15 October 1992
Hate is a strong word to use about a mere pop song. When I was young in 1992, though, I hated ‘Sleeping Satellite’. That naff “I blame you for the moonlit sky” chorus hook! Those clumsy, wordy lyrics! Its deification by middle-aged music press like Q magazine as Proper Songwriting Craft! I cringed for it. I felt cheated at how it started straight at that chorus before I could get to the radio, so I kept having to hear that awful lyric. I couldn’t understand why it was on the radio morning, noon and night in the first place.
Now that we’ve all matured, how does it sound today? Archer herself has a more likeable presence than I had remembered: sincere, yes, but not Bono-overbearing about it. Probably because I usually changed stations long before it, I had also forgotten about that twinkling Hammond organ mid-section, a not entirely unsuccessful tilt at engineering a starlight-dappled ambience.
Still, though, it’s a dreadfully corny song. “Did we fly to the moon too soon?” isn’t a figure of speech: this is literally what ‘Sleeping Satellite’ is about. The “eagle’s flight” in the chorus is the Eagle lunar module of ‘the Eagle has landed’ fame. The sleeping satellite could be the moon but might be the Earth. From a close textual reading, to save myself having to listen to the song any more than necessary, I take Archer’s point to be that the dry prose of the Apollo moon landings took away the poetry of looking into the night sky, and we’re now confined dreamless to an Earth we’re destroying. As a critique of industrial space exploration, its merits are for you to judge. As a song idea, is it ambitious and mercurial or contrived and workshopped? I tend to the latter, and Archer’s gauche AOR lyrics don’t convince me otherwise. The “I blame you for the moonlit sky” hook still sounds like overwrought teenage poetry. What if we went to the moon and found it to be as dull and inhospitable as ‘Sleeping Satellite’?
