Echo & The Bunnymen to Kill Actual Moon with Killing Moon
Okay, so early new-wave rockers Echo & The Bunnymen only made it up to #9 with their seminal album Ocean Rain. And only on the UK Charts. With only one hit single. And they were never really all that popular in the US. I guess none of that matters to NASA astronaut Timothy Kopra — who, if his favorite album since 1984 is the sad, gloomy Ocean Rain, he’s gotta be one super-fun guy to be have around the hyperbaric chamber.
The band has acknowledged that they were recently contacted by Kopra to inform them that he’d chosen the album to take into space with him during NASA’s next visit to the International Space Station.
“Now it’s official. We are the coolest band in the universe,” said Bunnymen frontman Ian McCulloch in a released statement. “As a kid I dreamt of being an astronaut, and now in a way it feels like I’m fulfilling that dream.”
This isn’t the first time NASA personnel have taken their own favorites into the cosmos – the last flight of the space shuttle Discovery contained a piece of sheet music for Beethoven’s Ode to Joy and the lightsaber used by Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars.
All of this raises a good question — do we need to be careful with what we take into space? On one hand, the 1985 Joe Dante film Explorers featured a group of aliens who’d been feeding off our television feeds since the early 1950′s. So they knew a little something. But then we have 1984′s Jeff Bridges vehicle Starman, and that guy didn’t know shit about the earth. He didn’t even know how to eat eggs properly.
All we can do is pray that when we are invaded, our fate isn’t sealed by smudged mascara and a thick Liverpool accent. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m going to start boning up on my Ocean Rain today. And when the attackers come, and only those lyrics are able to save me from a lifetime of working in the slave mines, you guys are all going to wish you’d listened to me more. You’ll see. You’ll all see.
Link: Echo & The Bunnymen’s “Ocean Rain” Headed to Space (Billboard)
