A former friend of mine, as he descended deeper into a fantasy world which was either delusional or border personality disorder, once confided to a mutual friend that his intention was to go into space.
This is the problem we will find with all those people who sit on the couch watching Star Trek or Doctor Who til all hours of the night. They dream of being astronauts without thinking of the sacrifices real astronauts would make.
Space tourism is a real thing now, with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos overtaking Richard Branson in the pioneering of this field. Within reason, anyone with sufficient wealth can stump up the cash for a ticket to the most expensive amusement park ride in history.
It is a bit like the Concorde’s regular transatlantic flights at Mach 2. You could sit in the comfort of First Class and follow the path first flown by Charles Lindbergh five decades earlier, at a speed first flown by Chuck Yeager three decades earlier.
Space tourism, whilst not so comfortable as Concorde, could make someone imagine that they are going where no man had gone before, not all that many years ago. You can follow brave pilots like Gagarin or Shepherd or Glenn into space.
But following those pioneers does not make one a hero, just a wealthy passenger. I do not think that my former friend realised that, nor that his morbidly obese BMI (somewhere over 50) would probably prevent his riding on anything smaller than a long retired Saturn V moon rocket, nor that he would never have the ready cash, regardless of the fantasy world where he believed so earnestly that he would that he briefly obtained a Jaguar on credit.
It was only last year that I finally listened in its entirely to David Bowie’s classic 1972 album Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars, an early archetype of the concept album, themed around a musically gifted alien from space. Such is the miracle of streaming services that I have most albums ever recorded at my finger tips to play through my blue tooth speaker (as Adam Ant would say: The Devil take your stereo and your record collection).
Quite definitely, it was a mind blowing record, one of those examples where the sum (like Aeschylus’ extant Oresteian trilogy – the sole surviving entire trilogy of Greek Tragedies) is greater than the parts.
Last month, one idle evening whilst sipping wine with a friend, I put a similar but inferior album to the test for the first time – Babylon Zoo’s The Boy with the X-ray Eyes. Babylon Zoo are most famed for being a one hit wonder in the mid 1990s with the song Spaceman from that album, after which they sank without a trace.
It occurred to me that Babylon Zoo had a very Ziggy Stardust feel to their music, and indeed when following up on this online found that I was not the first person to say this. Indeed, the past thirty years have had just about all of the few people who have commented (mostly unfavourably) about Babylon Zoo’s debut album have compared it to Ziggy Stardust.
I suppose, just like my former friend who wanted to follow Gagarin and Captain Kirk into space, Babylon Zoo wanted to burst into song on the soundwaves first ridden by Bowie. But at least Babylon Zoo gave us one fun song.
Lost For Words! 