During the early 80s, I was a young teenager (maybe aged 12), and there were quite a few tapes I owned for myself. ELO's Time album was one of them, and I must have listened a hundred times to it, back then.
As I'm not a native English speaker, just having started learning English by then, I even copied the lyrics of all songs using my father's type writer, trying to figure out the meaning of all those beatiful songs.
By then, I was (like many boys in this age), quite interested in astrophysics and in science fiction. Therefor, ELOs way to use robot voices (vocoders), or beeping synths was an additional (if not even the original) attraction for me, then.
For this reason, it never came into my mind that the story of this song could be anything else but a science fiction story, set in the future (like its succeeding track "yours truly 2095", which I took for a letter back from the same guy who was going to the moon here).
"Back in the 80s, when things were less complicated" - this is a kind of nostalgy towards today from a future point of view, kind of ironic, I'd say.
I took the song in a direct way, as a farewell song of a moon tourist (or even worker in a colony, like in Heinlein's: Moon is a harsh mistress).
P.S.: It's interesting that death and drugs seem to be read in any song, for instance also in "Boat on the River" (see there). But art is open to individual interpretation, so I am glad having found this forum.
During the early 80s, I was a young teenager (maybe aged 12), and there were quite a few tapes I owned for myself. ELO's Time album was one of them, and I must have listened a hundred times to it, back then. As I'm not a native English speaker, just having started learning English by then, I even copied the lyrics of all songs using my father's type writer, trying to figure out the meaning of all those beatiful songs.
By then, I was (like many boys in this age), quite interested in astrophysics and in science fiction. Therefor, ELOs way to use robot voices (vocoders), or beeping synths was an additional (if not even the original) attraction for me, then.
For this reason, it never came into my mind that the story of this song could be anything else but a science fiction story, set in the future (like its succeeding track "yours truly 2095", which I took for a letter back from the same guy who was going to the moon here).
"Back in the 80s, when things were less complicated" - this is a kind of nostalgy towards today from a future point of view, kind of ironic, I'd say.
I took the song in a direct way, as a farewell song of a moon tourist (or even worker in a colony, like in Heinlein's: Moon is a harsh mistress).
P.S.: It's interesting that death and drugs seem to be read in any song, for instance also in "Boat on the River" (see there). But art is open to individual interpretation, so I am glad having found this forum.
@teashaw Hey, I'm from the future, and I want to say that girls (of ANY age) also love sci-fi. It's not boys ''prerogative''.
@teashaw Hey, I'm from the future, and I want to say that girls (of ANY age) also love sci-fi. It's not boys ''prerogative''.