Why an obscure Bob Geldof song is The Greatest Song Ever Written
You know all about Bob Geldof, right? He’s a campaigner, he wants to feed the world, he doesn’t like Mondays. Perhaps you’ve already decided you don’t like him. He’s too earnest. You don’t like the way he manages his tax affairs. You cringe at his white saviour complex. He’s a hypocrite. But if you don’t like him, I’m sorry to tell you that you’re wrong. He may not be perfect, but neither, dear reader, are you. In the final reckoning, should one take place, his work from Live Aid to the last Ebola crisis will make clear that he’s saved lives in the hundreds of thousands. So, give him a break and keep reading.
I’m here to write about a song he wrote. In fact, it’s The Greatest Song Ever Written. Let’s see if I can stand that up.
I’m referring to the song ‘Thinking Voyager 2 Type Things’, an eight-minute masterpiece hiding away on Bob Geldof’s obscure and dreadfully named album ‘The Vegetarians of Love’, from 1990. The album was a flop, inching into the charts at 21 and then dropping straight back out again. If you’re conscious of any track from this album it would be ‘The Great Song of Indifference’, in which he takes the mickey out of his public persona, singing about how he doesn’t really mind if whole nations die. But more likely is that you don’t know anything about this album or this song, which I’ll remind you is The Greatest Song Ever Written.
So here it is:
Thinking Voyager 2 Type Things is a rumination on the smallness and brevity of our human existence, set against the unimaginable bigness of space and time. In other words, it’s about everything. The song begins with the tiniest moment of the creation of life, as proteins somehow sparked into existence, before throwing us nine billion miles away, as the cold metal of our own creation — the space probe Voyager 2 — hurtles onwards and away.
This is the moment that we come alive
I’m handing out the breath and the kiss
I’m electric with the snap and the crackle of creation
I’m mixing up the mud with the spit
So rise up Brendan Behan and like a drunken Lazarus
Let’s traipse the high bronze of the evening sky
Like crack crazed kings
Let me digress for a moment and talk about Voyager 2. I’ve been obsessed with this little space probe for many years. She was launched in August 1977, while I was still a babe in arms, on a mission to photograph the planets. A decade later, mission completed, she was flung out into the blackness, on a never-ending journey to who knows where. She recently left the heliosphere, beyond the energy of our sun, and is now in the unimaginable emptiness of interstellar space. She’s travelling at 16 kilometres per second, but in the vacuum of space she’ll feel perfectly still. Voyager 2 speaks to us today, with feeble radio signals as her nuclear battery nears exhaustion, but she’ll go quiet in a year or two.
Optimism was baked into the Voyager programme. NASA sent a gold disc along for the ride. The disc contains music, images and other information designed to show intelligent alien life the basics of life on earth. It also contained a map, showing the location of the sun in our Milky Way galaxy and the approximate time that the probe was launched, as measured by pulsars.
But it’s a doomed venture. Voyager 2 will swing through weak gravitational fields for billions of years, never reaching beyond our own back yard. Its first encounter with a neighbouring star will be in 40,000 years, when it will be 1.7 light years away — so nowhere near — the red dwarf star Ross 248. This in a galaxy of 400 billion stars, and a universe of 200 billion galaxies. Should alien life exist, only those just around the corner could ever stumble across Voyager 2 and its gold disc. Should that ever happen, humans are likely to be long dead.
And the pulsar map won’t work. Since Voyager 2 launched we’ve learned that pulsars aren’t stable enough to be a long term map back to Earth, and we’ve discovered billions more that complicate the map. The gold disc was brilliant, thoughtful and the most heroic failure I can bring to mind. So heroic that I tattooed it to my back.
But why am I labouring this description of Voyager 2, our small gestures and the vastness of space? Because with no religious faith to speak of, this is my profundity, this is my divine.
But back to the song.
Voyager 2 where are you now
Looking back at home and weeping
Cold and alone in the dark void
Winding down and bleeping
Ever dimmer ever thinner
Feebly cheeping in the solar winds
I’ll turn you up
Sail on sail on sail on
On past the howling storms
Through electric orange skies
And blinding methane rain
Sail on
I’ll turn you up
Bob’s thinking about his own mortality, “thinking it’s a cheap price that we pay for existence”, and he tells the story of a day with his wife.
Now we’re in Paris, in the ball gowns, in the high heels, in the snow
And we’re spinning round Versailles in a Volkswagen Beetle
That we’d hired for the day (at the cheap rate)
The room without the shower was cold again
“Are we already middle-aged”, she said
And I said “I feel nothing, I feel like a jelly-fish”,
“Maybe it’s the Portuguese Men-O-Pause”, she joked
And she laughed her brittle head
And we went back to bed
And I’ve been thinking about these things
I’ve been thinking about Voyager 2
And this is the moment that we come alive
The lyrics have moved from “thinking big things” — creation and the vastness of the universe — to the everyday banal reality of a car rental and chilly hotel room. For most of us the role of art is to do the same, but in reverse.
When Bob sings about his day out in Paris it’s so small, but pregnant with personal meaning. Because he’s famous, we know that his wife was famous too, and we know the bold contours of their relationship. We know he was married to Paula Yates, an effervescent, funny and flawed character quite different to Bob. We know she loved him, because she said so on TV. We know they had a glorious big family with eccentric baby names, because we saw it in magazines. But we also know that she left him, that it broke his heart, that her heart was then broken, and that she died.
Bob meant these lyrics to be a small, kitchen-sink contrast to his wonder at the universe, but they remind us of a huge personal tragedy. The everyday is no less profound.
But it’s a song. What does it sound like?
It sounds glorious.
It’s eight minutes of looping guitars, with no discernible chorus or middle eight, made rich by a Hammond organ. The guy on the organ is a famous session musician that played with Roxy Music, The Smiths, Elton John, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison and a dozen others. The rest of the band are hired hands from a group named the Penguin Café Orchestra. The sound they create is part folk music, part Philip Glass.
And it’s a cradle. A warm, musical cradle for a story that begins with the personal then soars to the far reaches of the universe. And if this isn’t The Greatest Song Ever Written, then I don’t know what is.