WWSotM: The Red Planet Blues

David Bowie never toured Mars [citation needed]...

Edgar Rice Burroughs sent John Carter to Mars several times, but due to time-skew John landed on a fictionalized planet where the women were strangely attractive...

Curiosity landed on the real Mars, or rather Curiosity landed on a Mars that is inhabited only by machines.  This Mars will cease to exist the moment a human sets foot on it.

However, to this day, no human has ever set foot on Mars.  There are good reasons for that.  One is that that human would probably not be coming back, another is that even getting there alive is really hard [citation needed].

It would also be very expensive, and you might say we have better things to spend our money on...  However, as long as we are limited only to Earth, we're vulnerable.  One decent sized rock falling out of the the sky and it is all over.

We're not quite ready to colonise Mars yet.

We really should be working on it more.

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The Red Planet Blues

Ziggy played guitar,
     jammin' good with Weird and Gilly...

There are no spiders
on Mars, spinning
in bone-cold canyons
to trap unwary space cadets.
There are no great domed cities, shining
pale in the brave red sunset. There are no get
of Edgar Rice Burroughs;
no green, six-limbed warriors
riding thoats or laying eggs
in odd moments
out there in the rusty desert. No Martians for the chronicler
to document their steady decline
after the Earthmen came.

Earthmen must come.
It is necessary.
Pick up the pickaxe.
Start digging a canal.

Releasing a single!

Or rather Hallam London, my musical collaborator, is releasing our song To the Sky, which we dedicate to David Bowie because, as often the case, we didn't realise quite what we had until it was gone.

As usual Hallam wrote the music and I provided the lyrics.  He also got other friends and professionals to contribute, see the bandcamp page for full credits...

This is the song I wrote about last week, explaining its creation story (no radioactive animals were involved, somebody may have fallen to Earth) and also see here for the lyrics.

Anyway, please enjoy the song and if you feel inspired to contribute a small sum to this enterprise, please buy it (for as little as 1€; for American friends 1€ is roughly $1.15 at today's prices...)

Please also share this song promiscuously.  You remember how Andy Warhol promised everybody 15 minutes of fame in the future?  Well it's been the future for over 15 years now and my fame still hasn't arrived...

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To the sky - artwork update

I have to start with a small version of the image, because that is what Facebook and other semantic content scrapers will pick up.  So that's the one on the left...  but I'll include a full sized version as well.

This is the cover which Julia Eichhorn has drawn to accompany Hallam's forthcoming single: To the sky

We now have a firm release date of "next week, as early as we can manage."

While I have your attention, let me leak a preview of the lyrics (below.)

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To the sky

(Lyrics by Ian Badcoe, Music by Hallam London)


Those were our days
we would space-walk in the park
I made you laugh
we kicked the grass
I didn't float home until the dark.

And you never grew cold

but you grew distant, never told me why.

I was a clown

said I'd be around

I was a fool to let you fly.

Got my space suit on...

I've got dotted arrows drawn upon the night
as the countdown runs
all the systems hum
I can follow arrows to the sky.

When the engines run...

I've got green lights right across the board

I locked everyone out,

but I do not doubt

and now it really seems

as if a man can touch the sky.

I lost those days

and how the vacuum's more complete

you are not there

not anywhere

that I can reach on aching feet.

I will not let it end

I've watched the wall clock since you're gone.

My head tilts back

to view the black

and you're a pale star in the dawn.

Got my space suit on...

I've got dotted arrows drawn upon the night
as the countdown runs
all the systems hum
I can follow arrows to the sky.

When the engines run...

I've got green lights right across the board

I locked everyone out,

but I do not doubt

but now...

Houston, I have a problem

it has to be there's love in outer space

but there is too much junk beyond the place

where all the blue turns black

and how can one man in his tiny can

have ever hoped....

I had a space suit on...

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(This is "Rock Music Description Language" again, verses on the left, choruses in the middle, break on the right...)

To the Sky...

You haven't heard much from me about my on-going collaboration with German Rock Musician Hallam London.  Partly this has been because we had a bit of a slow period (as documented here) and partly it has been because I've been busy changing my job, delivering the kid to/from University, saving the World from killer rhubarb (don't ask) etc etc.

Also another reason is I've been busy with the songs themselves.  Hallam and I just had an amazing six week burst of creativity during which we finished five songs.  (For a given value of finished, music production goes through many, many stages such as arrangement, performance, production, mixing etc etc...)

However, it is not of these songs that I wish to speak.

