Space for Sputnik, is still the place to be. Their songs carefully explore space, not only thematically but also musically. Space always has been one of the most popular themes in popmusic (second only to love and maybe drugs, which as we will see are spacey anyway) but it is always based on a paradox. As we all point out knowingly during the booming space battles of Star Wars, sound does not exist in space, so how do you represent space in music? Before the hippies and the dub-producers of the Seventies the mysterious jazz musician Sun Ra (who actually claimed he was born on Saturn and incidentally once played in Moscow in celebration of Yuri Gagarin's space flight) had the answer: you create space between sounds. Sun Ra's rudimentary use of echo during the early sixties would be re-invented some eight years later to produce the same space-like quality that acid-groups craved for.

The explosion of space in music not only coincided with the eminent climax of the American Space program on July 21 1969, but also with a massive exploration of inner space courtesy of a new drugculture. Whadda ya know? After the dancing molecules when the white light explodes into infinity your little head contains something not unlike the vast expanses of the universe. And why not make some soundtracks to make those hyperdrives through the mind even more exciting? Enter hour-long versions of The Grateful Dead's "Dark Star" or the great hyperspace paeans like Pink Floyd's "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun", rolling drumscapes that eventually climax into an aural eclipse. Before long David Bowie invented himself as the first rockstar from space singing about lift-offs as drugtrips and wondering if there's life on mars.