26 October/27 October 2019 ★ FT Weekend 17Arts
R
aymond Loewy became
famous designing steam
locomotives in the 1930s —
huge, streamlined, Art Deco
beasts that looked as if they
could break the sound barrier. Thirty
years later he was designing the interi-
ors of Nasaspacecraft. The 20th century
moved fast.
According to Justin McGuirk, the
curator ofMoving to Mars, a striking new
show at London’s Design Museum,
Nasa’s spaceships had been designed
entirely by engineers until then.When
Loewy came on board, he suggested that
if people were to spend monthsin space
they might, perhaps, need a window to
look out of or a table where they could
eat together. His drawings are here, sur-
prisingly simple,elegant, not a million
miles from Kubrick’s2001: A Space
Odysseywhich was being made at the
same time. They go some way to under-
lining the show’s theme, that moving to
Mars might be humanity’s most chal-
lenging job for design.
Perhaps in keeping with the Extinc-
tion Rebellion protesters on the streets
nearby, who are suggesting that we
might think about saving our own
planet, the underlying idea here is notDesign’s greatest
challenge?
Space|Edwin Heathcote visitsa Design Museum
exhibition that imagines making a life on Mars
Clockwise from main: internal and
external view of ‘Mars Habitat’ by
Hassell; Sokol spacesuits; ESA rover
prototype, from the ‘Moving to Mars’
exhibition Hassell + Eckersley O’Callaghan; Ed Reeve—imagining a wholly designed new world.
But for the rest of us? I find myself,
despite the irresistibility of the aesthet-
ics and the tech, curiously unattracted.
There is, for instance, the journey
itself. The moon was three days’ travel;
Mars (142m miles away) would take six
months or more. The brilliant Soviet
designer Galina Balashova is featured
here, her plans for interiors featuring
tartan blankets, curtains and landscape
pictures she painted herself to create
some semblance of home aboard the
spacecraft. In a contemporary response
to Loewy, there’s a new spaceship dining
table commissioned by the museum
from designer Konstantin Grcic, an ele-
gantdisc which rises from the floor with
a yellow Hula-Hoop for seating, metal
straps for the feet to keep the astronauts
fixed in place.
There are spacesuits (including a new
one designed specifically for Mars by
the University of North Dakota) withtheir incredible com-
plexity, and the eye-
watering detail of
gloves that allow
astronauts to do
intricate work. There
i s a l s o a ro o m o f
architectural models
from a competition
to design a new struc-
ture for the planet,
weird mounds of red
Martian earth piled
over 3D -printed
armatures and inflat-
able pods, including
one designfromNor-
man Foster. It all looks oddly 1960s.
Another room is devoted to off-world
agriculture, with terraria and complex
hydroponic closed-loop systems,
though it all depends on either trans-
porting water from Earth or finding and
extracting some of the ice at the Martian
poles. Architect Xavier de Kestelier
from Hasell suggestsa circular economy
is a matter of life or death on Mars — the
extreme self-reliance necessary for a
Martian mission, the need to recycle
everything, might promptbetter use of
our resourceson Earth.
It all ends with an intriguing installa-
tion by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg about
a Mars “wilding”, populating the planet
not with people but with plants, pre-
sented through a series of screens and a
gaming engine which maps the develop-
ment of the fauna over millennia.
The most arresting suggestion,
though, comes from Astronomer Royal
Martin Rees. He proposes that by the
time we are ready to go to Mars, in 40 or
50 years, biotechnology and micro-
robotics will have advanced so much
that the first generation arriving on the
planet might re-engineersubsequent
generations sothey become better
adapted for life on Mars — perhaps only
partly human, perhaps not at all. This
first generation of post-humans might
be almost immortal and lackingour
limitationsfor lengthy space travel:
physical decay, ageing, boredom, loneli-
ness, madness...
Mars, he suggests, could be just the
beginning, the launch pad for the rest of
space. But then he does sensibly addwe
might also do well to look after the
planet we have where everything is, at
least for the moment, astonishingly
comfortable and easy.ToFebruary23,designmuseum.orgI
n the early 1960s, the prospect of
a “British invasion” of the US
seemed remote: most of the traffic
was one-way, from the US to the
UK. However, one UK-made
record topped the charts across the
Atlantic: “Stranger on the Shore” was
a lilting instrumental written and
performed by Acker Bilk, a Somerset
clarinettist who earned his living on
the banjos-and-beer circuit of the UK’s
trad jazz scene. The song would earn
him a decent living for decades, but he
grew to loathe it.
Acker, real name Bernard Bilk,
claimed he thought up the song’s
melody in a taxi. He named this
gentle tune “Jenny” in honour of
his daughter. Having scored
several hits since his first, 1960’s
“Summer Set”, Bilk wasasked to
create the theme for a BBC TV
children’s series about a French au
pair in Brighton. Bilk offered them
“Jenny”, but was asked to change its
title to the name of the programme,
Stranger on the Shore. Its wistful, airy
tones, with Bilk’s “liquorice stick”
accompanied by silken strings, was
heard on TV on Sunday afternoons,
accompanying the culture-shocked
lead character longingly staring out
across theChannel towards her home
in France.
