The Vinyl Frontier

  Also available in the Bloomsbury Sigma series:

  Spirals in Time by Helen Scales

  A is for Arsenic by Kathryn Harkup

  Breaking the Chains of Gravity by Amy Shira Teitel

  Herding Hemingway’s Cats by Kat Arney

  Sorting the Beef from the Bull by R. Evershed and N. Temple

  Death on Earth by Jules Howard

  The Tyrannosaur Chronicles by David Hone

  Soccermatics by David Sumpter

  Big Data by Timandra Harkness

  Goldilocks and the Water Bears by Louisa Preston

  Science and the City by Laurie Winkless

  Bring Back the King by Helen Pilcher

  Furry Logic by Matin Durrani and Liz Kalaugher

  Built on Bones by Brenna Hassett

  My European Family by Karin Bojs

  4th Rock from the Sun by Nicky Jenner

  Patient H69 by Vanessa Potter

  Catching Breath by Kathryn Lougheed

  PIG/PORK by Pía Spry-Marqués

  The Planet Factory by Elizabeth Tasker

  Wonders Beyond Numbers by Johnny Ball

  Immune by Catherine Carver

  I, Mammal by Liam Drew

  Reinventing the Wheel by Bronwen and Francis Percival

  Making the Monster by Kathryn Harkup

  Best Before by Nicola Temple

  Catching Stardust by Natalie Starkey

  Seeds of Science by Mark Lynas

  Outnumbered by David Sumpter

  Eye of the Shoal by Helen Scales

  Nodding Off by Alice Gregory

  The Science of Sin by Jack Lewis

  The Edge of Memory by Patrick Nunn

  Turned On by Kate Devlin

  Borrowed Time by Sue Armstrong

  Love Factually by Laura Mucha

  For the other book club

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: The Naked Pioneers

  Chapter 2: Needle Hits Groove

  Chapter 3: Musos v Scientists

  Chapter 4: Uranium Clock

  Chapter 5: Now That’s What I Call Music

  Chapter 6: The Hydrogen Key

  Chapter 7: Berry v Beatles

  Chapter 8: Flowing Streams and Firecrackers

  Chapter 9: Mixing and Mastering

  Chapter 10: The Final Cut

  Chapter 11: A Last Supper

  Chapter 12: Hello, We Must Be Going

  Select Bibliography

  Appendices

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Prologue

  I still remember the first mixtape someone made for me. It had three words written on the side in blue ink: ‘Punk for Jono’.

  This pre-playlist playlist was produced in around 1987, 10 years after the launch of the Voyager space probes. Unlike the Voyager interstellar message, it wasn’t imprinted on a golden record encased in an aluminium cover and attached to the side of a spacecraft. It was a plastic C90 tape handed to me by Ed, a cool kid in the year above. The only thing it had in common with the Voyager records was that it included music selected by human hand. I would have been 12. I had stopped listening to Starlight Express, noting that Lloyd Webber musicals didn’t carry much weight in the school cool-o-sphere, and had recently discovered The Blues Brothers, Atlantic Soul Classics and Otis Redding.

  Then Ed made me a tape.

  He only recorded one side of the tape, and there was quite a long gap at the end, so it can only have been around 40 minutes in length. The tape has not survived, but my memory of it remains clear.

  Ed set the record levels a little too high. So by the time Topper Headon’s rumbling intro to ‘I Fought the Law’ had crescendoed, the drums were distorting. Then came the power chords. It was indescribably thrilling. Let’s just say Arthur Conley’s ‘Sweet Soul Music’ suddenly seemed a little thin.1

  Ed’s compilation taught me the importance of starting strong. And even though I haven’t actually seen this particular tape for 15 years, I can still recall every song – two more by The Clash (‘Safe European Home’, ‘Guns of Brixton’), ‘Guns for the Afghan Rebels’ by Angelic Upstarts, ‘Greatest Cockney Rip Off’ by Cockney Rejects, ‘Seattle’ by PiL, ‘Eton Rifles’ by The Jam, ‘Anarchy in the UK’ by the Sex Pistols and The Damned covering ‘Jet Boy, Jet Girl’. This was the first mixtape someone made for me, and in a way it remains unsurpassed.

