sarah Brightman and Hot Gossip: I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper.

(Editor’s note: The best version of this is on YouTube and can’t be embedded, so copy this link into your browser….Lyrics are below. Phil.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vE6YR9QbrqI

Or try this Star Trek version which is hilarious:

Speaker 1:

Arcaida
X-ray X-ray delta niner niner zero
This is Starfleet Control
You are clear to go hyperspace
Acknowledge

Speaker 2:

Affirmative, Star Comm
We have situation gold

Speaker 1:

Niner niner zero, roger
You’re looking good for trans-light

Sarah singing:

I lost my heart to a starship trooper
I lost my heart to a starship trooper
Oh…

Hey, Captain Strange, won’t you be my lover
You’re the best thing that I’ve ever discovered
Flash Gordon’s left me, he’s gone to the stars
An evil Darth Vader has me banished to Mars

Tell me, Captain Strange, do you feel my devotion
Or are you like a droid, devoid of emotion
Encounters one and two are not enough for me
What my body needs is close encounter three

I lost my heart to a starship trooper
Flashing lights in hyperspace
Fighting for the Federation
Hand in hand we’ll conquer space

Listen, Captain Strange, what’s our destination
The scanners seem to indicate a small deviation
Static on the comm – it’s Starfleet Command
Requesting your position, it’s their final demand

You’re intentions are known, they’ve found out at last
So if you’re gonna take me, please make it fast
Touch me, feel me, do what you will
I want to feel that galactic thrill

I lost my heart to a starship trooper
Flashing lights in hyperspace
Fighting for the Federation
Hand in hand we’ll conquer space

Speaker 1:

Niner niner zero
This is Star Comm
We got a problem
On your vector
Request status check
Over

Sarah singing:

Oh, baby…

Speaker 3:

Arcadia
This is Strategy Control
You have course deviation
At five mark six
Acknowledge

Sarah singing:

I love you…

Speaker 1:
Arcadia
We show condition red
Confirm

Sarah singing:

Love me…

Speaker 3:

What’s going on out there

Sarah singing:

Oh…
I lost my heart to a starship trooper
Flashing lights in hyperspace
Fighting for the Federation
Hand in hand we’ll conquer space
I lost my heart to a starship trooper
Oh…

Space suit is lying on control room floor
Pulse rate increasing as the heat factor soars
Take me, make me feel the force
Ignore the computers, we’re locked on course

I lost my heart to a starship trooper
Flashing lights in hyperspace
Fighting for the Federation
Hand in hand we’ll conquer space

I lost my heart to a starship trooper
Flashing lights in hyperspace
Fighting for the Federation
Hand in hand we’ll conquer space

Speaker 1, while Sarah sings the previous lines repeatedly:

Niner niner zero
This is Star Comm
Be advised
You have serious vector deviation
I repeat: serious vector deviation

Arcadia
Niner niner zero
Do you copy

This is Starfleet Control
To all ships in sector five
Be advised
Arcadia
Niner niner zero
Is off course
All ships squawk ident

Starship Arcadia
This is Starfleet Control
Squawk ident
I repeat: squawk ident.

Over to you Lee…

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee,
Little Jackie Paper loved that rascal Puff,
And brought him strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff. Oh

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee,
Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee.

Together they would travel on a boat with billowed sail
Jackie kept a lookout perched on Puff’s gigantic tail,
Noble kings and princes would bow whene’er they came,
Pirate ships would lower their flags when Puff roared out his name. Oh!

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee,
Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee.

A dragon lives forever but not so little boys
Painted wings and giants’ rings make way for other toys.
One grey night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more
And Puff that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar.

His head was bent in sorrow, green scales fell like rain,
Puff no longer went to play along the cherry lane.
Without his lifelong friend, Puff could not be brave,
So Puff that mighty dragon sadly slipped into his cave. Oh!

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee,
Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee.

Manhattan Project by Rush

Ken MacLeod writes:

The libertarian rock band Rush have often used science-fictional, fantasy, or dystopian themes in their songs, but this one (of the relative handful I’ve heard from their vast repertoire) has always struck me as the closest to the spirit of SF, despite its being about an event in the past. It looks beyond fission power’s violent and horrific sin of origin and first use, to the vast possibilities it opens up for humanity. ‘The hopeful depend on a world without end whatever the hopeless may say.’ I’m with the hopeful.

Imagine a time when it all began
In the dying days of a war
A weapon that would settle the score
Whoever found it first would be sure to do their worst.
They always had before…

Imagine a man where it all began
A scientist pacing the floor
In each nation, always eager to explore
To build the best big stick
To turn the winning trick.
But this was something more…

Chorus
The big bang took and shook the world
Shot down the rising sun
The end was begun and it hit everyone
When the chain reaction was done
The big shots tried to hold it back
Fools tried to wish it away
The hopeful depend on a world without end
Whatever the hopeless may say

Imagine a place where it all began
Gathered from across the land
To work in the secrecy of the desert sand
All of the brightest boys
To play with the biggest toys
More than they bargained for…

Chorus

Imagine a man when it all began
The pilot of Enola Gay
Flying out of the shockwave on that August day
All the powers that be, and the course of history,
Would be changed forevermore…

And this is a wonderful and extremely spooky song choice.

Jon Courtenay Grimwood writes:

Marquee Moon  by Television

Some songs stay with you because they remind you of a time, a friend or a lover. A few songs hook simply with their strangeness

For me, Marquee Moon was one of those.

I bought it in 1977, long before I saw Television or Tom Verlaine on stage. And decades before I saw him support Patti Smith at London’s Festival Hall. A gig where half the journalists and fans in the front rows looked exactly as I remembered them – just older, and fatter and balder.

This song doesn’t remind me of anyone or anything. But my memory of hearing it for the first time and realising I hadn’t the faintest fucking clue what it meant – but that didn’t matter – still sends a shiver down my spine.

Lightning, graveyards, rain, Cadillacs.

A ghost dragged back to the cemetary. Who knows.?

All the ingredients of the dark side of the American dream locked into one song. An epic ten-minute rock-guitar heart for the album of the same name. All anyone seems to agree is that, not only does Marquee Moon means whatever you want it to mean, it means it with a fierce intensity.

You give the listener (the reader, the viewer) the words. They bring their own emotion, reading and interpretation to the work. It’s a lesson for songwriters, novelists and artists everywhere.

Television came out of the New York CBGB scene that produced the Ramones. Yet their sound couldn’t be more different. The interlocking interplay of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd’s guitars, Fred Smith’s bass lines and Billy Ficca’s drums, the elliptic self-referencing lyrics that mean so much or nothing at all, split fans and critics. (Being called the Grateful Dead of Punk probably wasn’t meant as a compliment.) But there’s no doubt that much post-punk wouldn’t have happened without them.

I used the strangeness of this track in Stamping Butterflies; a novel set in an analogue of Guantanimo Bay, and a Chinese empire in space; in which the two main characters, Prisoner Zero and the emperor are dreaming each other. And an echo of my being hooked back in 1977 found its way into a key scene.

‘A madman wants to kill me and no one can tell me why. The Republicans are targeting my son’s girlfriend. My wife thinks I need a trip to the vet. The coffee around here tastes like dishwater. Apart from that everything’s fine.’

The black woman smiled. ‘I’ve just called in the transcript of the very first interrogation, the one when he was first asked why he tried to shoot you.’

‘And what was his answer?’

‘He was listening to the rain…’

‘What?’

‘That’s what he said. He was listening to the rain. We’re not talking conspiracy here. We’re talking lone nutter. That’s what Ed doesn’t want widely known. Conspiracy plays better.’

‘And what was he hearing?’

Paula looked puzzled, then understood. ‘Who knows?’ she said. ‘Something else, I guess…’

I remember
how the darkness doubled
I recall
lightning struck itself.
I was listening
listening to the rain
I was hearing
hearing something else.

Life in the hive puckered up my night,
the kiss of death, the embrace of life.
There I stand neath the Marquee Moon Just waiting,
Hesitating…
I ain’t waiting

I spoke to a man
down at the tracks.
I asked him
how he don’t go mad.
He said “Look here junior, don’t you be so happy.
And for Heaven’s sake, don’t you be so sad.”

Well a Cadillac
it pulled out of the graveyard.
Pulled up to me
all they said get in.
Then the Cadillac
it puttered back into the graveyard.
And me,
I got out again.

Screenwriter and blogger Adrian Reynolds has been a regular visitor to this site, and contributed a fabulous guest blog about Spider-Man not so long back.   I asked Adrian to come up with an SFF Song of the Week, and he came up with this amazing choice.

Adrian Reynolds writes:

There’ve been a few of these SFF songs now, and one name is conspicuous by its absence. The band I’m thinking of did one album with a gatefold sleeve that folded out into a warrior’s shield, of all things. They frequently sing about spaceships, and their live shows feature a wealth of original and plundered sf imagery. OK, so they’ve not troubled the charts much, but they’re still remembered fondly for a single about a marvellous device that helps its owner ride through space and time — a Silver Machine.

The band is Hawkwind of course. They didn’t just dabble in science fiction — they lived it. Early on, the band were based in Ladbroke Grove, where they got to know another Notting Hill resident in the form of Michael Moorcock. It’s the stale aroma of science fantasy paperbacks and bearded writers that probably keeps people at bay from Hawkwind — Half Man Half Biscuit nailed popular response with their lyric “Mention the Lord of the Rings once again/And I’ll more than likely kill you/Moorcock Moorcock Michael Moorcock/You fervently moan.”

Stick with them though, and Hawkwind — particularly early Hawkwind — reward attention. To my ears there’s not a lot to distinguish between some of their music and that of celebrated German hipsters Can. Only, where Can’s electrifying primitivism was produced by musicians who had jazz chops and classical training, Hawkwind’s was the result of giving electricity to primitives. The results were intermittently brilliant, particularly on the celebrated Space Ritual tour of 1973, which is where this Michael Moorcock penned piece comes from. Sonic Attack is an interlude in the chaos of their show, delivered by Robert Calvert with a backing you could either describe as musique concrete, or what happens when drug-addled loons are given primitive synthesisers. Put on your loon pants, light up a joss stick, and enjoy…

In case of Sonic Attack on your district, follow these rules…..

If you are making love it is imperative to bring all bodies to orgasm
simultaneously
Do not waste time blocking your ears.
Do not waste time seeking a soundproof shelter.
Try to get as far away from the sonic source as possible,
but do not panic…..

Use your wheels. It is what they are for.
Small babies may be placed inside the special cocoons,
which should be left if possible, in a shelter.
Do not attempt to use your own limbs.
If no wheels are available, metal, not organic, limbs
should be employed whenever possible…..

Remember, in the case of Sonic Attack, Survival means every man for himself.
Statistically more people survive if they think only of themselves.
Do not attempt to rescue friends, relatives, loved ones.
You have only a few seconds to escape.
Use those seconds sensibly or you will inevitably die.
Do not panic.
Think only of yourself….

These are the first signs of Sonic Attack:
You will notice small objects, such as ornaments, oscillating.
You will notice a vibration in your diaphragm.
You will hear a distant hissing in your ears.
You will feel dizzy.
You will feel the need to vomit.
There will be bleeding from orifices.
There will be an ache in the pelvic region.
You may be subject to fits of hysterical shouting, or even laughter.

These are all sign of imminent Sonic destruction.
Your only real protection is flight.
If you are less than ten years old, then remain in your shelter and use
your cocoon.
But remember:
You can help no-one else, No-one else, No-one else……

Archie Tait writes:

Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is the title track of The Flaming Lips’ tenth album, released in 2002. Split into two parts, it is the third (and fourth) of the three linked songs that open the album.

The first song, Fight Test, sets the tone – this is Psychedelic Power-Pop by grown-ups, very beaty, very Sunshine. It’s a melancholic reflection on Cat Stevens’ 1970 song Father and Son: its heritage indicates a clear point-of-entry for those old enough to recall the original, and it’s a throat-tugger.

I’d have chosen Fight Test itself for this slot, except it’s only recognisable as a Science Fiction song in retrospect (though once that connection is made, it becomes even more powerful). It’s a reflection on violence – is it ever right to fight? Though Fight Test is a song about love lost for the lack of commitment, it is also a reflection on violent resistance – that sometimes it’s not only right, it’s necessary to fight.

The next two songs reveal that Fight Test is also an introduction to the idea of violent resistance against the Pink Robots, resistance for humanity.

