“It was fantastic to be thinking that we were in there making up a piece of music, while the astronauts were standing on the moon.” According to Gilmour, the song also marked a turning point for the band-the point at which outer space ceased to be Pink Floyd’s preoccupation. “It brought it home to me, powerfully, that you could look up at the moon and there would be people standing on it,” he said. Later, Gilmour realized the song’s place in history.
Presaging the ambient and new-age music movements that would come into their own in the ’70s, “Moonhead” is both ahead of its time and solidly a product of the moment-the zeitgeist caught in a vacuum tube. Gilmour dismissed the song humbly as “a nice, spacey, atmospheric, 12-bar blues” that sounded “a bit off the wall,” but it’s much more than that. The BBC’s suspense-puncturing quip about green cheese wasn’t enough to deflate the grandeur and mystique of “Moonhead.” Constructed of cosmic guitar effects, pulses of percussion, and Waters’s ominously descending bass line, it’s an eerie piece of improvisation that translates the breathtaking awe of the moon landing into music. A few jokes here and there helped keep spirits up, hence the raft of novelty songs that appeared at the time, from the psychedelic sound of “Man in the Moon” by the group Village to the hilariously twangy single “First Country Singer on the Moon” by Don Lewis. Amid all the triumphalism of Apollo 11’s anticipated success was a dark underside. Who were we, after all, to dare walk on the moon? It was a feat of hubris that echoed Icarus’s own. Laughter was one way to deal with the very real possibility of failure-not to mention the existential enormity-that came with the Apollo 11 mission. For good measure, a young Judi Dench and a young Ian McKellen-pre-Dame and pre-Sir-read lighthearted poetry on the program.
It was no surprise, then, that the BBC tapped Pink Floyd to appear on a special Apollo 11–themed episode of Omnibus titled, with perhaps with the slightest dearth of decorum, “So What If It’s Just Green Cheese?” This irreverent sentiment was reiterated in the middle of Pink Floyd’s performance of “Moonhead,” when an unidentified narrator breaks into the song to exclaim, “So they’re there, a quarter of a million miles away, up there on the moon, and early tomorrow morning they’ll step out and see once and for all if it’s green cheese or not”-referring to the fact that, in the wee hours of July 21, 1969, Armstrong would leave Homo sapiens’ first boot print on the moon, followed about 19 minutes later by Aldrin. By the summer of 1969, Pink Floyd was nowhere near the superstar level it would reach in the ’70s, but it was a cult band whose psychedelic explorations were firmly associated with outer space. But before he left, Barrett had stamped on the band a fascination with both science fact and fiction, as heard on such songs as “Astronomy Domine” and “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,” which Barrett either wrote or contributed to. Syd Barrett, the group’s founding frontman, had parted ways with his bandmates in 1968, after his struggles with mental illness and drug use had made working with him almost impossible. Pink Floyd was uniquely qualified for the task. Kennedy’s rousing moonshot speech in 1962. Pink Floyd was commissioned by the BBC to perform instrumental music live on the air as the Apollo 11 crew’s video and audio signals came streaming in across the emptiness of space, beating the Soviets at the race that had been spurred on by John F. The piece isn’t ranked with Pink Floyd classics such as “Wish You Were Here” or “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2.” Over the decades, “Moonhead” has remained one of the most overlooked entries in the band’s canon, despite its historic status. They were using music, specifically an improvised and largely forgotten song called “Moonhead.” However, the members of Pink Floyd-David Gilmour, Roger Waters, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright-weren’t using science, calculus, and technology to transport people through space on that fateful evening. Of course, two men were already there: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the Apollo 11 astronauts who became the first human beings to set foot on the lunar surface. For seven and a half minutes on the night of July 20, 1969, Pink Floyd took thousands of BBC viewers to the moon.
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