Songs for the Bewildered: The Place Where We All Intend To Die
Back in the fun-stuffed, joy-filled, gloriously utopian days of the early 1980s, three things seemed sure and certain.
1) Nuclear Armageddon was imminent and inevitable. It was 2 minutes to midnight and jttery fingers hovered over red buttons. We were all fucked.
2) We'd soon be abandoning a borked earth and heading out into the cosmos on giant space arks. Possibly as a result of 1.
3) I'd wake, most days, to find myself caked and coated in drying urine.
All three were, I'm sure, related. Cold war politics, space opera, and my stinky wee. Key ingredients of a frazzled Zeitgeist.
It's my daughter's ongoing love affair with Bosco that has such thoughts fizzing about my brain-box. This afternoon we watched the episode where Frank Twomey returned from "the pictures" having viewed a Star Wars knock-off. He was jazzed. He was jizzed. He was excited. He wanted, he said, to build a spaceship and to head off, he said, into the depths of outer space. He, Marian and Bosco decided to sing a song that spoke of the thrills, spills and adventures that awaited them there. This is the result.
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Melancholia and poignancy absolutely drip from every flat, warbled note. Outer space suddenly doesn't sound anything like a jolly old…er…space where you'd whizz about in an X-Wing, chortling delightedly. It sounds deeply sad. And empty. A place of forced exile. A quality Marian captures upsettingly with the words…
"Past the moon,
And then soon,
We will wave the sun goodbye".
Yes, we will wave the sun goodbye as we squat in our tin-can ships gazing longingly back toward a long-disappeared earth. Tears streaming down faces half-lit by said sun's weakening rays. We're suddenly out here like Major Tom, spinning and floating and slowly asphyxiating. Mummy! I want to go home!
To make matters worse, Frank all but admits that space travel is, really, when you think about it, a metaphor for death.
"Outer Space,
Is the place,
Where we all intend to…fly".
There's a millisecond's pause between "to" and "fly" that inevitably invites the listener to jauntily sing "Where we all intend to…die!". You think subtleties like these were lost on young Bosco enthusiasts? Not a bit of it. There may have been a time, back in the giddy days of the 50s and 60s, when space seemed seductive. A place of boundless possibilities and off-world technological utopias. But by the time I was old enough to really consider such things, and worry about such things, and piss in the bed as an indirect result of such things, space just seemed horribly cold, weird and indifferent. A vast place where'd you'd lose your mind. Where you'd slowly suffocate or burn up on re-entry. Where you'd watch the tiny blue bauble of mother Earth vanish (forever) into the endlessly black distance. The place where we all intend to die.
Nobody (not even Kubrick, or Bowie, or Tarkovsky) articulated this space/death analogy as succinctly and movingly as Europe's beautiful Joey Tempest of course.
The mushroom clouds are rising. We're headed for Venus.1 The undiscovered planet, from whose bourn no traveller returns. It's game over, man. I'm off for a little cry. *Sob*2
- Snigger! [back]
- Actually, I'm off to the Irish Blog Awards in Belfast. I may see some of you there. [back]
March 18, 2011
11 responses to Songs for the Bewildered: The Place Where We All Intend To Die
Of all the words that rhyme with ‘seen us’ poor Joey picks the most inhospitable planet in the solar system. Them big-haired family-friendly euro-rockers woz doomed from the start.
Also of interest … A 1-page story Alan Moore did for StarLord or 2000ad in which a long-haul astronaut undergoes a nervous breakdown. The last panel reveals he’s been in a simulator for just a short time. Heady stuff for a 9 year old. Can’t find any trace of it online.
Well, exactly. This lends further weight to my theory that it’s really all about big, stinky DEATH. Joey and Co are travelling to a place that is utterly unlivable in. Even thinking about it makes me want to cry.
Though that “Maybe they’ve seen us” is tantalising. Who are “they”? Angels? A Venusian super-race that have been communicating directly with Joey through the chip in his permed head? The song holds on to its mysteries. Beautiful and terrible all at once.
As for the Alan Moore story, that’s just another spin on the “Aha! It was all happening in an alien zoo all the time!” twist that accounted for about 95 fucking percent of Tharg’s Future Shocks!
Your tears are a comfort, somehow.
Oh. Typing in the dark, I first wrote ‘your teats’ and freaked myself out a bit. Totes ew.
@Jo – To lighten the mood, and simultaneously join in the “your teats” bawdiness, I should point out that I can’t listen to the above Bosco song without guffawing (like a big man-child) at the words “interstellar ride”. Gets me every single time.
Though Marian was a ride. Of course.
Nothing whatever to do with interstellar travel, but I recently found your blog and love it and I just wanted to share that with you. Incidentally, for imminent-death-induced melancholia, nothing can beat Clive Dunn’s “Grandad”. It’d break your heart.
@Polly – Thanks! Very nice of you to say so. I’m (unfortunately) familiar with “Grandad”. Part of that same maudlin/reactionary wave that spawned other flat-cap (mortality) classics like “Matchstalk Men & Matchstalk Cats and Dogs”. Not so much breaking your heart as testing the strength of your stomach.
Fustar – In my head I know you’re right but my attachment to it is beyond the influence of either logic or taste. It was on an album called “All Aboard” that I played endlessly as a kid, so I’ve always had a soft spot for it. And a high tolerance for maudlin whinging, obviously.
Wonderful stuff, just stumbled across this. There’s also Megadeth’s dark challenge in 1990′s Rust in Peace album:
“Launch the Polaris
The end doesn’t scare us
When will this cease?
The warheads will all rust in peace”
The Soviet Union promptly collapsed and we avoided nuclear armageddon
Thanks, Shane. Rawk/Metal bands these days must curse the current lack of mushroom-cloud inspiration. Though there are, I’m sure, plenty of other things to be jittery about.