The second song, One More Robot / Sympathy 3000-21, introduces the robots – ‘One more robot learns to be something / More than a machine…’ This song is sympathetic to the robot’s desire to love, and compares to human uncertainty about the condition of love, the robot’s uncertainty whether what it feels is love, or just an artificial simulacrum.

Now we come to Yoshimi. The narrator (the boy who revised his opinion about non-violence, also the man uncertain whether his definition of love and humanity is any different from a robot’s) now relies on the girl Yoshimi to protect him from the robots, and to destroy them.

The Flaming Lips have been around for a long time, in pop terms – since 1984. Like Roxy Music, they have become a pop group for grown-ups.  Roxy always had Bryan Ferry’s reflective melancholia and diverse culturals referents, anchored by Paul Thompson’s resolute yet inventive drum-beat.  The Lips pull similarly diverse influences together without revealing the joins, anchored by drummer Steven Drozd’s utter dedication to the beat, producing music that simultaneously excites and intrigues. Wayne Coyne’s lyrics are allusive, often based in science metaphors.  The Flaming Lips incorporate California Sunshine Pop and psychedelia (they are from Oklahoma).  They can transform from driving rhythm to anthemic operatics and back again, mid-song. They have a one-handed drummer. Their 1997 album Zaireeka is a four-disc set, all four discs to be played simultaneously.

Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is a nostalgic reminder of 8os anime, those big-eyed, glistening, primary-coloured teenagers who saved the world from monsters, aliens and robots, before the genre ‘grew up’ with Akira and Urotsukidoji – Legend of the Overfiend. It asks whether a mature man, who has lost the compass of his own humanity, can be saved by an innocent cartoon. The ‘story’ ends after just three songs. It is barely more than a narrative premise; it has no development, no climax and no resolution. By refusing to elaborate, to pin itself down, a ludicrous conjecture is rendered haunting, and touching.  Allusive, repetitive, precise, it echoes in our memory like other such ‘mystery’ songs with unfinished narratives - The Jaynetts’ Sally Go Round the Roses, Jerry Jeff Walker’s Mr Bojangles, Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billy Joe.

The Flaming Lips have Science Fiction form: their previous albums feature songs like What is the Light? (An Untested Hypothesis Suggesting That the Chemical (In Our Brains) by Which We Are Able to Experience the Sensation of Being in Love Is the Same Chemical That Caused the ‘Big Bang’ That Was the Birth of the Accelerating Universe (Soft Bulletin 1999); and Riding to Work in the Year 2025 (You’re Invisible Now) (Zaireeka 1997).  Their most recent album is a re-make of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. According to Wikipedia, Aaron Sorkin is working on a Broadway musical version of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hq-W-4Izjwc&feature=fvst4Izjwc&

Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

The name is Yoshimi

She’s a black belt in karate

Working for the city

She has to discipline her body

‘Cause she knows that it’s demanding

To defeat those evil machines

I know she can beat them

Oh Yoshimi, they don’t believe me

But you won’t let those robots eat me

Yoshimi, they don’t believe me

But you won’t let those robots defeat me

Those evil-natured robots

They’re programmed to destroy us

She’s gotta be strong to fight them

So she’s taking lots of vitamins

‘Cause she knows that it’d be tragic

If those evil robots win

I know she can beat them.

Oh Yoshimi, they don’t believe me

But you won’t let those robots defeat me

Yoshimi, they don’t believe me

But you won’t let those robots eat me.

Fight Test

The test begins NOW

I thought I was smart,

I thought I was right

I thought it was better not to fight

I thought there was a virtue

In always being cool.

So when it came time to fight

I thought: I’ll just step aside

And that time would prove you wrong

And that you would be the fool.

I don’t know where the sunbeams end

And the starlight begins

It’s all a mystery

Oh to fight is to defend

If it’s not now, then tell me when

Would be the time that you would stand up

And be a man

For to lose, I could accept

But to surrender?  I just wept

And regretted this moment -

Oh, that I, I was the fool.

I don’t know where the sun-beams end

And the starlight begins

It’s all a mystery

And I don’t know how a man decides what’s right

For his own life - It’s just a mystery.

‘Cause I’m a man, not a boy

And there are things you can’t avoid

You face them when you’re not prepared

To face them

If I could, I would

But you’re with him now

It’d do no good

I should have fought him

But instead I let him

I let him take it.

I don’t know where the sunbeams end

And the star light begins

It’s all a mystery.

And I don’t know how a man decides

What’s right for his own life -

It’s a mystery.

Robert  Grant writes:

‘Where’s Captain Kirk’ by SpizzEnergi (Rough Trade RTS04. 1979)

When Philip first extended the invite to choose SFF Song of the Week the immediate temptation was to reach across the huge back catalogue of some old prog-rock band like Hawkwind, ELP or Genesis or maybe something newer like Coheed & Cambria or Tool but two things stopped us: 1) they’re a bit too obvious and 2) they’re a bit po-faced and exclusive and for those reasons wouldn’t really represent what SCI-FI-LONDON is all about.

But this, this is more us. It’s a fabulous pop song, great fun, with real energy. Sure, it’s a bit rough around the edges but from the opening guitar riff to the last shout of the chorus you cannot help tapping your feet, singing along and having a great time whether you want to or not. We used it for the festival sting two years ago and every time it played, the audience – no matter how many times they’d heard it – jigged in their seats and sang along showing exactly why it was named Single Of The Week by Melody Maker, why it remained at No.1 on the newly created UK Indie Chart for over two months and in the top 50 for the entire year and why John Peel called it the best Star Trek song ever in his BBC1 programme on the music of Star Trek.

Mojo magazine included it in their list of the best punk rock singles of all time and while it’s been covered by a number of artists, most famously by R.E.M., and it’s been remixed and re-imagined a fair number of times over the years as well, the original is still, and will always be, the best and when you’re at this years SCI-FI-LONDON in May, whack it on the nearest juke box and you just might see a fat bloke dance!

I was beamed aboard the starship Enterprise
What I felt what I saw was a total surprise
I looked around and wondered can this be
Or is this the start of my insanity

Oh but it’s true
As we went warp factor 2
And I met all of the crew
Where’s Captain Kirk?

