Here’s an album that crosses over with another one of my series on this blog, as it features some work written by Michael Moorcock (who also played with the band from time to time), and who features in my Appendix N series. Hawkwind have a couple of albums based on Moorcock’s works as well, but they come after this one.
I hope that at least one of the band’s “Charisma Era” albums makes it to the list, when Bob Calvert played more of a role as frontman and the songs were more complex and lyrical, although this live album is more indicative of the characteristic “space rock” sound of Hawkwind.
This is the classic line-up. Dave Brock, of course. Del Dettmar on synth, Simon King on drums, Nik Taylor on sax, and one Ian “Lemmy” Kilminster on bass. Urban myth has it that Hawkwind sacked Lemmy from the band by asking him to pop out of the tour van to buy some cigarettes and then driving off without him, no idea if this is true. Since he named his band after a Hawkwind song, I don’t think there were too many hard feelings, and this sounds more like Pink Floyd getting rid of Syd Barrett by just no longer taking him to gigs.
At this stage, musically, Hawkwind create lengthy tracks with a steady hypnotic rhythm from drums and bass, over which jam the guitars of Brock and the woodwind of Taylor, wrapped up in rushing, swirling, synth sounds. The music is broken up with spoken word pieces intoned by Calvert, but the spacy noises continue. It can be deeply hypnotic, which is perhaps why it appealed to me the moment I heard Hall Of The Mountain Grill decades ago.
Lyrically, Hawkwind are influenced by science fiction and fantasy; this performance is imagined around interstellar travellers in suspended animation. During this era the lyrics are sparse and less distinct, becoming more to the forefront in the Charisma Era. As well as Moorcock, however, we get Lord Of Light, based on the Roger Zelazny novel (he’s another Appendix N figure, but I haven’t got to him as of writing this. He’ll be right at the end). Lemmy’s bass on this track is superb.
We also get Orgone Accumulator, one of two tracks written about the woo inventions of Wilhelm Reich – the other being Cloudbusting by Kate Bush - one of the few tracks on here where the lyrics really shine through. I didn’t think that I’d heard this album before, but Bob Calvert delivers a spoken word piece (written by Moorcock) called Sonic Attack, a faux public information announcement on how to spot an imminent sonic attack (“There will be bleeding from orifices”) and what to do (“Use your wheels, it is what they are for. Think only of yourself”). Calvert intones it in crisp, Alan Rickman-esque tones, and I know I’ve heard it before, possibly on a compilation. It’s the best of the spoken word pieces, although Ten Seconds Of Forever is good too.
This is another band that I saw live, with the Huw Lloyd-Langton line-up, by which time the band had returned to this kind of space rock (albeit with a harder edge). The band tend to blend into the dry ice and light show, hiding within the sound and vision, apart from a female dancer or two wearing little more than a G-string and body paint. Not the famous Stacia when I saw them, she’d long left the band. Easier on the eye than Bez, however.
The whole performance then, and here especially, is almost like a shamanic ritual, the pulsing swirling music inducing almost a trance-like state. And that’s kind of the gist of most of the Hawkwind output, a sort of melange of shamanic, cosmic, science-fiction, fantasy, trippy stuff – Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker comes close in a literary sense.
There have been a few albums recently that felt like revisiting old friends – Dark Side Of The moon, Aladdin Sane – and they’ve been good to hear again after a long time but lacked the deep emotional punch that they gave me decades ago. But this one I enjoyed a lot more; it’s like meeting an old friend and discovering that although you’ve both changed over the years, you’ve changed in ways that make you *more* interesting to each other.
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