This had a space theme, featuring some of their most memorable songs. This is a live favourite.
Gagarin features the words of Yuri Gagarin himself as he did his first space walk and saw the Earth from space.
What beauty. I saw clouds and their light shadows on the distant dear earth.... The water looked like darkish, slightly gleaming spots.... When I watched the horizon, I saw the abrupt, contrasting transition from the earth's light-colored surface to the absolutely black sky. I enjoyed the rich color spectrum of the earth. It is surrounded by a light blue aureole that gradually darkens, becoming turquiose, dark blue, violet, and finally coal black.
This is the track named after him:
June saw the passing of the great Chris Squire. I had the pleasure of seeing him play live a number of times with Yes in various incarnations.... and his Rickenbacker tone was legendary.
Here's a classic bass line... from 1983 when Yes 'reinvented' themselves...
I remember this playing in the Dickens Inn in Rotherham... a classic pub much missed...
There were lots of musical myths about this place, but it also hosted some excellent musicians. This was our pub of choice in the early 80s
The Dickens at Westgate was a popular meeting place in the 70s and 80s and attracted such legendary performers as Joe Cocker, Frank White, Def Leppard and Saxon.
The Apollo astronauts (and those who came before and after) have enjoyed views of the Earth that very few have seen. We are also waiting for the ARTEMIS mission. It's been a while coming.
The early Apollo missions were very popular as TV spectacles, although over time, there was less interest - Apollo 13 brought the audiences back for a while, but perhaps for the wrong reasons. The Space Shuttle programme also had its moments, but also some disasters.
The Apollo programme has also influenced other musicians. Mike Oldfield's 'Space Movie' album remixed some of this themes from other albums.
How might Life On Mars? have been inspired by BBC controversy?
Spoiler alert: Life On Mars? isn’t really about Mars! It was actually about escaping from the perceived banality of suburban life to search for other, hopefully more interesting places.
'Life On Mars?' presents a cynical perspective about such aspiration, with acerbic views on the American Dream ‘It's on America's tortured brow; That Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow’ and the impact of mass tourism on destinations: ‘See the mice in their million hordes; From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads.’
Why did David Bowie pick on tourism and why these particular places?
It seems that he was influenced by a high profile BBC television programme of the time called 'Holiday', which was launched in 1969.
David Bowie’s real name was David Jones.
Born in south London in 1947, he was in the vanguard of the 'baby-boomers', the generation born between 1945 and 1965. This demographic tsunami became a key driver for change in music, fashion and demand for consumer goods and services including tourism.
The young David Jones was a bit of a trend setter, making his first TV appearance in 1964 at the age of 17 in an interview with Cliff Michelmore who at that time was one of the best-known personalities in the UK. Michelmore anchored the popular BBC current affairs programme 'Tonight' which ran a report about the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men, recently founded by David Jones and a few of his friends.
Less than four years later in 1969, at the height of the Space Race, David Bowie wrote 'Space Oddity'.
The title of the song was a pun inspired by the 1968 Stanley Kubrick movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Apollo 8 mission which took the first human beings around the Moon at Christmas 1968.
In July 1969 'Space Oddity' was rush-released as a single to coincide with the Apollo 11 mission which took human beings to walk on the Moon for the first time.
The song gained further profile when it was used by the BBC as background music during their coverage of the key moon landings which were coincidentally anchored by the omnipresent BBC stalwart Cliff Michelmore.
Also in 1969, the BBC launched a lifestyle consumer series called 'Holiday 69' (later shortened to just 'Holiday') on the 2nd of January, providing viewers with an audio-visual respite from the depths of the British winter.
Yet again, it was anchored by his 1964 interviewer Cliff Michelmore.
The programme was extremely successful, running for 38 years until 2007, becoming the longest running travel series on UK television, with Michelmore leading the presentation until 1986. Such programmes would regularly attract millions of viewers, at a time when there were only three TV channels to watch in the UK until 1982 and no satellite TV or Internet.
'Holiday' offered viewers vicarious experiences of tourist destinations which at the time were just becoming attainable as places of escape. As Michelmore reflected later ‘it was a bit of sunshine in the middle of the winter, even though it was in black and white!’.
More recently, the BBC has courted controversy when presenters express opinions about current affairs, attracting accusations of bias, but such incidents are nothing new.
The very first Holiday programme attracted international criticism when Cliff Michelmore reported about sewage on beaches in Ibiza and referred to it as 'this septic isle'.
David Bowie would probably have been aware of the Holiday programme and the controversy over the Ibiza coverage. So it’s no coincidence that he chose Ibiza and the Norfolk Broads to reference as places of escape.
The programme would also have attracted David Bowie's attention because the theme music used was 'The Castle' by the US American psychedelic rock band Love, taken from their 1966 album Da Capo. Love was led by Arthur Lee, who was an influence on Bowie's early work.
Further details about the geographical places linked to Life On Mars? are available in a story map created using ArcGIS Online:
The original theme tune for the series was Love's "The Castle". Subsequent theme tunes in the mid-1970s included Hugo Montenegro's arrangement of Lalo Schifrin's theme to the 1968 movie 'The Fox', a cover of the Beatles song "Here Comes the Sun", and Part One of Jean Michel Jarre's Equinoxe.
Gordon Giltrap's "Heartsong" was used as a theme tune from 1978 until the end of the 1985 series.
This is the one I remember the best.
In 1986 it was replaced with "The Holiday Suite" written by Simon May, who also composed the EastEnders theme. This proved unpopular, and was replaced on Holiday '87 by a further Giltrap composition "Breaking Free" which also only lasted one year. For Holiday '88-'91 they used a third Giltrap composition "Holiday Romance".
In 1992 Paul Hardcastle composed a new theme, titled "Voyager". This theme was used throughout the 1990s and 2000s until the programme came to an end after 37 years in 2007.
