An obvious point of connection between rock music and space is that astronauts, like rock stars, are often quite small. Tim Peake – mobbed in the O2 at Space Rocks, the first festival of music and space – has the compact frame of Bruce Dickinson. Nasa allows you in at just 4ft 10. Space craft are increasingly bijou, and you grow a couple of inches up there anyway.
Mark McCaughrean, a senior adviser at the European Space Agency, talks to me about Lush. He got tickets for their reunion tour, and watched standing next to Miki Berenyi’s mum. Sadly, Lush fell out again: maybe the organisers of Space Rocks will fall out too, he says, and reform in 20 years’ time. His colleague, the Rosetta scientist Matt Taylor – who helped put the Philae Lander on Comet 67P and offended the universe by wearing a shirt with semi-naked ladies on it – is a devotee of Cannibal Corpse. He looks like something from Metal Hammer, or a member of their editorial team. Above the stage hangs a small-scale model of the Rosetta spacecraft, like a 1970s lighting rig.
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