I went to the bridge and we were tossed about
In the storm of the vortex I was hit with a doubt
I saw in a dream in a memory of mine
Was it you was it me who was in all the time?

Spock pulled me through
As we went warp factor 2
And someone I saw I knew
Who’s Captain Kirk?

So when I awoke from the dangers of space
I looked and I saw a familiar face
The time warp in space made a change in me
For I was the captain and the captain was me

Yes it’s so true
As we went warp factor 2
The changes I had been through
As Captain Kirk
I’m Captain Kirk

I love his choice for today – my generation too! – but this particular song it’s WAY too long to feature on this blog, or even on YouTube. So I feature an excerpt, with a link for you to buy the album if you want to hear more.

Mike Carey writes:

Supper’s Ready Part 2

In Supper’s Ready (from their 1972 album, Foxtrot), Genesis created a sprawling sci-fi epic and played it out in the space of a suite of songs whose combined length is more than twenty minutes. Beginning with a first inkling of disaster to come when the narrator sees something alien and inexplicable in his lover’s face, it escalates through total war, millenarian cults, extreme body modification and finally the end of the world – although we’re not sure whether this is devastation or redemption.

The lyrics are elliptical, and it’s never possible to paraphrase exactly what’s going on, but the orchestration of emotion throughout is amazing, as is the bravura finish, which swipes the imagery of the Book of Revelations and puts it through its paces – so that when we come full circle to the announcement that “supper’s ready”, it’s the supper of the king of kings, announced by the angel who stands in the sun. Pretentious? Maybe. But back in 1974 (which was when I discovered the album) that didn’t put me off at all. I just loved it for the insane head-trip it was. Moreover, it paved the way for the greater glories of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway two years later – The Lamia, Lilywhite Lilith, The Colony of Slippermen et al.

Yes, kids, that’s how old I am. I remember when Genesis weren’t boring…

Lovers’ Leap

Walking across the sitting-room, I turn the television off.
Sitting beside you, I look into your eyes.
As the sound of motor cars fades in the night time,
I swear I saw your face change, it didn’t seem quite right.
…And it’s hello babe with your guardian eyes so blue
Hey my baby don’t you know our love is true.

Coming closer with our eyes, a distance falls around our bodies.
Out in the garden, the moon seems very bright,
Six saintly shrouded men move across the lawn slowly.
The seventh walks in front with a cross held high in hand.
…And it’s hello babe your supper’s waiting for you.
Hey my baby, don’t you know our love is true.

I’ve been so far from here,
Far from your warm arms.
It’s good to feel you again,
It’s been a long long time. Hasn’t it?

The Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man

I know a farmer who looks after the farm.
With water clear, he cares for all his harvest.
I know a fireman who looks after the fire.

Can’t you see he’s fooled you all.
Yes, he’s here again, can’t you see he’s fooled you all.
Share his peace,
Sign the lease.
He’s a supersonic scientist,
He’s the guaranteed eternal sanctuary man.
Look, look into my mouth he cries,
And all the children lost down many paths,
I bet my life you’ll walk inside
Hand in hand,
gland in gland
With a spoonful of miracle,
He’s the guaranteed eternal sanctuary.
We will rock you, rock you little snake,
We will keep you sad and warm.

Ikhnaton And Itsacon And Their Band Of Merry Men

Wearing feelings on our faces while our faces took a rest,
We walked across the fields to see the children of the West,
But we saw a host of dark skinned warriors
standing still below the ground,
Waiting for battle.

The fight’s begun, they’ve been released.
Killing foe for peace…bang, bang, bang. Bang, bang, bang…
And they’re giving me a wonderful potion,
‘Cos I cannot contain my emotion.
And even though I’m feeling good,
Something tells me I’d better activate my prayer capsule.

Today’s a day to celebrate, the foe have met their fate.
The order for rejoicing and dancing has come from our warlord.

How Dare I Be So Beautiful?

Wandering in the chaos the battle has left,
We climb up the mountain of human flesh,
To a plateau of green grass, and green trees full of life.
A young figure sits still by a pool,
He’s been stamped “Human Bacon” by some butchery tool.
(He is you)
Social Security took care of this lad.
We watch in reverence, as Narcissus is turned to a flower.
A flower?

Willow Farm

If you go down to Willow Farm,
to look for butterflies, flutterbyes, gutterflies
Open your eyes, it’s full of surprise, everyone lies,
like the fox on the rocks,
and the musical box.
Yes, there’s Mum & Dad, and good and bad,
and everyone’s happy to be here.

There’s Winston Churchill dressed in drag,
he used to be a British flag, plastic bag, what a drag.
The frog was a prince, the prince was a brick, the brick was an egg,
the egg was a bird.
(Fly away you sweet little thing, they’re hard on your tail)
Hadn’t you heard?
(They’re going to change you into a human being!)
Yahoo, we’re happy as fish and gorgeous as geese,
and wonderfully clean in the morning.

We’ve got everything, we’re growing everything,
We’ve got some in
We’ve got some out
We’ve got some wild things floating about
Everyone, we’re changing everyone,
you name them all,
We’ve had them here,
And the real stars are still to appear.

ALL CHANGE!

Feel your body melt;
Mum to mud to mad to dad
Dad diddley office, Dad diddley office,
You’re all full of ball.

Dad to dam to dum to mum
Mum diddley washing, Mum diddley washing,
You’re all full of ball.

Let me hear you lies, we’re living this up to the eyes.
Ooee-ooee-ooee-oowaa
Momma I want you now.

And as you listen to my voice
To look for hidden doors, tidy floors, more applause.
You’ve been here all the time,
Like it or not, like what you got,
You’re under the soil (the soil, the soil),
Yes, deep in the soil (the soil, the soil, the soil, the soil!).
So we’ll end with a whistle and end with a bang
and all of us fit in our places.

Apocalypse In 9/8 (Co-Starring the delicious talents of Gabble Ratchet)

With the guards of Magog, swarming around,
The Pied Piper takes his children underground.
Dragons coming out of the sea,
Shimmering silver head of wisdom looking at me.
He brings down the fire from the skies,
You can tell he’s doing well by the look in human eyes.
Better not compromise.
It won’t be easy.

666 is no longer alone,
He’s getting out the marrow in your back bone,
And the seven trumpets blowing sweet rock and roll,
Gonna blow right down inside your soul.
Pythagoras with the looking glass reflects the full moon,
In blood, he’s writing the lyrics of a HIP brand new tune.

