Apollo 11: the 25 best songs inspired by the moon

From Sinatra to Bowie, Pink Floyd to Janis Joplin, that lonely celestial orb has inspired some absolute crackers.

Date published: 15th Jul 2019

It’s 22nd July 1969, and the Apollo 11 astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, having just completed man’s first lunar touch-down, are rocketing back towards earth at speeds of up to 25,000 mph.

Tucked up inside their command module, Columbia, it would take the crew the best part of three days to travel the 230,000 miles back to earth. 

As with any epic journey, the soundtrack was vital. So, with the help of a fella called Mickey Kapp (the astronauts’ record-industry buddy and mixtape man) and a Sony TC-50 cassette recorder, the boys kicked off their moon boots and kicked back with their favourite tunes.

For Aldrin, it was Frank Sinatra’s Fly Me To The Moon and the Barbara Streisand ballad, People. For Collins, Everybody’s Gone To The Moon by Jonathan King and Angel Of The Morning by Bettye Swann.

For Armstrong though, the first man to set foot on the moon and, by accounts, a deeply private and complex individual, the choice was appropriately more left-field. Described by Vanity Fair in an interview with Kapp as ‘an amalgam of late 1940s lounge jazz and orchestral film music’, Music Out Of The Moon, released by Capitol Records in 1947, is one of the first records to feature a ‘Theremin’ -  a very odd, contactless, electrical instrument invented in the 1920s by Russian inventor, Leon Theremin, which produces an eerie, otherworldly sound likened to ‘a person crying out in the abyss’

...bet that one really got the re-entry party started.

Luckily for us there have been much better tunes written about by that lonely, silver, celestial orb up there. So, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, we’ve put together 25 of the best songs inspired by the moon - sans any weird, whiny Russian antenna thingies.

Here's the Spotify playlist: