What Planet Am I On? Read Online Free PDF

UFOs. I’ve personally never written a song about UFOs or aliens in all my years with Happy Mondays or Black Grape. But then I very rarely ever write a specific song about anything in particular. Most of my songs I put together like a magpie, dragging together different lines and images that work well together. Probably the closest I came to revealing my extraterrestrial interests was name-checking Neil Armstrong in the Black Grape single ‘In the Name of the Father’:
    Neil Armstrong, astronaut,
    he had balls bigger than King Kong,
    First big suit on the moon, and he’s off to play golf
    hole in one!
    But that didn’t mean anything really. When we were making the first Black Grape album, me and Kermit would just riff off each other in the studio a lot of the time. We’d both have little snippets and one-liners, and a song would emerge from that.

    When I was growing up, David Bowie was the main pop star who was writing about space and life on other planets, or certainly the main one who we knew about, the geezer who was speaking to kids like me. But Bowie was far from the first. What did John Lennon say about Elvis? Before anyone did anything, Elvis did everything? Well, that applies to UFOs as well.
    There’s a well-known story told by Elvis’s dad about how there was a big blue light that shone above his house when Elvis was born. Elvis himself came out with some bonkers stuff in his time, but in the last fifteen years of his life he became mates with a woman called Wanda June Hill who recorded some strange interviews with him. There’s some debate over these interviews but they’ve been checked out by a specialist who says it is Elvis.
    In one of these interviews he tells old Wanda that he was visited by ‘life forms’ as a kid. ‘I am not of this world,’ Elvis told her. ‘I am a man, I am a human being now, but what is “me” is not from here. I am from out there . . . you think I am making this up, but it’s true – you’ll know one day.’
    When he was shooting the film Spinout in 1966, Elvis started seeing his co-star Deborah Walley at the same time, and told her that he didn’t want to spend any time on ‘trivialities’: ‘I got the word. I want to give it to you. I’m not a man. I’m not a woman. I’m a soul, a spirit, aforce. I have no interest in anything of this world. I want to live in another dimension entirely.’
    Elvis had several UFO encounters including one in the late sixties when he was driving down Route 66 with Larry Geller and Jerry Schilling, two of the ‘Memphis Mafia’ (which is what they called the hangers-on who were always around Elvis). Elvis saw a ‘flying saucer’ cross the sky in front of them and get brighter, then do a right-hand turn and just shoot off into the distance. ‘That was definitely not a shooting star!’ said Elvis. The other two agreed. Jerry pointed out that nothing manmade moved like that and Larry said, ‘That thing moved like a flying saucer.’ Elvis later told Larry, ‘It’s ridiculous to think we’re the only life with millions of planets in the universe.’
    I’m totally with old Elvis on that one. Couldn’t agree with you more, mate.
    You could spend your life reading about Elvis, and there are quite a few extraterrestrial connections we read about while researching this book and TV series. It didn’t stop when he died either – loads of people have claimed to have seen weird lights and phenomena over Graceland since.
    I’m not sure where Elton John was coming from when he first saw a picture of Elvis from ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and thought he resembled ‘a man from Mars’. But I do remember an episode of The X-Files where references were made to Elvis’s UFO connections. FBI agent Fox Mulder told his partner Dana Scully that he was goingon a spiritual journey and then at the end of the show he tips up at Graceland, putting on Elvis shades.
    There were lots of incidents with musicians and UFOs in the sixties, which I’m