Welcome to the the official sports pages of electronic music. Going where no man has gone before, eh? If he’s not careful our unhinged columnist will be queuing up where lots of people have been before – the dole office
Hello electronic sound readers kkkzzzzk phrrrrzzzzz i am on the moon fzzzzzzt crrracckle kfffffrpt i am typing with my moon typewriter on top of a massive crater made of moon chhzzzktzzzz ffffzzztttcccssssh kkzzzttttt hold on let me adjust this moon antennae to get a better moon reception.
Hello, Earth. This is the first magazine column written on the surface of the Moon. I’m typing in slow motion because that’s how everyone moves here. I’m wearing one of those big astronaut onesies off the telly, y’know, the suit with hoover pipes and fishbowls for heads. What was that old song? ‘Everyone’s Gone To The Moon’. What a belching gust of bum burps: there’s no one else here. It’s like off-season at Rhyl waterpark without the discarded condoms. All I can see on this fetid ballsack of stone are craters and dust: there’s not even a newsagent. If I can’t find anywhere to buy an Irn Bru, I’m kicking off.
The Moon is seen as romantic, like a box of discounted chocolates or a dog humping your face during your afternoon nap. I once had a hot date by the soft light of the Moon. By “hot date” I mean “a fumble in some bushes with a postman”. And by “bushes” I mean “the garden peas freezer in Carlisle Asda”. Now I come to think of it, it was a fly-encrusted strip light and not the Moon, but the point stands: when people think about the Moon, they get all moist and write drippy songs about it. ‘Blue Moon’ is about how much the full moon would swear on seeing how fat it is. Echo & The Bunnymen wrote an astronomical murder ballad called ‘The Killing Moon’, which I can only imagine is a song about Cluedo in space. And French knob-fiddlers Air invited us to a ‘Moon Safari’ – an entirely pointless exercise because there are no lions or giraffes on the Moon let alone monkey-themed tea shops.
The musical kings of the Moon, apart from all the other people who did lunar tunes such as Dave Bowie and Michael Oldfield and Savage Garden, is Pink Floyd. They made a whole Moon album, although they’re crap at drawing circles so the moon on the cover looks like a triangle. They invented techno by using their synth’s “helicopter” preset for ‘On The Run’. Aaaaaaargh. Sorry, I just fell down a crater. I’m getting no pleasure writing on the Moon, by the way: my typewriter ink keeps running out because the gravity’s buggered.
So why are we even doing this? Why did Electronic Sound send me as far away from their offices as possible? Because the Moon is 50 years old today. Happy birthday, Moon! Time for a history lesson. Nothing good was invented 50 years ago: wires were made of corrugated iron although iron wasn’t invented yet so they had to use mud. It’s incredible to think that the Hammersmith Apollo 11, which was the original shuttlecock that put Lance Armstrong on the Moon, contained fewer electronics than Kraftwerk’s live set. To launch a rocket in 1969, they just taped some bins together and put it on some fire. Wouldn’t it be amazing to go back in time and offer those old spaceflyers the benefits of our modern technology: microprocessors, cloud storage, those egg slicer things like look like miniature sandwich toasters. They’d have gone way further than the stupid Moon: in 1969, if you’d strapped a Roomba to a Nintendo DS, you’d have bounced off Uranus fffssst crrkkkkzzzt sorry i’m losing you fzzzppppfffrt kzzzzzzz chkchrrkxxx hello? hello? zhhzzzkfffffft pzzzzxxxzzt damn these lead-lined craters click
