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Play, download and edit the free video Jonathan King - Everyones Gone To The Moon (1965).

This is one of the most beautiful songs to come out of Britain in 1965, I think. I always loved hearing it when it came out ... I was 11 at the time and it played on my imagination with dreams of later moon missions still only on the drafting board. But this was always in the background with talk that not only the Moon would be colonized, but even Mars by the end of the 20th Century, not to mention space tourism (far from the reality of what was to come). The deeper meaning of the lyrics eluded me until I got quite older, but I felt the song was a profoundly sad one. After a time, it just drifted away, maybe to be heard occasionally as an oldie on an adult easy listening station, never on an oldies station.

"Everyone's Gone To The Moon" by Jonathan King was without question an inspiration for the cynical but lovely space songs by David Bowie and Elton John that would come out seven years later in 1972. But whereas "Space Oddity" and "Rocket Man" dealt with the consequences of a deadly space accident or a very long separation of a husband from his wife from the first person perspective (the astronaut's), "Everyone's Gone To The Moon" addressed issues that were more of a social nature. It does this in a very poetic manner, dealing first with the impressions of those left behind on Earth as everyone else who is capable of space travel goes off to the Moon or elsewhere in space, more and more with each passing year. Ultimately though, this is a song about loneliness, despair, aging, and being left behind. The Moon functions as a complex metaphor. It is about the consequences of scientific progress for one thing. Progress may improve one's life in some respects, but in the process something very important is always lost and left behind. Change is the natural way of things, but as the years pass it ultimately brings on feelings of nostalgia, loneliness and longing for a time that is fading and eventually no longer exists. The people in our lives gradually disappear and ultimately they die (if we don't die first). And every passing year, a part of ourselves die as we gradually become someone else. But the ultimate meaning to me of "Everyone's Gone To The Moon" is everyone's gone to the cemetery and the history books.

"Everyone's Gone to the Moon" was released in 1965 while Jonathan King was still an undergraduate at Cambridge University, according to Wikipedia. It peaked at #4 in the UK, and debuted in the United States in early September 1965 (just as school fall semester was starting). It reached #17 on Billboard and #12 for two weeks at Cash Box on November 20, 1965.

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