Hallo Spaceboy

Written by: David Bowie, Brian Eno
Recorded: summer 1994; 17, 18 January 1995
Producers: David Bowie, Brian Eno, David Richards

Released: 25 September 1995

Available on:
1.Outside
No Trendy Réchauffé (Live Birmingham 95)
liveandwell.com
Look At The Moon! (Live Phoenix Festival 97)
Glastonbury 2000
BBC Radio Theatre, London June 2000
A Reality Tour
Nothing Has Changed
Legacy
Moonage Daydream

Personnel

Credited to David Bowie and Brian Eno, ‘Hallo Spaceboy’ was the third single released from the 1.Outside album. It was remixed by Pet Shop Boys with additional lyrics referencing Major Tom from 1969’s ‘Space Oddity’.

I adore that track. In my mind, it was like Jim Morrison meets industrial. When I heard it back, I thought, ‘Fuck me. It’s like metal Doors.’ It’s an extraordinary sound.

In 1994, Reeves Gabrels and Bowie spent a month together in Montreux, Switzerland, creating various pieces of additional music for the Leon project, which later became 1.Outside.

One afternoon, near the end of that month-long stay in Switzerland, I wrote an ambient piece which David then recited the words ‘moon dust…’ etc over. The words were from a poem written by a poet whose name escapes me (might be John Giorno), but David was reading that poem when I re-entered the control room after recording some of what became the ‘Moondust’ track. At that point he decided adding that to my idea.

The writer Gabrels was attempting to recall was, in fact, Brion Gysin, a poet, painter, filmmaker, musician, and inventor of the cut-up creative method famously put to extensive use by Bowie and writer William Burroughs.

In the studio, Bowie spoke the line “If I fall, moondust will cover me”. Although unused in the 1.Outside mix, it was included in the introduction of the Pet Shop Boys remix. The phrase, sometimes said to be Gysin’s last words, was in fact adapted from a line from Gysin’s 1969 novel The Process: “a familiar indigo rag flutters out of the sand where I look for my guide to find him, too, buried in moondust.”

1.Outside, subtitled The Nathan Adler Diaries: A Hyper-cycle, is a murder mystery involving various dystopian characters on the cusp of the 21st century. ‘Hallo Spaceboy’, however, bears little relation to the core concept, and is perhaps best seen as the equivalent of ‘Starman’ on the similarly-loosely conceptual The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars.

There’s an emotional engine created by the juxtaposition of the musical texture and the lyrics. But that’s probably what art does best: it manifests that which is impossible to articulate.