And it’s hey babe, with your guardian eyes so blue,
Hey my baby, don’t you know our love is true,
I’ve been so far from here,
Far from your loving arms,
Now I’m back again, and babe it’s gonna work out fine.

As Sure As Eggs Is Eggs (Aching Men’s Feet)

Can’t you feel our souls ignite
Shedding ever changing colours, in the darkness of the fading night,
Like the river joins the ocean, as the germ in a seed grows
We have finally been freed to get back home.

There’s an angel standing in the sun, and he’s crying with a loud voice,
“This is the supper of the mighty One”,
The Lord of Lords,
King of Kings,
Has returned to lead His children home,
To take them to the new Jerusalem.

Download from Amazon here.

Mike Cobley writes:

Last century, at about the 4/5ths mark, I had just been sorrowfully yet firmly ejected from Strathclyde University (BSc Production Engineering & Beer Bar Lager), having failed to pass the 2nd year exams. Such are the twists and turns of life’s twisty turny laundry chute. However, I had got involved with the entertainments department at Strathclyde Students Union, persuading 1st the internal radio station to let me have a stab at playing records and, like, being a DJ, man! before becoming an official Ents crew member (in as much as any of us reprobates were, like, official). This was 1979, so it was a pre-digital and inherently grimy world of discos and gigs and guzzling tins of lager (free to Ents staff, heh heh) and smoking Benson & Hedges (this was before my body staged a revolt about a decade later). So anyway, amongst the very many now-classic choons and toetappers that passed across the twin decks (usually a Citronic Mk2 with Garrard turntables) was – Space Station No 5, as sung by Sammy Hagar, from the live album ‘Loud and Clear’.

The song originally appeared on Montrose’s self-titled album, out in 1973. But when I first heard it, about 1980, this was of course years and years before Babylon 5 was even so much as a twinkle in JM Straczynski’s eye. But listening to it again soon after B5 hit the screens it struck me as the natural, if unofficial, theme song for the series. The original album version is cool in its way, but the live version just completely tears loose, hammers along with a breathless urgency. Entirely fantastic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzIUNyiIwPc

Start, with the sun
And move on out
The future’s in the skies above
The heavens unfold
And a new star is born
Space and time makin’ love

Chorus:
Oh what a time we had
Living on the ground
I’ve moved to station Number 5
See you next time around,
Next time around

As far you want, as close as you need
It’s all in the mind, you know
This old world hasn’t really seen it’s day
It’s here, time to go

Chorus

Remember when it was so clear
We were young, but the memory still remains
To pick fruit from a tree
Fish from the seas
Now nothing’s left here, but the stains
Well I can’t cry no more
Can only be glad
There’s other places we can be
If the time suits you right
I’m leaving tonight
Come fly away
With me!
Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah
Oh, yeah
Start, with the sun
And move on out
The future’s in the skies above
The heavens unfold
A new star is born
Space and time makin’ love

Chorus

It’s this! A delightful, fall-around-on-the-floor laughing song choice from Stuart Angell McGregor, screenwriter and blogger, who is a regular contributor to this site’s TV and Movie and Book Zones. (Look out for his marvellous analysis of The X-Files, a wonderfully comprehensive and witty account of the classic show.)

Stuart Angell McGregor writes:

Years after Laika – the perky and bright-eyed soviet space dog -  barked his last and burned up a hero in earth’s atmosphere, Gerry Anderson created Fireball XL5, a children’s show in which goggle-eyed space puppet Colonel Steve Zodiac patrolled the stars in the eponymous super rocket.

XL5 was a fun, wobbly-stringed, space western with only one really exceptional element to call its own: ‘Fireball’, the theme that swung proudly over the show’s closing credits. Fireball wasn’t so much crooned, more sensually exuded from the pores of chocolate-voiced Australian Don Spencer.

XL5 began in ’62, and ended a year later, the exact time that American astronauts Alan Sheppard and ol’ John Glenn were freewheeling, for the first time, way up there, in machines held together with little more than pure hope and bubblegum.

And, ultimately, that’s what holds Spencer’s Fireball together, too – not that cool retro sound you can imagine spooling easy and smooth from the glossy speakers of some Kubrickian space station – but hope, the dreams of small men wanting to touch, wanting to be, something far bigger.

When I was a mere slip of a thing, my Dad would sing me to sleep with his own garbled and half-remembered version of this song. And though he could never quite carry the tune far enough, and forever fiddled with the tips of his cigarette yellow fingers, that glorious and hopeful chorus always managed to come out just right.

‘My heart would be a fireball
A fireball
Every time I gaze into your
Starry eyes’

Amazing, no?

Now, there’s nothing left to do but pass the space martins, and dance.

I wish I was a spaceman,
the fastest guy alive
I’d fly you ‘round the universe.
In Fireball XL5.
Way out in space together.
Conquerors of the sky.
My heart would be a fireball.
A fireball.
Every time I gaze into your starry eyes.

We’d take a path to Jupiter and maybe very soon.
We’d cruise along the Milky Way and land upon the Moon.
To a wonderland of stardust.
We’ll zoom our way to mars.
My heart would be a fireball.
A fireball.
And you would be my Venus of the stars.

But though I’m not a spaceman
Famous and renowned
I’m just a guy that’s down to earth
With both feet on the ground
It’s all imagination
I’ll never reach the stars
My heart is still a fireball
A fireball
Every time I gaze into your starry eyes

And today’s SFF Song of the Week is from Brian – who writes compelling heroic epic fantasy among other things, and who sets his books in a godless universe so bleak and violent that’s a surprise to find what a pleasant man he really is. Look out for his first three books – Winterbirth, Bloodheir, and Fall of Thanes.

Brian Ruckley writes:

Here’s some musical fantasy from a creator who was himself a unique, larger than life, vaguely numinous presence in the last quarter of the 20th century: Freddie Mercury. Lots of Queen’s songs have a slightly science fictional or fantastical vibe – elaborate concoctions fuelled by a shifting, vivid, sometimes surreal imagination – but The Seven Seas of Rhye is a rather different beast.

