Strange SFFH Music: The Space Lady

In this first of a new series looking at the weird and wonderful of speculative-leaning music, Geoff Holder puts The Space Lady’s Greatest Hits (2013) on the stereo.

Artist: The Space Lady
Album: The Space Lady’s Greatest Hits
Released: 2013
Style: Synth pop, space music, outsider music, electronica

Children of the BFS, do you want an album of spacey songs sung by a woman playing a cheap synthesizer while wearing a silver plastic helmet adorned with wings and a flashing red light? Of course you do! 

Mainstream artists are all very well, but oftentimes true gold is found in the margins of culture. And so it is with the eccentric individual known to the world as The Space Lady. Susan Dietrich was a poverty-stricken hippie-era street musician who started with an accordion. When that was stolen she graduated to a battery-operated Casiotone keyboard and amplifier. With her ethereal vocals and iconic winged helmet she became a hit on the streets of San Francisco, in 1984 becoming dubbed “The Space Lady” by fans in a local newspaper competition. And a legend was born.

Or not. 

Decades of obscurity followed. Susan made some private cassette recordings before retiring from music and taking up another life. Then in 2000 music historian Irwin Chusid brought out the book and albums Songs in the Key of Z—The Curious Universe of Outsider Music, a compilation of deeply peculiar work by people as far from the mainstream music industry as it is possible to go. Chusid’s work is very much worth mining should your musical desires be in search of some Major Weirdness (don’t say I didn’t warn you). Volume 2 of Songs in the Key of Z contained The Space Lady’s lovely, loopy cover of “I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night,” originally a heavy psych hit for the Electric Prunes in 1967. And a legend was born. 

Or not. 

Although Songs in the Key of Z sparked interest in The Space Lady, Susan Dietrich herself, now a nurse living in Colorado, knew nothing of this. Finally in 2012 her second husband discovered her lost past as a helmeted performer and persuaded her to come out of retirement. The following year The Space Lady’s Greatest Hits was released. And a legend was born. 

This time for real. 

(Image source: Instagram)

The album was listed in The Guardian’s “List of the 101 Strangest Records on Spotify”. In her late 60s she toured the US, the UK and Europe, and was a favourite on Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone on BBC Radio 6. Vice Magazine voted Greatest Hits one of the best albums of the year and the NME declared it one of the “101 Albums to Hear Before You Die”. 

Among the greatest strangest of all time

So what’s it sound like? The music is dominated by the abilities and limitations of her portable Casiotone MT-40, a consumer model popular with home entertainers (and now an increasing number of hipster indie musicians). Pre-set drum patterns mix with generic whooshes and bassy synthetic sounds, here enhanced by a phase shifter that gives everything a Fifties sci-fi feel. At the end of a song she often pushes the keyboard to its limits, turning out space-rock noises not unlike a cut-rate Hawkwind. 

The key factor, however, is the Space Lady’s distinctive vocals. Her limited range, essentially moving between a gentle whisper and a light soprano, is rendered magnificently strange through the use of echo and delay effects. The resulting combination transcends the cheesy associations of the Casiotone to produce music unlike any other—familiar yet unsettling, unearthly yet deeply emotional.

Quite frankly, it’s brilliant.

A number of tracks on the album are originals, the best of which is “Synthesize Me,’ written by Susan Dietrich’s late first husband Joel Dunsany. However it is her cover versions that have attracted the most attention, because they are Mighty Odd. And Mighty Wonderful. 

(Photo: The Space Lady performing at Manchester Museum, March 30, 2013; Man Alive! ; Flickr; source: Wikipedia)

The Sweet’s stomping glam rock monster “Ballroom Blitz” is here trippy and otherworldly. “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” a song about phantom cowboys, becomes genuinely ghostly, assisted by the weird distorted chorus of “Yippie-Yi-Ay”. The Steve Miller Band’s soft rock “Fly Like An Eagle” turns into avant-pop. Or is it avant-prog? Or art-synth? The Space Lady challenges genre categorisation. Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild,” a hard rock staple since its appearance on the soundtrack of Easy Rider, becomes something that is, well whatever it is, it’s not hard rock. “Radar Love,” the driving Seventies glam classic by Golden Earring, is transformed into what could be an X-Files soundtrack. Early rock’n’roll standards like “Shakin’ All Over” and Elvis’ “All Shook Up” get the same treatment, as does, less successfully, Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ On The Ritz” and a minor piece by The Doors. 

Best of all however is “Major Tom (Coming Home),” originally an Eighties hit by Peter Schilling, itself a significant sci-fi song because of the way it expands the story of David Bowie’s Major Tom astronaut character from 1969’s “Space Oddity”. In the hands of the Space Lady this tale of a lost scientist leaving his spaceship behind for the lure of infinite space becomes utterly, utterly eerie. I tell you, every time I hear it I get goosebumps.  

One of the other pleasures of The Space Lady’s Greatest Hits comes in the form of the photographs. There is Susan performing on the streets of San Francisco, wearing that plastic silver helmet with white wings and a flashing red beacon on top. And the CD disc features an image of her collecting bowl. Wonderful. 

Now in her late seventies, Susan Dietrich has released more albums since Greatest Hits, with covers ranging from David Bowie to The Beatles. 

The Space Lady, we salute you!