Neil Armstrong’s giant leap came at a time of grim realities — Biafra, Altamont, the Manson killings — back here on Earth. No 1 at the time was Thunderclap Newman’s insurrectionary Something in the Air, but in the wake of the Moon landing came Zager & Evans’s apocalyptic vision of life In the Year 2525 and David Bowie’s breakthrough hit Space Oddity. Prior to 1969, when pop dealt with outer space, it tended to be one degree less plausible than Flash Gordon — even the superhip Byrds reduced the mysteries of space to squeaky alien smurf voices on CTA 102.

The Apollo 11 mission changed all that; space travel was now a matter of gravitas. Maybe it was the blank spacesuits, the eerie static crackle of Armstrong’s voice, but Bowie’s hit set the tone for a bunch of hits — a mixture of futurism, awe, and the lyrics that contemplated how the average Joe would deal with life in the space age. Elton John’s Rocket Man (“And all this science, I don’t understand”) took this to an extreme, while Bowie (Moonage Daydream) and Marc Bolan (Spaceball Ricochet) suffused Glam with interstellar imagery. It was all slightly dark; we were living in the shadow of the Moon, and the rest of the universe, pop assumed, was all set to open up for us .A more subtle but longer lasting influence of the Moon landing was the purely sonic evocation of space that took hold in the early Seventies. Hawkwind were the kings of space rock, guitars and primitive synths powering their rockets through albums such as Space Ritual — you could surely feel the G-force on their lone hit single, the hard-driving Silver Machine. Down the line Spacemen 3 stretched the sound out further still in the Eighties, while Detroit created a whole new Space Rock scene in the Nineties, with groups such as Mahogany and Fuxa taking long, dead slow, noisy jams out into orbit.It’s surely no coincidence that the influence of electronica on pop went hand in hand with the Moon landing. Space Oddity prominently featured the Stylophone, which may have sounded like little more than a jazzed-up comb and paper but it became the must-have in 1969. It looked and sounded like the future, and a generation of kids who received them were buying Korgs and Moogs ten years later.

By the time Star Wars made the cinemas in 1977, electronic music and space travel were synonymous: Magic Fly, by the bluntly named French group Space, took space-pop on to the dance floor that autumn. Disco’s eyes-closed hedonism saw a bright future of Supernature and Starship Troopers, while Marvin Gaye dreamt of cosmic sexual encounters on A Funky Space Reincarnation. The paranoia of Rocket Man had been replaced by a sense of weightlessness on songs such as Slick’s ethereal Space Bass, while Atmosfear’s squelchy Dancing in Outer Space evoked glitter boots attempting to combat zero gravity.

When electro emerged in the early Eighties, with its alien use of the vocoder, relentless machine-driven beats and deep, deep echoes, it appropriated space travel wholesale. It was lapped up by pre-teens. Electro acts such as Planet Patrol and the spacesuit-clad Jonzun Crew (key record: Space is the Place) made intergalactic travel something kids aspired to once again.

The clean future dream of hanging out on the Moon, in reality as in pop, came to an abrupt end in January 1986 with the space shuttle disaster. No one in the early 21st century sings about dancing in outer space, let alone colonising Jupiter and Mars. Pop seems more earthbound, less awestruck and slightly diminished as a result.

“You know I wanted to be a spaceman That’s what I wanted to be But now that I am a spaceman Nobody cares about me” Spaceman Harry Nilsson

“Space is dark, it is so endless, when you’re lost it’s so relentless” Space is Deep Hawkwind “Away we steal in a spacemobile A supersonic honeymoon Leave your cares below Pull the switch, let’s go!” Destination Moon Dinah Washington “Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On Jupiter and Mars” Fly Me To The Moon Frank Sinatra “Giant steps are what you take Walking on the moon I hope my legs don’t break Walking on the moon” Walking On The Moon The Police

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