This is explicitly epic, secondary world fantasy fiction done as a brief, grandiose rock song. Rhye and its seas existed, but only in the minds of Freddie Mercury and his sister, who dreamed it up together when they were children. Others might settle for imaginary friends; they invented a whole world, and stories to inhabit it. Rhye is the setting for several early Queen songs (including the brilliantly titled Ogre Battle, which sounds like it ought to be a D&D soundtrack), but The Seven Seas of Rhye is the (modest) hit that immortalized it. And with lyrics like these:

Be gone with you, you shod and shady senators
Give out the good, leave out the bad evil cries
I challenge the mighty titan and his troubadours
And with a smile I’ll take you to the seven seas of Rhye

Doesn’t it sound as though there’s a hell of a book in there somewhere?

Fear me you lords and lady preachers
I descend upon your Earth from the skies
I command your very souls you unbelievers
Bring before me what is mine, the seven seas of Rhye

Can you hear me you peers and privy counsellors
I stand before you naked to the eyes
I will destroy any man who dares abuse my trust
I swear that you’ll be mine, the seven seas of Rhye

Sister, I live and lie for you
Mister, do and I’ll die
You are mine, I possess you, I belong to you forever

Storm the master-marathon, I’ll fly through
By flash and thunder-fire I’ll survive, I’ll survive, I’ll survive I’ll survive, I’ll survive
Then I’ll defy the laws of nature and come out alive
Then I’ll get you

Be gone with you, you shod and shady senators
Give out the good, leave out the bad evil cries
I challenge the mighty titan and his troubadours
And with a smile I’ll take you to the seven seas of Rhye

Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Futurismic – near-future science fiction webzine
Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of The Dreaded Press – rock music reviews webzine
Publicist and PR officer for PS Publishing – the UK’s foremost boutique genre publisher

Paul clearly has several doppelgangers to get all that done, and one of them wrote this:

Paul Raven writes:

Heavy rock and science fiction have a relationship that goes way back, long before I was even born… though, truth be told, both fields of endeavour had a habit of showing one another in the worst possible light. Or maybe that’s just hindsight, my own generational lenses distorting what went before like a fun-house mirror, making serious statements into figures of fun through the heat-haze of time?

But I digress… I have a tendency to ramble, you see. Perhaps that’s why I’m so fond of sprawling epic music? Sure, I like a short sharp blast of punk energy or heavy metal power as much as the next man, but given the choice I’ll always pick the long tunes with the slow build – the tunes with dynamics, atmosphere, and a certain mind-expanding hugeness. Music with space, in other words, whether that space be inner or outer (or both). Few bands fit the bill quite as well as Mancunian three-piece Amplifier, whose lyrics often reflect the science fictional feel of their music.

And no song by Amplifier fits the bill better than “UFOs”. Like most of their songs, “UFOs” has no distinct narrative or story, but the lyrics and the music combined do something that very few musicians have ever managed for me – they evoke sensawunda. Remember that first addictive experience with science fiction when you were young? That first time you put down a book with the feeling that you’d had your head expanded to more ably contain the ideas and vistas it handed you? That first time you realised how small a thing you really are, in a universe so inconceivably immense? That’s sensawunda, at least by my definition, and no matter how many times I listen to “UFOs” I get that same feeling of inner expansion, as the hairs on the back of my neck stand up like missiles preparing to launch, and my heart skips erratic like an irregular quasar thumping out its mysterious message from a million million million years in the past.

But enough of my chatter – let’s let the band do the talking. Two things to note: firstly, “UFOs” is not a pop song, or even a ‘regular’ rock song in format. There is no instant hook, no verse-chorus-verse-bridge-verse-chorus-coda structure. It’s a slow builder, a journey, a trip – so give it time to grow. The pay-off is worth it, I promise you.

Secondly, there’s no ‘proper’ video – Amplifier are too small a band to have videos for their more obscure album tracks – but the beauty of their style is that you can (and should) provide your own, projecting what you hear onto the deep black screen of your own closed eyelids. So set aside eight minutes, crank the volume as loud as you can without distressing your neighbours, press play, and then sit back with your eyes closed. “We’ll all be waiting for you here.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7Pn1YR3rN4

Oh, have you heard the news from outer space?
It seems that somewhere in the ancient dunes
of silver moons, like giant spoons lie dusty tombs
of Martian men in U-boat pens…
and they will come to kill us all.

‘Cause our plastic factories
and our catastrophic theories

are all we have / we live our lives from paper bags, and
I know better than you know -
I’ll kill you ’cause you drive too slow!
Aggressive instincts will do us in, yeah…
just give us the chance for us to prove it ourselves.

(Don’t you know that all machines sink?

Do you know they sing as they think?

Although their bodies are electric…

Don’t you know that all machines think?)

So we laid back and we watched space revolve
the bodies of astronauts long cold
blinking like lonely satellites…
Where we left vapour trails through cotton skies -
come on, let’s scratch the heavens one last time!
‘Cause we’re all sinking in the sunshine
and though you’d love to stay,
well, you said you must be on your way
to where the rainbows and UFOs
fall ten at a time
in a shower of glitter and gold…

… we’ll all be waiting for you here.

Note from Phil: Paul suggested closing your eyes, but I like to listen to the track while looking at this:

And Lilith Saintcrow writes:

I could sing Leslie Fish songs before I even know who Leslie Fish was. In those benighted days, while the Internet was in its dialup infancy and in any case hadn’t bothered to come knocking at the doors of suburbia, one of my friends who went to Renaissance faires gave me a mix tape. Not a CD, an actual magnetic tape, that had mostly Leslie Fish and some Andreas Vollenweider and some Echo’s Children. There was no track list, just the tape in a beat-up plastic case scrounged from the bottom of someone’s older sister’s car. I played that tape over and over again, fascinated that people were writing songs to go with fandom. I had no idea what fandom was, it was just such a revelation that other people loved these fictional worlds the way I did–and, in fact, loved them enough to write songs about them. I was utterly enchanted.

I can still remember–and sing along with–every song that was on that tape.

Cut to *mumblemumble* years later, to when the Internet has become a world-class library for fandom and I’ve got enough cash to pay for a high-speed connection. One day, I was humming Bones–the song Fish wrote about Dr. McCoy from Star Trek–and I thought, if I can remember the lyrics, I’ll bet the Internet can tell me more.

Famous last words, right?

