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Peter Schilling never thought this would happen.
A song he released in 1983 has taken over the 2024 European Championship.
The infectious Major Tom has risen from stadiums and soared over the fan parks across host nation Germany. It is, with apologies to Gala’s Freed From Desire, the sound of the tournament.
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More than 40 years after it was written, the story of an astronaut drifting into oblivion has harmonised a divided country, capturing the new era of optimism that surrounds its national football team.
“It’s crazy for me,” Schilling, now 68, tells The Athletic, “because I never expected the song to have this kind of power.
“Major Tom has been an anthem in sport before. There is an ice hockey team, Mannheim Eagles, who have been using it for years. When Borussia Dortmund won the Champions League in 1997, their fans sang it, too. But this wave of popularity is extraordinary; it’s fantastic for me.”
When it first came out, Major Tom (Vollig Losgelost) — to use its full title, the second bit translates as ‘Completely Detached’ — went to number one in Germany, Austria, Canada, Switzerland and even Bolivia. Its off-kilter rhythms are the essence of 1980s German cool and decades spent soundtracking disparate parts of popular culture — from movie Atomic Blonde to TV dramas Breaking Bad and Deutschland ’83 — have not diminished its infectiousness; it is still able to speak to a new generation.
Schilling grew up a Bayern Munich fan, enraptured by their West Germany international sweeper Franz Beckenbauer — “It was his elegance. He was like a new type of footballer” — and might have become a player, too. He had trials with VfB Stuttgart, his big local club. A whippet-like forward who played on the left, he was offered a contract, but football could never quite compete with music.
Then, in his late teens, he had a choice to make.
GO DEEPERFranz Beckenbauer was Germany's most beautiful and important footballer - no one will get close“I had an offer from a record label in Stuttgart,” Schilling says. “I knew my development as a football player would come to an end because there were other players coming up who were just as fast and had very good technique, too. I decided from the bottom of my heart that music was the thing, so it was a logical direction. But that was just the beginning and it took 10 years until I reached my goal.”
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And now, in 2024, music and football are entwined for him again.
Germany played their second group game of the tournament in Stuttgart. Before and after the 2-0 win against Hungary that confirmed their qualification for the knockout phase, 50,000 people inside the stadium sang Major Tom’s refrain together, sending it echoing out across a sun-scorched city.
Vollig losgelost (Completely detached)
Von der erde (From the Earth)
Schwebt das raumschiff (The Spacecraft floats)
Vollig schwerelos (Completely weightless)
“What many people don’t know is that I wrote the song 800 metres (half a mile) from that stadium. It’s from that area,” says Schilling. “So, I was watching that day and there were so many different things going on. The game. Germany winning. The people. The place where the song was written. And then there’s me, sitting in front of my TV.
“This is what it’s all about. It’s why I started making music. This is it.”
Germany fans signing Peter Schilling’s Major Tom. Great atmosphere here ahead of Germany 🇩🇪 vs Hungary 🇭🇺. #Euro2024 pic.twitter.com/JMPHy3GawE
— Manuel Veth (@ManuelVeth) June 19, 2024
Songs have captured the spirit of tournaments before — Three Lions (Football’s Coming Home) at Euro 96in England. Wavin’ Flag at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. But this is different — Major Tom was written neither for this tournament nor this Germany team. It has no relation to football. All sorts of elements have had to collide at precisely the right time to create a phenomenon.
That process began back in March, when Adidas launched the new Germany kit with a razor-sharp, pitch-perfect marketing campaign, toying mischievously with national stereotypes. It struck a chord. Crucially, it used Schilling’s Major Tom as its soundtrack.
“The Adidas spot was the basis of the whole success,” says Schilling. “Suddenly, the supporters were incredibly into it. A fan called Max Kirchi made an online petition for the song to become the national team’s goal music. Within a few hours, 70,000 fans had signed it.”
Goal music is a big deal in German football. It’s the song that plays over the stadium sound system immediately after the home team score and, typically, over time, it becomes integral to the matchday experience at that club. In his petition, Kirchi wrote that “regardless of whether you are enthusiastic about the jersey or not, everyone can agree that the song fits with a feeling of new beginnings (for) the national team”.
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At the time of writing, that petition has over 300,000 signatures. Kirchi captured the mood.
“Suddenly,” Schilling remembers, “the DFB came to us about using the song because they noticed what was happening with the fans. A DFB employee told me that in his 20-year career at the DFB, he had never seen something like this.”
The Deutsche Fussball-Bund (DFB) is the German Football Association. Over the past 10 years, it has not enjoyed an easy relationship with the public. Since Germany won the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, scandal, over-commercialisation and poor performance by the national team have combined to drive them and the fans apart.
