1969

Album: Here Come the Aliens (2018)
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Songfacts®:

  • This cut was inspired by Kim Wilde's close encounter with a UFO in 2009. The incident happened when the songstress was sitting in her garden with a glass of wine. She recalled to the BBC:

    "I looked up in the sky and saw this huge bright light behind a cloud. Brighter than the moon, but similar to the light from the moon. I said to my husband and my friend, 'that's really odd,' so we walked down the grass and looked to see if there was any source. All of a sudden it moved, very quickly, from about 11.00 to 1.00. Then it just did that, back and forth, for several minutes. Whenever it moved, something shifted in the air - but it was silent. Absolutely silent."

    Kim Wilde added that her friends and family around her accused her of drinking too much wine that night. "But the week after, the Welwyn and Hatfield Times carried the story of someone else who had actually taken a photograph of a sphere in the sky," she said. "And the witness account tallies exactly with my one. So I said to everyone, 'There you go!'"
  • The song is the opening track of Here Come the Aliens, Wilde's first album of original tunes for 23 years. The LP takes its title from one of "1969"'s lyrics.
  • The song title is a reference to the year that man first stepped on the Moon, an event that ignited Kim Wilde's interest in space.

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