Credit: Far Out / Raph Pour-Hashemi
Sun 2 August 2026 20:45, UK
While there is plenty of music out there you could describe as being ‘out of this world’, the term applies more literally to the songs that were included on the famous Voyager Golden Record and shipped out to space.
Ranging from traditional music from across the world through to classical pieces, such as Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Spring’ and Beethoven’s ‘Symphony No 5’, and more contemporary pieces by Chuck Berry and Blind Willie Johnson, the music was selected to communicate the human spirit, sense of creativity, emotional expression and culture to anyone else who may have developed both the capacity to hear and the technology to play the 12”, gold-plated copper disc at 16 and 2/3 revolutions per minute.
It’s not just NASA, but musicians have always been pretty invested in the ‘Space Race’, as well. Sinatra asked that we might fly him to the moon, let him play among the stars, while Elton John told us of a Rocket Man. More recently, Weyes Blood has sung about ‘Andromeda’, and Metronomy told us that “I’m Aquarius”.
And you can’t forget ‘Telstar’ by The Tornados; it might be an instrumental, but you just take one listen and tell me that it isn’t a song about space.
Instrumental in making that non-lyric piece of music was Joe Meek, who had previously put together an entire album in 1959 that conceptualised what the worlds were like beyond our own planets outer-limits. In the ‘50s, there were an extra-terrestrial amount of songs about space: ‘Flying Saucers Rock ‘n’ Roll’ by Billy Lee Riley, ‘The Little Space Girl’ from Jesse Lee Turner, ‘Flying Saucer Boogie’ by Eddie Cletro & His Roundup Boys and ‘Planetary Run’ by Joe Montgomery, even ‘Rocket 88’, which was actually about a car, felt like it belonged somewhere further out beyond the stars.
But maybe no other musician has ever been as closely associated with alien life and other worlds as David Bowie. In ‘Space Oddity’, ‘Life on Mars’, ‘Starman’, ‘Moonage Daydream’, ‘Loving the Alien’ and ‘Hallo Spaceboy’, among others, he returned to the vast expanse of possibilities beyond the planet for inspiration time and time again, and even explained that the origins of his Ziggy Stardust character were not of this world. And Ziggy wasn’t his last extraterrestrial character, either, as Bowie went on to play the leading alien in the 1976 Nicolas Roeg film, The Man Who Fell to Earth.
And Def Leppard frontman Joe Walsh thinks that Ziggy Stardust should have been sent back to his own planet when Nasa were compiling their Voyager Golden Record (which incidentally, looked a little something like the little golden forehead patches Bowie sometimes wore when playing the Ziggy character on tour).
Further reading: From The Vault
“Ziggy was an incredibly cheap album, but an incredibly important one,” Elliott said in 2022, “Next time they send one of those things into space, Ziggy should be on it, not Chuck Berry, anyone but Chuck Berry.”
But here’s the problem with that. Ziggy Stardust was already an alien. Anyone listening out in space presumably already knows all about his experience, his feelings, culture and skimpy outfits. Chuck Berry was selected for inclusion on the Voyager Golden Record not only because his music is better and more important than David Bowie’s, but because it does more to whoever is out there about the experience of being a human being.
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