Who's she?

In this shallow, celebrity-obsessed age, a lack of talent is no barrier to fame and fortune, so long as you can capture the imagination of tabloid journalists and a zombified TV audience. How ironic, then, that someone like Lucia Pamela - whose music career spans nine decades - has been all but forgotten. Voted Miss St Louis as a teenager in 1926 (or so she claims), Pamela devoted her life to showbusiness, performing across the US and Europe throughout the last century and winning a Medal of Honor from Congress for entertaining American troops during wartime. She's also been immortalised in Ripley's Believe It Or Not! for memorising more songs than anyone else (10,000-plus!), and was the creative force behind numerous US radio programmes, stageshows and even a colouring book for kids "from the ages of three to 80".

Why should we care?

In 1969, Pamela unleashed Into Outer Space - an LP which has since become the Holy Grail for fans of outsider music. Purportedly recorded on the Moon - long before the Apollo XI team set foot on our celestial satellite - Into Outer Space sees Pamela playing all the instruments herself, creating an offbeat, charming cacophony where perky pianos collide with madcap drums and wild clarinets, the instruments struggling to compete with Pamela's unearthly growling and chattering as she relates the amazing things she's seen in space, including talking cows, singing cats and an intergalactic dance known as the 'Flip, Flop, Fly'.

Where is she now?

Pamela has retired from showbiz, and her most recent work was staging an Into Outer Space show to raise money for local charities in LA. Her work remains a source of inspiration for leftfield musicians, most notably Laetitia Sadier and Tim Gane of Stereolab, who penned 'International Colouring Contest' as a tribute to Pamela and sampled her voice for the album Mars Audiac Quintet.

CURRENTLY AVAILABLE: Into Outer Space has been reissued. Get it from Arfarfrecords.com