  Around the same time I received a double tape deck for my birthday. Suddenly, at my disposal, was the heady power of being able to share and disseminate music. I was able to easily transfer any music I had from one tape to another. I’m pretty confident I owe Whitesnake quite a lot of money. I must have supplied copies of ‘Here I Go Again’ (from Now That’s What I Call Music 10) to most of the boys in my dormitory. But the first proper compilation, mixtape, playlist – whatever you want to call it – that I made for someone else, came much later. It was for a girl called Beth.

  It was the summer term of my penultimate year at boarding school. I had just emerged from a four-year imprisonment in braces. I had joined a band. I had got drunk. I had successfully snogged one female to date. Then a friend informed me that Beth had taken a shine to me. That was the summer I found out a little of what love was like. I’d had crushes before – Fairuza Balk in Return to Oz, for example – but nothing like this. I didn’t know her well. She was a couple of years younger than me. But she was pretty and funny, with a disarming, slightly dozy way of moving and talking, as if her body was suspended from a head full of helium.

  Messages were exchanged. We were to meet at Doctor’s Lake after lunch. We had the whole afternoon. Doctor’s Lake was in reality a fairly dismal pond, but it was a place within school grounds where couples might go with a relatively high expectation of solitude. We went there. We were alone. I remember it being hot. I remember being terrified of any physical contact. I remember leaning back, accidentally touching her hand, and actually screaming with the shock.

  The afternoon wore on. Screaming aside, there had been no physical contact. It was becoming awkward. We had to go back to our respective boarding houses soon. Eventually we did, walking in a slow meandering way, conscious of important work still to attend to, expectations to be met. Then, as we approached the back of the old squash courts with the leaky roof, we faced each other. I pushed through a bewildering fog of terror, and we managed a kiss.

  That evening, snog under my belt, I set about fulfilling a promise I’d made earlier in the day – I would make her a tape. I can still recall the feeling, the excitement, the compulsion to create the ultimate calling card of cool. In that C90 tape, I was seeking to represent myself as a sensitive, discerning boy with startlingly good taste.

  There was a time when I kept a journal of every tape I made, with each song noted down so as to guard against that cardinal sin of giving someone the same song twice. Although that journal no longer survives, I still remember some highlights from the first tape I made Beth. This was around 1991 and I was a British indie kid, so there was certainly ‘Vapour Trail’ by Ride, ‘Grey Cell Green’ by Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, some Violent Femmes (probably ‘Good Feeling’), and I remember very clearly that sides one and two were kicked off by songs from earnest Irish rockers Power of Dreams.

  From that day forwards, for the best part of two decades, any good friend of either sex would probably receive at least one compilation from me. Some were short, on C60 tapes, some were long. At times I ventured into double and triple albums (reusing those tape cases that generally housed cheap blues compilations). I gave the tapes names and made covers, usually with random punk writing from letters cut out of magazines. Later, I made the leap to producing compilations on CD, and even playlists that only existed in digital for
m. But it was never quite the same.

  Back in my mixtape heyday I had rules: I stopped including more than one song by the same artist or band, and all the songs had to be unknown to the receiver (although this wasn’t always possible). I also liked contrasts. I liked to follow serious, mournful songs with novelty pop. I liked to have quiet followed by loud, or loud by quiet, so a song from Anthrax, for example, might well be followed by Flanders and Swann.

  Another important rule was that I had to minimise space at the end of each side of the cassette. I gathered together a host of short songs (‘Wienerschnitzel’ by Descendents, for instance) that came in useful when trying to fill each side of the tape right to its audio brim. If the dreaded snap of the ‘record’ button popping up occurred even a second before the final chords of the song faded away, or conversely if there was too long a pause afterwards, it would not do. It had to fit, perfectly, with only seconds to spare.