The jolt of joy that went through me when I realized I could buy a CD with these songs I’d been carrying in my memory is probably only comparable to the unbelieving joy I felt when I realized Echo’s Children were singing in Elvish, dammit! Now I can see that my friend cherrypicked a few songs from a couple Fish albums, and that I can get to know much more of Fish’s body of work. It’s been like Christmas.

Still, those songs from the mix tape, lo those many years ago, stick in my head as my first love in filk. Bones. The Engineer’s Hymn. And perhaps one of the funniest filk party songs ever created: Banned From Argo.

Enjoy.

When we pulled into Argo Port in need of R & R
The crew set out investigating every joint and bar
We had high expectations of their hospitality
But found too late it wasn’t geared for spacers such as we

And we’re banned from Argo every one
Banned from Argo just for having a little fun
We spent a jolly shoreleave there for just three days or four
But Argo doesn’t want us anymore

Our captain’s tastes were simple but his methods were complex
We found him with five partners each of a different world and sex
The shorepolice were on the way — we had no second chance
We beamed him up in the nick of time in the remnants of his pants

And we’re banned from Argo every one
Banned from Argo just for having a little fun
We spent a jolly shoreleave there for just three days or four
But Argo doesn’t want us anymore.

Our engineer would yield to none in putting down the brew
He outdrank seven space marines and a demolition crew
The navigator didn’t win but he outdrank almost all
And now they’ve got a shuttlecraft on the roof of city hall

And we’re banned from Argo every one
Banned from Argo just for having a little fun
We spent a jolly shoreleave there for just three days or four
But Argo doesn’t want us anymore

Our proper cool first officer was drugged with something green
And hauled into an alley where he suffered things obscene
He sobered up in sickbay and he’s none the worse for wear
Except he somehow taught the bridge computer how to swear

And we’re banned from Argo every one
Banned from Argo just for having a little fun
We spent a jolly shoreleave there for just three days or four
But Argo doesn’t want us anymore

The head nurse disappeared a while in the major dope bazaar
Buying an odd green potion guaranteed to cause pon farr
She came home with no uniform and an oddly cheerful heart
And a painful way of walking with her feet a yard apart

And we’re banned from Argo every one
Banned from Argo just for having a little fun
We spent a jolly shoreleave there for just three days or four
But Argo doesn’t want us anymore

Our lady of communications won a ship-wide bet
By getting into the planet’s main communications net
Now every time someone calls up on an Argo telescreen
The flesh is there but the clothes they wear are nowhere to be seen

And we’re banned from Argo every one
Banned from Argo just for having a little fun
We spent a jolly shoreleave there for just three days or four
But Argo doesn’t want us anymore

Our doctor loves humanity; his private life is quiet
The shorepolice arrested him for inciting whores to riot
We found him in the city jail, locked on and beamed him free
Intact except for hickeys and six kinds of VD

And we’re banned from Argo every one
Banned from Argo just for having a little fun
We spent a jolly shoreleave there for just three days or four
But Argo doesn’t want us anymore

Our helmsman loves exotic plants and the plants all love him too
He took some down on leave with him and he wondered what they’d do
The planetary governor called and swore upon his life
That a gang of plants entwined his house and then seduced his wife

And we’re banned from Argo every one
Banned from Argo just for having a little fun
We spent a jolly shoreleave there for just three days or four
But Argo doesn’t want us anymore

A gang of Klingons landed and nobody seemed to care
They stomped into the nearest bar to announce that they were there
Half our crew was busy therein and invited them to play
But the Klingons only looked at us and turned and ran away

And we’re banned from Argo every one
Banned from Argo just for having a little fun
We spent a jolly shoreleave there for just three days or four
But Argo doesn’t want us anymore

Our crew is Starfleet’s finest and our record is our pride
And when we play we tend to leave a trail a mile wide
We’re sorry ’bout the wreckage and the riots and the fuss
At least we’re sure that planet won’t be quick forgetting us

And we’re banned from Argo every one
Banned from Argo just for having a little fun
We spent a jolly shoreleave there for just three days or four
But Argo doesn’t want us anymore

(Wonder why’)

Nicole Peeler writes:

Hello! Nicole Peeler, here. For those (ten) of you who know me, you know that I write for Orbit books, much like Philip. Only I write the dreaded . . . urban fantasy! Now, I am well aware that there is an element of more hard core sci-fi/fantasy readers who think urban fantasy consists of a bunch of women dressed like leather daddies running around with swords, alternately decapitating monsters and bonking vampires.

And, admittedly, this description is often accurate.

That said, I write a slightly different kind of urban fantasy. I write UF that’s based on my love of mythology, and one of my all-time favorite myths is that of the selkie. The very first time I read a selkie myth–I think I was twelve–I was transfixed. And not only with the beautiful selkie maiden, but especially with the idea of the half human children she inevitably leaves behind after finding her seal skin and returning to the sea.

Ultimately, these selkie legends are very much ones of victimization. The selkie maid is victimized when her skin is stolen; the human husband is victimized when his wife leaves him (and sometimes, if rarely, he doesn’t understand why because he never understood the import of the skin he’d found); and the children are victimized by losing their mother.

Which leads me to Feist, and her song, “Sea Lion Woman.” In many ways, this song is the delicious, grrrrl power, feminist answer to the selkie myth. For unlike her selkie cousin, the seal woman, Feist’s “Sea Lion Woman” is anything but a victim. Just drinking a cup of tea, she makes a rooster crow!

And you know what else they call a rooster. . .

I imagine Feist’s sea lion woman as the Black Widow version of my beloved selkie myth. The seal woman takes off her skin, and some man comes and steals it. The sea lion woman, however, takes off her skin, dons some pretty dresses and she does the calling, hoping the men who answer know what to do. And the ones who don’t? They get a knife in the back.

Those sea lion women are fierce, yo.

Sea lion woman

She drink coffee

Sea lion woman

She drink tea

And a rooster crows

Sea lion woman

She drink coffee

She drink tea

And a rooster crows

Sea lion woman

Dressed in red

Smile at the man

When you wake up in his bed

Sea lion woman

Dressed in black

Wink at the man

Then stab him in his back

Sea lion woman

She drink coffee

She drink tea

And a rooster crows

Sea lion woman

Dressed in white

Marry the man

And you’ll spend a long sweet life

Sea lion woman

Dressed in green

Silver lining and golden seams

Sea lion woman

Dressed in blue

Call on the man

And hope he knows what he can do

Sea lion…

Sea lion woman

She drink coffee

She drink tea

And a rooster crows

Sea lion woman

She drink coffee

She drink tea

And a rooster crows

Sea lion woman

Dressed in the blue

Call on the man

And hope he knows what he can do

Sea lion woman

Dressed in red

Smile at the man

When you wake up in his bed

Sea lion woman….

