The Space Lady’s Greatest Hits

Her story is told beautifully in the insert of this collection, but I’ll just give you a few key points: the Space Lady started busking in the late 70s with an accordion and, following an incident with a drunk asshole, switched to a set up of a basic drum machine, a casio keyboard and an echo pedal, becoming a star in San Francisco’s Castro district in the 80s playing her version of current and past hits. She retired in 2000 but came back in the early 10s, still playing on the streets with her distinctive winged plastic helmet.

This record has mostly songs from her CDr she self-released in 1990, I think. Being a street performer, her sound is obviously minimalistic. You could think of her as a wide-eyed, sweet, good-hearted hippie version of Suicide. Everything is enveloped in swirling phaser and echo. There are two fantastic originals, “Humdinger” and “Synthesize Me”, and eight mindblowing covers. My favorites are “Major Tom” (German pop hit from the 80s, if it doesn’t ring a bell it will as soon as you hear it) and the ultra-psychedelic “Ghost Riders In The Sky”, but every song is a miracle on this sea-green plastic thing. What about the spacey echo mindfuck of “Born To Be Wild”? Her voice is gentle, soothing and otherworldly and will make you feel like you’re shooting through space on a ramshackle DIY spaceship decorated with blinking xmas lights.

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