“So that’s exactly what I did with it and it’s one of my favorite points in my live set - because not only do I get to remind the audience of one of the greatest writing partnerships ever, I get to remind myself why I love Elton’s music so much, and how I felt at 14 hearing him live for the first time.” “Listening to it growing up when I was getting into country music, I always thought ‘This could be a great country song,’” she explains. “ was the very first live show I ever saw when I was 14, and that was what made me go ‘Oh my god, I want to do this for a living.’ ‘Rocket Man’ is such a colossal hit and it displays perfectly everything that is genius and brilliant about Elton and Bernie’s songwriting, which is why I wanted to cover this one in particular. “Elton John for me has always been king,” Oakes says. “Rocket Man” is also a staple in the live set of Liverpool-born country singer-songwriter Laura Oakes, twice named the British Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year. The irony would not have been lost on Elton, who himself played on some albums in that series in his pre-fame years of the late 1960s.Įlectro-pop pioneers Heaven 17 gave the song a distinctive update for the 2015 various artists compilation ’ 80s Re-Covered, on which artists of the 1980s lent their sound to a variety of hits. One of the first covers of “Rocket Man” was for the 24 th edition of the Top Of The Pops series, which offered budget compilations of recent hits, swiftly recorded by nameless musicians. “But now that I am a spaceman, nobody cares about me.” Burning out his fuse… “I wanted to be a spaceman, that’s what I wanted to be,” he sang. It hit No.6 on Billboard’s Hot 100 in July, the very month that American writer-artist Harry Nilsson’s Son Of Schmilsson album was released, containing “Spaceman,” which described how the lunar programme was no longer the inspiration it had been. “Rocket Man” peaked at No.2 in the UK in the first week of June 1972, beaten to the top only by “Metal Guru,’ by Elton’s friend Marc Bolan and T. I had the whole opening bit: ‘She packed my bags last night, pre-flight/zero hour, 9am, and I’m gonna be high as a kite by then.’ That all came to me at once.” I drove like crazy down these backroads trying to get there in time so I’d remember it, and rushed in the door to write it down. In 1998, Taupin told Musician magazine: “The first verse of ‘Rocket Man’…was in my head as I was driving to my parents’ house in England many years ago. If that single had come out now I would be ‘part of the scene’.” Zero hour, 9am “It would be nice to eradicate ‘Space Oddity,’” he said, “but I’m flattered in the nicest way, that Elton John took so much out of it for ‘Rocket Man.’ I think perhaps it was premature. The story described the life of an astronaut who goes on three-month sojourns into space.Īs Elton’s “Rocket Man” first climbed into the chart stratosphere, the still-emerging Bowie described the influence of his earlier hit on the new one - even as he admitted to Disc magazine that he already thought of his song as an unwelcome novelty. The book reached a new generation when it was turned into the 1969 feature film starring Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom. Taupin’s lyric for “Rocket Man” drew inspiration from one of 18 short stories in 1951’s The Illustrated Man, by the revered science fiction writer Ray Bradbury. By 1972, the “space age” as we then knew it was coming to an end, with the final moon launch in the program, Apollo 17, making its landing that December. As public fascination in space flight reached fever pitch, that Bowie single came out a matter of days before the launch of Apollo 11, which dramatically achieved the first manned lunar landing.
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