Smash hit

I don’t even know why it works! It wouldn’t even surprise me that much if I woke up one morning and someone said to me, ‘Hey, you know how the world was turning? Well, it’s stopped.’ Why wouldn’t it? That part of outer space. . . I love that, the way it’s full of mysteries.”

Equally mysterious to my child’s mind at the time (Coyne and I are the same age) was why the world around me seemed to change so drastically in the early 1980s — Watergate and the oil crisis had set the tone for what followed. Again, a musician, this time David Bowie, seemed to sum up the emotional shift more clearly than anyone else when he said: “For me and several of my friends, the 1970s were the start of the 20th century. It was Kubrick’s doing, on the whole, with 2001 and A Clockwork Orange. . . there was a distinct feeling that nothing was true any more and that the future was not as clear-cut as it had seemed. . . everything was up for grabs.”

Like the Grateful Dead, Moby Grape, Ringo Starr, Gyorgy Ligeti (with Lux Aeterna, a choral piece from 2001) and others, Bowie’s music provides as evocative a taste of that time as any other art form has to offer, so they followed me throughout my travels, springing surprises along the way.

A child of punk, I’d always thought I hated Zappa and the Dead, and the Appalachian folk music I heard everywhere in the southern and southwestern states of American, and grew to love profoundly.

At which point, it occurred to me that there had been a link between the space race and the counterculture all along. As Eric Hobsbawm has noted, the era from the mid-1950s to the oil crisis of 1973 constitutes the greatest period of economic expansion the world has ever seen, and these were two of the chief three ways America chose to spend its money (the other being the Vietnam war). The most potent symbols of that era had always seemed to me to be the white Fender Strat with which Jimi Hendrix skewered his national anthem at Woodstock and the Saturn V rocket that went to the moon — and it suddenly seemed clear that this wasn’t just a figment of my imagination. Music and the moon were flip sides of the same coin, emanations of a brief but colourful decade in which, to paraphrase John Updike, the chief question was not “Why?” but “Why not?”.

Moondust is released on May 11 by Heavenly/Virgin Records

Explore Music

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010