Musicians have stared into the void and pondered space and the Moon since the first notes were sung. But space travel didn’t come to prominence in music until the late 1940s when the availability of electronic instruments led to a burgeoning of space-themed albums, including plinky-ponky pseudo-classical gems such as Les Baxter’s Music Out of the Moon, and Impressions of Outer Space by Larry Elgart.

This sound workshop approach found mainstream success in 1962 with Telstar by the Tornados, the first British group to top the charts in the US. Joe Meek produced it in a self-built studio on Holloway Road, North London. The former electricity board worker had assembled all kinds of gadgets to create the sound that became the template of “space age”.

Throughout the 1960s the space race seeped into popular culture. David Bowie conjured astral dreaminess in Space Oddity, the Byrds proffered Mr Spaceman, while Gil Scott-Heron argued that money would be better invested on Earth in Whitey’s on the Moon.

By the early 1970s, bands such as Pink Floyd and Hawkwind melded musical and visual elements into “space rock”. This meant repetitive and loud guitars to replicate the throbbing of the engines, followed by gentle synthesiser codas to mark the vastness of outer space.

The genre has spawned galaxies of songs but one of the most peculiar is the Carpenters’ 1977 single Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft, launched into a cultural world supposedly in the urban, ultra-real snarl of New Wave. It remains the official anthem of World Contact Day.

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