  Why am I telling you all this? Because I am not a scientist. I’ve always loved astronomy, sure. As a kid I watched and re-watched documentaries on Halley’s Comet, on Voyager 2, on Neptune. I kept a scrapbook of articles culled from Scientific American and New Scientist. I know the name of Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon. I understand the justification for Pluto’s declassification. I know what a pulsar is. But, despite a fascination with astronomy, I don’t have more than a layman’s grasp of what’s going on out there. I do, though, have an understanding of what it’s like to make a compilation.

  When I handed Beth that tape in the early summer of 1991, I was trying to share my soul, to create an image of me, encapsulated in 90 minutes of music. When a group of scientists, artists and writers gathered in Ithaca, New York, to begin work on the Voyager Golden Record, they were attempting to capture the soul of humanity in 90 minutes of music.

  Try to imagine it. Think of the pressure. What would you choose? You have an hour and a half to represent Earth’s music. Plus, if we assume that you’re going to make the very sensible decision to include the first-pressing Stone Roses LP in its entirety, you really only have around 30 minutes left to play with.

  This is a story of the summer of 1977 – when science rubbed up against art to create a monument that will, in all probability, outlive us all. When we are dust, when the Sun dies, these two golden analogue discs, with their handy accompanying stylus and instructions, will still be speeding off further into the cosmos. And alongside their music, photographs and data, the discs will still have etched into their fabric the sound of one woman’s brainwaves – a recording made on 3 June 1977, just weeks before launch. The sound of a human being in love with another human being. Just as I was in love with Beth.

  Notes

  1 Although I would like to make it clear that I still really love ‘Sweet Soul Music’.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Naked Pioneers

  ‘Ad astra per aspera’ – ‘Through difficulties to the stars’

  Carl Sagan

  Two space probes called Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were sent to the outer planets in the late 1970s to beam back lots of lovely images and data of the gas giants and their moons. Primary mission complete, and with no way of being controlled, the probes were doomed to drift forever in the unimaginable void of interstellar space.

  With this gloomy-sounding outcome in mind, NASA decided to do something very optimistic. They would send with them a message, on the very slim chance that they would one day be recovered by some little green chap. The message took the form of a metal record. A record designed to convey something about our origins, our civilisation, our art, through sounds, images and music. CliffsNotes to Earthlings.

  To tell the story of this record, its creators and the people who chose that moment to fall in love, we need to begin by backing up a little. You see, Voyager Golden Record is a sequel. It’s the more ambitious, bigger-budget sequel to Pioneer Plaque. Five years before Voyager, the Pioneer probes became the first man-made objects destined to reach interstellar space, to cast off the gravitational cloak of our solar system and head out into it forever. While this was known to everyone involved in the mission, it took an outsider looking in – a writer for Christian Science Monitor – to draw attention to the magnitude of this fact. Pioneer 10 and 11 were to be humankind’s first emissaries to the stars. Here was a first-time opportunity to send a message, a greeting to any intelligent beings who might chance upon them.

  Armed with enthusiasm and a deadline of just three weeks, a three-strong team, comprising an artist, an astronomer and an astrophysicist, thrashed out a design for a modest metal plaque, complete with star map and naked human figures. However, one of the strangest aspects of the Pioneer plaques – the first of which was hurled towards Jupiter in March 1972 – was the absence of vulva.

  The last-minute sanitising of the female figure, for fear of offending a domestic audience, captures an essence of the environment in which the Pioneer plaques were forged. These are not only messages to some imagined future alien interaction, they are also time capsules, snapshots of when they left Earth. The removal of the vulva is a lens through which we can view America nearly 50 years ago. Despite the swinging sixties, despite mass movements, protests, social reforms and upheavals, despite convention-busting cinema coming out of the American New Wave, America in 1972 remained a conservative environment. NASA was in the glare of the public gaze, at the mercy of popular opinion. It was funded by American tax dollars, and everyone knew it. And to tell the story of the missing vulva, we need to back up just a little bit further.

