The Space Lady – The
Space Lady's Greatest Hits (Night School Records)
The Space Lady (aka
Susan Dietrich) is a San Franciscan street performer who started out playing
pop covers on her accordion in the late 1970s. Following the theft of her instrument,
she upgraded to newer technology, in the shape of the Casio keyboard, then festooned
herself in space travel paraphernalia and transmitted her strange messages of
peace and harmony through to the 1990s.
She came into low-key
cult status with her inclusion on Irwin Chusid's compilation of outsider music,
“Songs In The Key Of Z” in 2000 - an album, which collected a host of strange,
unconventional or mentally unstable artists.
Arguably the appeal of the
outsider musician is the exponent’s insular musical vision, self-belief and
compulsion to perform – often vying with accepted standards of taste and
tolerance - that gives the music an unnerving, unsettling or mysterious edge,
and perplexes their audience. The Space Lady sits (un)comfortably within this “genre”.
“The Space Lady's
Greatest Hits” collects together her only recorded music from her 70s-90s
career. What you get is bizarre, cabaret, lo-fi recordings of a quite
intelligent and distinctive voice, atop sounds that are as simple as they are
strange and arcane.
The self-penned “Humdinger”
is a description of all that surrounds her, “Synthesize Me” sets selected
lyrics to complement the space-age backdrop and Peter Schilling’s “Major Tom”
is an apt choice of cover.
Other songs chosen, work
in a more inexplicable manner. The cowboy classic, “Ghost Riders in the Sky” is
totally haunting but conjures no horses, “Born to Be Wild” lacks the aggression
and rock ’n’ roll of Steppenwolf’s original, but is wild. The Electric Prunes’ “I
Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)” is modulation crazy and “Ballroom Blitz”
removes all traces of glam.
In 2012 The Space Lady
revived her career, playing at the Riverwalk and on Union Street in Pueblo, CO,
and at the UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico and is now
recording again. Her recordings have also appeared on mixes by Erol Alkan and
John Maus.
“The Space Lady's
Greatest Hits” is totally unique, as humorous as it is weird, and a mind-boggling
curio.
Willsk
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