Marvin Gaye

Not one of his ten planets sits in an air sign. Earth takes four, with three each in fire and water, and five of the ten are cardinal. The Sun, Mercury and Saturn sit inside eight degrees of Aries, which is a tight group, and the Moon's sign is certain at twenty two degrees of Virgo. The record says Gaye fought Motown to release What's Going On, an album about Vietnam, poverty and the environment that the label thought was commercial suicide, and that his father shot him the day before his forty fifth birthday.

Jupiter sits in direct opposition to Neptune at thirteen hundredths of a degree, the tightest contact in the chart, and the reading is faith without evidence: wishful thinking, being taken in, and promises that felt entirely real when they were made. All three clauses are written as failures, and the record is a case where that shape succeeded. A label holding the sales figures said the album was commercial suicide, the man without the figures said it was not, and he was right, which is faith without evidence described from the other end.

The Moon sits conjunct Neptune at over four fifths of a degree, feeling without edges: strong intuition, absorbing the mood of a room whether or not it is wanted, and genuine difficulty telling your own feelings from somebody else's. An album about a war, about poverty and about the state of the air is a room the size of a country, and absorbing its mood is a fair description of the job the record says he insisted on doing. Three of the four closest contacts in this chart use the Moon, Jupiter and Neptune, so nearly everything tight here is the same three bodies said three ways.

The record's last fact is a father shooting his son, and nothing in these ten planets contains it, predicted it or bears on it. He died in Los Angeles on 1 April 1984, at forty four, the day before his forty fifth birthday, which put the transiting Sun back within a fifth of a degree of its natal place. That is the date restated in degrees and nothing more: a death beside a birthday produces a solar return automatically, and the orb is measuring the calendar. Mercury, Neptune and Pluto were the three retrograde planets. Jupiter stood square his natal Sun at three tenths of a degree that day and Venus opposite his natal Moon at a third. The Moon was new and nought per cent lit, a phase that starts things without waiting to see the whole of them.