Has life gotten you down?
Do things seem hard or tough?
We might have just the antidote: Stephen Hawking covering Monty Python's "Galaxy Song."
The famous physicist and pop icon has lent his electronic voice to a new video for the ditty, written by Eric Idle and made famous as the closing track in the British comedy troupe's 1983 film classic Monty Python's the Meaning of Life.
The cover is set for released as a 7-inch single for Record Store Day on April 18. It follows Monty Python Live (Mostly), a stage revival with Idle, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam performing such classic skits as "Dead Parrot" and "Ministry of Silly Walks."
According to The Guardian: "There are just 1,000 physical copies of the song available for Record Store Day, but fans of the song can purchase a digital versionfrom 13 April."
Along with "Galaxy Song," a version of the classic video game Asteroids is being released featuring a heavily armed Hawking shooting up the faces of the Monty Python cast.
This is not the first time that Hawking has appeared in a music video — his "voice" has also been featured in two songs by the British band Pink Floyd.
Hawking's life story was featured in last year's biopic The Theory of Everything, starring Eddie Redmayne as the renowned physicist who has struggled for decades with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). And as we noted previously, the 73-year-old cosmologist "is no stranger to pop culture, and has left an enduring mark on the celebrity landscape. He's appeared on TV shows ranging from a cameo as a hologram of himself as a poker player aboard the Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation, to an object of fawning adulation for the geeky cast of The Big Bang Theory."
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