Alastair’s SFF Song of the Week is Wings by the Fall, a tale of time travel and time paradoxes.

Alastair Reynolds writes:

I’ve loved The Fall for about twenty years. I don’t think there’s any one particular period of their music that I like more than another but “Wings” is undoubtedly one of my all-time favorites. It’s from the early Brix era, when the group’s music was starting to becone slightly more poppy, or as poppy as it’s ever going to get given Smith’s unique vocal approach, the relentlessly lo-fi production and the ever present emphasis on repetition. “Wings” pretty much encapsulates everything that’s great about the group, though. It’s got a fantastically catchy riff, mind-bending sci-fi time-travel lyrics, and as always there’s some great dead-pan humour. “I paid them off with stuffing from my wings”, indeed. And the video is superb.

Day by day.
The moon gains on me.
Day by day.
The moon gains on me.

Purchased pair of flabby wings.
I took to doing some hovering.
Here is a list of incorrect things.

Hovered mid-air outside a study.
An academic needed his chin,
Sent in the dust of some cheap magazines.
His academic rust, could not burn them up.

Recruited some gremlins.
To get me clear of the airline routes.
I paid them off with stuffing from my wings.
They had some fun with those cheapo airline snobs.

The stuffing loss made me hit a timelock.
I ended up in the eighteen sixties.
I’ve been there for one hundred and twenty five years.
A small alteration of the past. can turn time into space.

Ended up under ardwick bridge.
With some veterans from the u.s. civil war.
They were under irish patronage.
We shot dead a stupid sergeant,
But I got hit in the crossfire.
The lucky hit made me hit a time lock.

But, when I got back.
The place I made the purchase, no longer exists
I’d erased it under the bridge.

Day by day.
The moon came towards me
By such things.
The moon came towards me.

So now I sleep in ditches.
And hide away from nosey kids.
The wings rot and feather under me.
The wings rot and curl right under me.
A small alteration of the past.
Can turn time into space.
Small touches can alter more than a mere decade.

This week there’s a great song choice from Tony Ballantyne, the wickedly inventive and thoroughly delightful author of The Robot Wars and The Recursion Trilogy. It’s Experiment IV, by Kate Bush.

Tony Ballantyne writes:

Listen to the song and you realise this is an SF short story just waiting to be written. Try and write it (and I have done) and you realise you’re never going to do it as succinctly as Kate Bush manages. “From the painful sounds of mothers, to the terrifying screams…” This is how to make a sound that could kill someone.

Watch the video and you see actors Peter Vaughan, Richard Vernon, Dawn French and Hugh Laurie bring a whole new dimension to the story. Finally there’s Kate Bush herself doing her Raiders of the Lost Ark routine as she turns from angel temptress to demon nightmare as the sound is played to its helpless victim. Wonderful!

SF and Kate Bush. Throw in an accordion and you’d have my best night in ever.

We were working secretly
For the military.
Our experiment in sound,
Was nearly ready to begin.
We only know in theory
What we are doing:
Music made for pleasure,
Music made to thrill.
It was music we were making here until

They told us
All they wanted
Was a sound that could kill someone
From a distance.
So we go ahead,
And the meters are over in the red.
It’s a mistake in the making.

From the painful cry of mothers,
To the terrifying scream,
We recorded it and put it into our machine.

Then they told us
All they wanted
Was a sound that could kill someone
From a distance.
So we go ahead,
And the meters are over in the red.
It’s a mistake in the making.

It could feel like falling in love.
It could feel so bad.
But it could feel so good.
It could sing you to sleep

?”I’ll bet my mum’s gonna give me a little toy instrument!”?

But that dream is your enemy.

We won’t be there to be blamed.
We won’t be there to snitch.
I just pray that someone there
Can hit the switch.

But they told us
All they wanted
Was a sound that could kill someone
From a distance.
So we go ahead,
And the meters are over in the red.
It’s a mistake we’ve made.

Hmm hmm hmm, hmm hmm hmm.
And the public are warned to stay off.

I was watching Kerrang the other day, as one does when there’s an urgent deadline looming. And I found myself watching and hugely enjoying a video of Muse performing Supermassive Black Hole.

It made me think about how many rock songs have explicitly SF and Fantasy content. There’s Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun, Bowie’s Space Oddity, Gorillaz’ Every Planet That We Reach is Dead (though I don’t quite get the lyrics), Genesis’s Lilywhite Lilith and Automatic’s Monster (both fantasy!), Blue Oyster Cult’s Astronomy, Bonnie Tyler’s Faster than the Speed of Light (does that count?) and a whole host of others.

This is clearly a subject that requires serious academic study, but rather than getting off my arse and doing that, I’m simply going to nominate my own personal favourite SFF song – from dinosaur rockers Deep Purple, whose song Space Truckin’ has enough SF content for a movie.

And over the next few weeks, I’m going to ask some friends to nominate their own suggestions for best SFF Song of the Week. So far I’ve got song choices from Tony Ballantyne, Alastair Reynolds, TV producer Archie Tait and several others. Watch this space…

Here’s Purple. Beware, this is 10 minutes of 1970s virtuosic and very loud insanity. Lyrics follow the clip.

We had a lot of luck on Venus
We always had a ball on Mars
Meeting all the groovey people
We’ve rocked the Milky Way so far
We’re dancing around the Borealis
We’re space truckin’ round the the stars
Come on let’s go Space Truckin’

Remember when we did the moonshot
And Pony Trekker led the way
We’d move to the Canaveral moonstop
And everynaut would dance and sway
We got music in our solar system
We’re space truckin’ round the stars
Come on let’s go Space Truckin’

The fireball that we rode was moving
But now we’ve got a new machine
Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah the freaks said
Man those cats can really swing
They got music in their solar system
They’ve rocked around the Milky Way
They dance around the Borealis
They’re Space Truckin’ everyday
Come on!