  In 1964 a graduate student working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory1 noticed something important. His name was Gary Flandro. He had finished school in 1957, just before Sputnik, perfectly timing his arrival at JPL with the start of the space race. The first of the Pioneer missions took place the following year, when a probe designed to achieve moon orbit, failed some 73.6 seconds after launch. A steady stream continued to punch holes in the atmosphere. Some were lost at launch, others failed to reach their desired orbit, others did very well. A personal favourite is Pioneer 5 from March 1960 – a spherical probe sent to measure magnetic forces in the space between the orbits of Earth and Venus – that looks very similar to the intimidating black ball that approaches Princess Leia in Star Wars: A New Hope.

  Flandro had been investigating the knotty problem of how an object might be sent further, towards the outer planets. The general consensus at the time was that this was virtually impossible without something called gravity assist. Jupiter held the keys to the outer planets. Without Jupiter’s gravity, any object sent in that direction would eventually fall back to Earth’s orbit. But with Jupiter there, an object could fly past, pick up an enormous boost of energy, and then be hurled out towards Saturn. Then, in theory, it could do the same thing at Saturn, and head off further towards Uranus, Neptune and so on.

  While working on trajectories, Flandro realised something mind-blowing: that by the late 1970s all the outer planets would be on the same side of the Sun. This alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune could enable a single craft to visit all four outer planets by using gravity assists in what would be dubbed the ‘Grand Tour’. This wasn’t quite a single one-time option – there were various possible iterations and trajectories – but such an advantageous planetary arrangement would not occur again for another 175 years. Flandro had uncovered a chance to explore a number of planets in one go, at a fraction of the cost. Suddenly NASA had been given the mother of all deadlines.

  ***

  To plan for a planetary Grand Tour, NASA needed Pioneers 10 and 11 to dip their toes in the waters of the outer solar system, to see if such an endeavour was even possible. The idea to include a message with the Pioneers came relatively late in the day. Eric Burgess, an English freelancer, had been writing about space missions since 1957. He’s the one who held up his hand in class and pointed out to the world that NASA was about to throw something further than anything had ever been thrown. And during conversations with writer
s Richard Hoagland and Don Bane the idea for attaching some kind of physical message to the craft was forged. Burgess was unsure about pitching direct to NASA, so instead he approached Carl Sagan, whose eyes lit up.

  Sagan was already a well-known astronomer, with a growing public profile, but he was not yet the household name he would become. He was a coal-face scientist, with acknowledged achievements, enthusiasms and specialisations under his belt. He would study the greenhouse effect on Venus, seasonal dust patterns on Mars, the environment of Saturn’s moon Titan. He would play a medal-winning role in NASA’s Mariner 9 mission, and contribute to the Viking, Voyager and Galileo missions.

  In early December 1971, astronomers and astrophysicists descended on San Juan, Puerto Rico, for the 136th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. During a coffee break Sagan began talking to his friend and colleague Frank Drake about the idea for a message aimed at extraterrestrials. He was preaching to the converted – Frank had been thinking about communicating with aliens for years.2

  Writing in ‘The Foundations of the Voyager Record’ in 1978, Drake recalled that many of the parameters for the Pioneer plaques were pinned down during that frantic coffee break in Puerto Rico. Before the end of recess, Sagan and Drake had decided they wanted to convey where, when and who the craft came from, without using written language.

  To begin with, Sagan suggested a map showing binary stars and constellations, but Drake had a more elegant solution. He suggested a map showing Earth in relation to certain pulsars – spinning neutron stars that emit regular beams of radiation. He reasoned that, as the frequencies of the pulses shift slowly over time, it should be possible for some future being to calculate – from the difference in the frequency of those pulses as recorded on the plaque, compared to the pulses at that future time – the approximate date when the ship’s plaque was designed.

  Sagan had the connections and influence within NASA, but it wasn’t an easy sell. Even the smallest addition of weight to Pioneer 10 would throw off NASA’s calculations. To enable Sagan’s project to proceed, NASA would have to unclench, let go the reins, and okay its engineers to re-compute the figures. After weeks of delays and bureaucratic wrangling, Sagan had his green light. But with the launch fast approaching, it was a green light with a strict deadline of just three weeks.