In January this year, David Bowie died.  Hallam and I were just starting a new song when we heard the news.  We had some cause for introspection.  We'd never discussed Bowie, but as you can imagine he was a formative influence for us both.  We thought about doing some sort of song as a tribute, and then we had to wrestle with the question of how hubristic that was.  After some soul searching, we realised that all of our music comes from a very Bowie place anyway: it's all about gender and sanity and slices of everyday or unusual lives; we're also frequently a bit SciFi; often trying to push some envelope or other; and as every song is very different, I think we're reinventing ourselves even faster than he did!

So anyway, we got on with the song.  Unusually we reversed of our usual way of working.  Hallam recorded the musical idea first, and I analysed the metrical structure of his "na naaa nah" place-holder lyrics.  Then I wrote a prototype chorus.

So far so good, but we had to decide what the song was about, and we kept cycling back to Bowie-like (Bowiesque?  Bowiesian?) ideas.  In the end we were drawn strongly to the ideas in Major Tom and Space Oddity—and who doesn't want a space launch in the middle their song?—and a love story, obviously...

And now it's finished.  It's partly a Bowie tribute, but obviously also has to stand as a song on its own.  Hallam has gone beyond the mere "teaser" quality of our previous releases with this one.  He's hired a great drummer, and an engineer to do the mixing and production.  He's currently finalising the artwork.

It's called To the Sky, and next week Hallam will release it as a single!

Yes, you do have to wait until then...  but in the meantime here's the play-list with our previous two teasers Anger Bob and Identity...

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And BONUS! a recording of The rain in certain car parks (yes I did call a song that).  This live recording isn't polished as Hallam's studio recordings, but it does have a live band and audience...

 

The man who ate the world

I found another poem that was inspired by David Bowie.  This time directly, as I wrote it while listening to The Man Who Sold the World on repeat play.

As a poem, at the time, I never quite felt that it worked.  It needed something more than I had been able to put into it...

...and so it languished.  Until last week's sad news set me off on an extended session of listening to David, which necessarily included TMWSTW, and that lead me back here: to, re-read this.

And it has a lot going for it.  It needed some tightening, tuning, polishing; and it's not perfect of course.  There's a visible weld down the middle.

However, all-in-all this is as good as it's going to get, and if there is a time for this one, the time is now.

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The man who ate the world

He eats.

He eats prawns, brawn, surf and turf
and lawn, and tiny-little handmade hors d'oeuvres
in fistfuls of a dozen.

It is Zen, a total focus, a mathematician's
locus of a point which moves
from plate to mouth. There's nothing else
of which he is aware.

He inhabits his moments with relish
especially in the topological sense: a manifold
whose destiny is to wrap itself round lobsters,
as many plates of fries, seasonal vegetables,
toast-and-pâté arrangements as it possibly can.

Bought his first café at twenty-one
soon angled on owning the pub next door.
The club was an obvious move;
had to take out a mobster or two
to get the hotel — OK a whole chain.

Then it made sense to own his suppliers,
and the logistics people were for hire
and then sale.

It's a long walk, from talk of serving scampi
in a small town, to wheeling deals in front of—
and behind—entire governments
but he got here.

And still he eats:
genocide by chocolate, wonton soup,
coffee liquors, the cheeseboard,
a smorgasbord of goujons
and don't spare the ribs.

This is his way:
conspicuous consumption, the working luncheon,
in places appointed for filling faces, and he's the big man,
the master of this race: the suited, the college recruited,
plutocrats, the freshly commuted; all round and shiny
little parasites, who cling limpet-like
to unreliable accounts at anyone's expense—

until today
when one of them mentioned
a small South-American country
that's up for sale.

The Red Planet Blues

 

Not exactly about David Bowie.  Not exactly not about David Bowie either.

If we've learned anything, it is:

1. embrace the ambiguity
2. reach for the future
3. never stop reinventing yourself.

Iain Banks wrote in Excession of the Zetetic Elench a faction split from The Culture who believe in investigating the Universe by allowing themselves to be actively transformed by the beings and cultures they meet.  The Elencher ideal is that if a member of another advanced civilisation, say The Culture, were to meet a member of the Elench twice, they would have no way of knowing it was the same individual.

Does that sound at all familiar?

OK, enough waffle, on with the poem that isn't about David Bowie.  I must have others that aren't about him either, but this is the one I remembered just now.

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The Red Planet Blues

Ziggy played guitar,
     jammin' good with Weird and Gilly...

There are no spiders
on Mars, spinning
in bone-cold canyons
to trap unwary space cadets.
There are no great domed cities, shining
pale in the brave red sunset. There are no get
of Edgar Rice burrows;
no green, six-armed warriors
riding thoats or laying eggs
in odd moments
out there in the rusty desert. No Martians for the chronicler
to document their steady decline
after the Earthmen came.

Earthmen must come.
It is necessary.
Pick up the pickaxe.
Start digging a canal.