“Stranger on the Shore” was
released in October 1961, credited
toAcker Bilk with the Leon Young
String Chorale. It became 1962’s
biggest-selling single in the UK,
spending 55 weeks in the chart,
though it was kept off the top
spot by Cliff Richard’s “The
Young Ones”.
It made number one in the US,
however, and both the single and its
accompanying album went gold there.
It is not knownwho was responsible forBilk, at heart a real jazz fan, was
doubtless flattered when Duke
Ellington covered it for his album
Ellington 65, and other credible
instrumentalists who tackled the song
included contrasting Chets, Baker
(smooth jazz trumpet) and Atkins
(country guitar), both in 1966.
“Stranger On The Shore” was too
successful not to acquire lyrics. The
music publisher Robert Mellin penned
lovelorn verses about a man pining for
his partner overseas, giving the ditty a
second life. The Drifters scored a small
US hit with this version in 1962 as Bilk’s
instrumental was climbing the same
chart, and Andy Williams made
number 30 in the UK with his effort.
There were covers galore by Ruby &
The Romantics, Slim Whitman and
Roger Whittaker; the song was also
used in numerous movies.
As time passed,interpretations grew
more bizarre. Reggae saxophonist Val
Bennett recorded it in 1968 under the
production supervision of Lee
Perry, who oversaw a funkier cut of
it five years later by the singer
David Isaacs. Jamaican vocal
group The Chosen Few offered a
lush though slightly dissonant
version in 1973, smothered in
fuzzbox guitars. In 1987, Tijuana
trumpeter Herb Alpert made it an
unlikely choice for one of his jazz-
funk “comeback” albums,Keep Your
Eye On Me. Free jazzers Lol Coxhill and
Steve Beresford were among a group of
improviserscalled The Promenaders,
who returned it to Brighton
beach, recording/butchering it
there in 1982.
Rave anarcho-pranksters The
KLF sampledBilk’s version heavily
on their 1990 albumChill Out, using
its haunting nature to powerful
effect on “A Melody From a Past Life
Keeps Pulling Me Back”. Perhaps
Bilk felt the same way. In 2012,
half a century after the song’s major
success, hegrumbled to the BBC:
“[“Stranger on the Shore”] is all
right, but you do get fed up with it
after 50 years.”
Ian McCann
For more in the series, go to ft.com/
life-of-a-songAcker Bilk playing the
clarinet in 1962 ANL/Shutterstock-the rumour that Ginger Baker had
played on Bilk’s version, an entirely
fictitious notion, although Bilk and
Baker had played together in the 1950s
while the late Cream drummer was
learning his trade.
The song proved remarkably flexible
and Bilk called it “my pension”. As an
instrumental, it attracted covers by
Booker T & The M.G.’s, where it sat
incongruously on the grits and gravy of
their debut LP,Green Onions; soul
saxophone star King Curtis played it
dead straight in 1964, and kitsch-
Hawaiian MOR kings Santo & Johnny
delivered it as an unseemly brisk strut
in 1964. Fellow exotica specialist
Martin Denny also took a trip to the
shoreline in 1962.that we will all have to move to Mars but
rather that the extreme difficulty of sus-
taining life on the Red Planet might be
the spur to finding solutionsback home.
Mars has always been a special case.
Since the Italian astronomer Giovanni
Schiaparelli identified a series of lines
across the planet in 1877 (the beautiful
maps are displayed here) and dubbed
them “canali” (translatedas “canals”),
the erroneous notion spread that ithad
been terraformed bya civilisation. Sub-
sequently the image of the planet was
developed by sci-fi. From HG Wells’The
War of the Worlds ith its tripod-ridingw
monsters to the big-brained, glass-hel-
meted, ray-gun-toting aliens of 1950s
pulp, Mars was the go-to planet for evil
aliens. It was a bit of a disappointment
then to find, decades after Schiaparelli
drew hismaps, that Mars is in fact a
dead red desert with a misty mauve sky.
Ridley Scott’s 2015 filmThe Martian
captures its hostility pretty well, astro-
naut Matt Damon reduced to growing
potatoes in his and his departed col-
leagues’ faeces, battlingstarvation, dust
storms and loneliness.Yet only last
month SpaceX released the designs for
its “Starship”, the fulcrum of Elon
Musk’s plans to colonise Mars. It looks
oddly like something Raymond Loewy
might have designed, with its retro ray-
gun fins and shiny metallic body.
So why the attraction? The epic,
immersive installations featuring real
panoramas of the surface of the planet
from the Curiosity Rovercertainly seem
seductive to architects and designersTHE LIFE
OF A SONGSTRANGER ON
THE SHOREAbove: Marsha, a design for a
vertical Martian habitat, by AI
Spacefactory; Mars Habitat by
Foster + Partners, from the Moving
to Mars exhibition Ed Reeve—OCTOBER 26 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 24/10/2019- 17:18 User:paul.gould Page Name:WKD17, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 17, 1