Images courtesy of the Canadian Space Agency and Chris Hadfield
As if getting to fly in space isn’t enough, a group of former astronauts also has its own “out-of-this-world” band, and they’re coming to play in our area.
They call themselves “Bandella”, and just about all of them have been on multiple space flights and space walks. Canadian, Chris Hadfield, who retired as a colonel a career as a test pilot that included stints in the Canadian Air Force as well as the U.S. Air Force and Navy, later flew two Space Shuttle missions and did a tour as commander of the International Space Station. Colonel Hadfield says Bandella started in a basement in Russia almost exactly 20 years ago, “where we were training to fly on the Russian Soyuz rocket,” Hadfield says, “I was NASA’s director of operations in Russia, and in the evenings, we would get together and play music.” Hadfield says they continued it after they moved back to Houston, and he says they’ve been able to play gigs all over the country, where they’ve enjoyed interacting with the people who come to their shows.
Hadfield tells Northwest Newsradio music is a big part of life on the ISS. Hadfield says, “There’s a guitar. I mean, we’re just people, and even though we’re living a long way from home, we still need arts and a chance to try and explain the complexities of life to ourselves, so that guitar gets played every day…I played and recorded a whole album of music on that guitar when I was up there.”
Recording that album wasn’t just for posterity, or ego, but it included Hadfield’s rendition of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”, the video for which went viral and was seen by hundreds of millions of people…a video which, by the way, Hadfield had to do all by himself after everyone else was asleep…recording, lighting and shooting the video and the performance.
Hadfield is a guitar player and singer, and the rest of the band features a flute, a stand-up bass and plenty of singing. Hadfield says the music they play is what he calls “world acoustic music”, although a lot of the songs have a space theme.
Bandella is playing two shows this weekend at the Museum of Flight but, unfortunately, they are both sold out, but maybe we’ll get lucky and catch the show in a bootleg video.