In 2018 and 2022, Germany were eliminated after the group stage of successive World Cups. It was a historic low for a country that has won four World Cups and got to four more finals.
Between those two tournaments, the national team’s domestic television audience halved, from 22 million down to just over 11 million. The nest of social issues presented by Qatar’s staging of the most recent World Cup was complicit in that, with many Germans demanding that the team not take part at all.
They went. They were bad. Everything got worse.
GO DEEPERGermany's World Cup failure: 'It’s not just bad luck, it’s inability'Embracing Major Tom has been a way for the DFB to reconnect with supporters and to show it was paying attention. It adopted the song as their goal music, their ‘torhymne’, in March.
UEFA, European football’s governing body and organiser of the Euros, has prevented Germany from using it at the tournament, insisting that only its officially licensed song is used, but Major Tom is being played before and after games and has replaced Zombie Nation’s Kernkraft 400, which had been in use since 2019.
Schilling was only too happy to give his permission.
“The DFB told me that there was some distance between the fans and the team and that the song could help change that and make them a bit closer again. The DFB could show the supporters: look, we are listening to you, your interests are important to us. And they could show that through the example of the song. So, I did my little bit to give the initial spark to the story that’s happening now. I’m so proud that I was able to do that.”
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Germany quickly started to improve.
Excellent wins against France and the Netherlands in their two March friendlies created momentum and a belief that Euro 2024, the first men’s international tournament held in Germany in 18 years, could potentially produce the kind of euphoria awakened by the staging of that 2006 World Cup when the hosts were surprise semi-finalists.
Another factor has been the release of a mould-breaking away kit. Germany’s home shirt is always white. Their change one is traditionally either green or red and black. But this year’s version is pink and, upon release, it was pitched as being representative of a new generation of fans and as a celebration of a modern, diverse Germany.
Some traditionalists raged. It began something close to a culture war.
Ultimately, it has become the quickest-selling away shirt in the history of the team. Its success has deepened the sense of renewal and change.
Major Tom and Schilling are entwined with that optimism.
When coach Julian Nagelsmann’s final squad for this tournament was revealed, the DFB decided to announce many of the players included on an individual basis, ahead of time. It was another non-traditional move. Again, it was popular.
Maximilian Mittelstadt, the Stuttgart full-back who rose dramatically last season to claim a place in the Germany team, became symbolic of a new, more meritocratic selection policy. He also scored the first goal to use Major Tom as its music in that game against the Dutch and Schilling filmed the vignette confirming Mittelstadt had made the Euros squad.
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For those wondering about any connection with the 1969 David Bowie song Space Oddity, which also has an astronaut named Major Tom, Schilling was actually inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s movie from a year earlier, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Like Bowie, Schilling was deeply affected by Kubrick’s film and when he talks to The Athletic over Zoom, he has a backdrop of a galaxy of stars and light.
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“I saw 2001 in 1970 and it left such an impression on me. I had been 13 years old when the first moon landing happened in 1969. I remembered watching it on TV and seeing those guys, so, so far away, walking up there. It was fascinating.”
The two songs are very different. As are the two Major Toms.
In both, he is an astronaut cut off from Earth and floating farther out into space. Bowie’s is heading for disaster without knowing it. Schilling’s is strangely optimistic in the face of a doom he understands is inevitable.
Far beneath the ship the world is mourning,
They don’t realise he’s alive,
No one understands, but Major Tom sees
Now the light commands, this is my home
I’m coming home
The song itself came together in fragments.
Having enjoyed breakthrough success with a single titled Only Dreams, Schilling was encouraged to go further down that creative path.
“I had an old guitar riff that I had forgotten about,” he says. “I’d written a melody and that was lying around, too. I remember writing the lyrics in about four or five hours. When everything was put together, all those little pieces, it just worked.
“When we played it in the studio the first time, people had tears in their eyes. I was astonished by the reaction to the song. I still am.”
German society is in transition. It is experiencing change and not necessarily in a comfortable way.
Within that context, perhaps Major Tom offers something familiar, euphoric and reassuring. Or it could just be that the sun is out, the football is good, and Schilling wrote an incredibly catchy song. For different people, different reasons.
“Some things happen that you can’t plan,” Schilling says. “I’m glad to have this, you know. Millions of songwriters over generations around the world and across the generations would want to have this kind of moment with one of their songs. And I have it. It’s happened to me.”
GO DEEPERBeer, Euro 2024, and all those cups - what's going on?(Top photo: Schilling performing last year; by Jason Tschepljakow/picture alliance via Getty Images)
