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The space race left its mark on Western society in almost every way. Where I grew up, there was a whole segment of our suburb with streets named after planets. The same forgotten town planner, I presume, named all the streets of another nearby development after real-life spacecraft. Even the supermarket had a zippy little rocket stuck to its facade.
Even before JFK launched the race for the moon in 1962, the post-war West was infatuated with the seemingly brave new world the atom and the rocket had opened up. By the 1950s, even the humble petrol station could look like a set for The Jetsons. Las Vegas capitalised on ‘atomic tourism’ where, after a few drinks and bets, visitors could drive out to the desert to watch the sky light up as the latest test bomb was detonated. There was even futuristic Space City development mooted in Alabama.
One largely forgotten facet of the space boom of the middle 20th century was its effect on popular music. Before rock’n’roll and long before psychedelia, there was ‘space-age music’. While its characteristic sounds could be said to date back to Gustav Holst’s “Neptune the Mystic” from The Planets suite of 1917, the genre didn’t really boom until after the bomb.
The world changed immeasurably after 1945, for good and bad. The same conflict that birthed the atom bomb also spurred innumerable other technological developments, from radar to meteorology (as high-altitude bombers confirmed the existence of jet streams). As Carl Sagan’s Contact shows, the earliest television broadcasts to leave Earth was a 1935 speech by Hitler at the Berlin Olympics. The Germans, fiendishly clever chaps that they were, also made far-reaching advances in sound-recording technology.
As astounded Allies monitoring Nazi propaganda broadcasts realised, German radio stations were broadcasting high-quality music and speeches around the clock. In Britain and America this was only possible with live orchestras or speakers. The explanation turned out to be magnetic tape. The Germans had perfected a recording medium that could capture sound with startling fidelity and allow it to be edited and replayed. When American soldiers and engineers encountered the technology, they brought it home and began experimenting.
At the same time, the atomic age was being sold to the public as both wonder and threat. The bomb had ended the war, but it also created a new and permanent anxiety. Governments tried to balance the fear with promises of peaceful atomic power that would generate electricity too cheap to meter and transform medicine and agriculture. The imagery of the atom appeared on everything from toasters to the covers of popular records. There was even a mind-boggling children’s toy from the manufacturer of the Erector set, the Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab. Yes, it included genuine radioactive material, long before plutonium became “available at every corner drugstore”, as Back to the Future’s “Doc” Brown (Christopher Lloyd) predicted.
The space race that followed carried the same mixture of excitement and unease. Rockets promised moon colonies and interplanetary travel, yet they also carried the possibility of nuclear missiles. It was an era that wanted both reassurance and a sense of the future arriving at speed.
Using the array of new technologies, from high-quality magnetic tape to the theremin, popular music responded in its own way. The result was a wild melange of jazz, lounge music, South Seas kitsch and futuristic electronic sounds dubbed space-age music. Imagine the soundtrack to a movie featuring Dean Martin in a well-tailored spacesuit sipping a cocktail with Barbarella.
One early and influential example was the 1947 album Music Out of the Moon, featuring the theremin played by Dr Samuel Hoffman, a podiatrist who performed with the eerie instrument in his spare time. The theremin, an electronic instrument controlled without being touched, became one of the signature sounds of what would later be called space-age music. The record combined a wordless choir, Latin rhythms, a full jazz orchestra with harp and the otherworldly theremin floating above it all. It was at once lush and unsettling, an early attempt to give musical shape to the new technological age. Scantily clad space hula girls on the cover no doubt helped sales.
The album was more than a curiosity. It helped set in motion several overlapping styles. One was straightforward mood music: the vast catalogue of “Music for…” records that appeared in the late 1940s and 1950s. These were not albums you sat down to listen to with full attention. They were designed as background, to match the new suburban lifestyle of hi-fi consoles, cocktail cabinets and wall-to-wall carpet. There was music for dreaming, for romancing, for rainy nights, for working or studying – and even music to help you stop smoking. Jackie Gleason released dozens of them, dictating arrangements in characteristically blunt terms. The music was often interchangeable, but that was part of the point. It turned recorded sound into something closer to interior decoration.
A more colourful offshoot was exotica. Composers such as Les Baxter and Martin Denny took the space-age interest in the exotic and the futuristic and applied it to imagined versions of the South Pacific, Asia and Latin America. Baxter’s work with the Peruvian singer Yma Sumac on Voice of the Xtabay combined her extraordinary vocal range with lush, dramatic arrangements. Martin Denny added bird calls, unusual percussion and a deliberately dreamy atmosphere that became the soundtrack to the tiki bar craze. These records were never meant to be authentic field recordings. They were fantasies: condensed versions of distant places filtered through mid-century American tastes. They sold the idea of escape and mystery at a time when many people were settling into new suburbs and new routines.
Technical experimentation ran alongside the stylistic playfulness. Composers began using prepared pianos, contact microphones, tape manipulation and early synthesisers. Arthur Ferrante and Louis Teicher stuffed objects into piano strings to create strange, percussive effects. The Electro-Sonic Orchestra placed microphones directly on instruments to give engineers greater control over the final mix. In Europe, the musique concrète movement and its German counterparts were already treating recorded sound as raw material to be reshaped. Much of this remained academic until it filtered into more commercial records. Dutch composers working at Philips Electronics produced what is often regarded as the first electronic pop album, while British producer Joe Meek applied radical studio techniques to everything from surf-influenced instrumentals to space-themed concept records.
By the early 1960s, the various strands were beginning to merge. One of the most satisfying late examples was Moon Gas by Dick Hyman and Mary Mayo, which blended jazz piano with early electronic keyboards and an ethereal vocal style. It felt like a natural culmination of the space-age impulse: sophisticated, slightly otherworldly and still rooted in melody and performance rather than pure abstraction.
The style did not survive the cultural shifts of the mid-1960s. The British Invasion and the rise of Motown placed new emphasis on bands, singers and a sense of authenticity. Mood music and exotica began to sound old-fashioned, even kitsch. Still, the 1969 British SF film Moon Zero Two theme combined space-age style with Shirley Bassey-influenced soul vocals, but the accompanying animated credits made it all seem a bit of a dad joke. Otherwise, the space-age composers largely stepped back as audiences turned towards music that felt more immediate and less obviously produced.
Yet the influence lingered. The same spirit of studio experimentation and the blending of acoustic and electronic sounds reappeared in the Moog records of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and later in the ambient and new age genres. Even by the dawn of the 1980s, the B-52s tipped their beehives to the era, with songs like “There’s a Moon in the Sky (Called the Moon)”, on their 1979 self-titled debut album.
What had begun as an attempt to give musical form to the atomic and space ages had quietly helped open the door to the electronic music that would dominate later decades.
Looking back, the space-age music of the 1950s and early 1960s feels like a genuine product of its moment. It was optimistic without being naïve, experimental without losing its sense of melody and willing to treat technology as something that could be beautiful as well as unsettling. In an age that was both exhilarated and anxious about the future, these records offered a soundtrack that acknowledged both feelings. They may have been easy to dismiss later as background music or bachelor-pad kitsch, but they captured something real about the way a generation tried to make sense of a world that suddenly seemed much larger and stranger than before.
Besides, where else would you get album covers this raunchy, in 1958? The Good Oil.
