Hawkwind has been called space rock, psychadelic rock, progressive rock, even heavy metal. I never really understood the last designation until I listened to The Space Ritual: Alive in Liverpool and London. I might even call this album a form of space punk!
The Space Ritual concept was recorded live in December 1972 and released on 11 May 1973, going to #9 on the UK charts, and #179 on Billboard in the US. Segments of this electro-poetic-psychadelic freakout have been re-issued in various formats over the last 4 decades, but the complete Space Ritual concert experience was not available until EMI published it as a special 3-disc set in 2007. Discs 1 and 2 are regular 16-bit, 44kHz stereo CD’s, while disc 3 is a DVD-audio format of the same material, with 24-bit mastering in both 48kHz and 96kHz. The DVD-audio format allows you to listen to the entire concert without interruption. This offering is in 320-kbps mp3 format, converted from an EAC/FLAC rip of the original audio CD’s. I think you will find the sound quality to be quite acceptable.
The album was recorded during the Doremi Fasol Latido album tour which comprises the bulk of this set. Additional tracks include “Born To Go”, “Upside Down” and “Orgone Accumulator”. The songs are interspersed by electronic and spoken pieces, creating a seamless performance more than 132 minutes long.
The concert itself was a cerebral multimedia experience, representing themes developed by Barney Bubbles and Robert Calvert which entwined the fantasy of Starfarers in suspended animation travelling through time and space with the concept of the music of the spheres.
The performance featured dancers Stacia, Miss Renee and Tony Carrera, stage set by Bubbles, lightshow by Liquid Len and poetry recitations by Calvert. On entering the venue, audience members were given a free programme featuring a short sci-fi story by Bubbles setting the band in a Starfarers scenario returning to Earth.
The original double-LP release featured edits and overdubs to fit the limitations of vinyl, but now you can hear the original recording with all its conceptual intentions.
This is Hawkwind live, performing its Space Ritual.
Personnel:
Dave Brock (guitar, vocals, keyboards)
Nik Turner (saxophone, flute, vocals)
Lemmy Kilmister (bass, vocals)
Del Dettmar (keyboards)
Robert Calvert (vocals, poetry)
Simon King (drums)
DikMik (generator)
CD-1:
1) Earth Calling
2) Born To Go
3) Down Through The Night
4) The Awakening
5) Lord Of Light
6) The Black Corridor
7) Space Is Deep
8) Electronic No 1
9) Orgone Accumulator
10) Upside Down
11) 10 Seconds Of Forever
12) Brainstorm (Previously Unreleased Complete Version)
CD-2:
1) Seven By Seven
2) Sonic Attack
3) Time We Left This World Today
4) Master Of The Universe
5) Welcome To The Future (Previously Unreleased Complete Version)
6) You Shouldn’t Do That (Previously Unreleased)
Bonus Tracks:
7) Orgone Accumulator
8) Time We Left This World Today
9) You Shouldn’t Do That
I am the creator and site administrator at The Basement Rug. I have been collecting LP's and CD's for more than 30 years. I 
Hawkwind: ‘It was basically freak-out music’
They created ’space rock’, are probably the most influential British group ever – and prefer picking raspberries to stardom.
Hawkwind explain their 40-year survival.
by Ed Vulliamy
Thursday 27 August 2009
The approach to intergalactic headquarters runs along a narrow lane in Devon, under the bridge of a railway closed decades ago and through a number of gates with signs warning that “Our Dogs Bite”. There is a carved totem pole in the garden, and a studio like the Tardis, banked up with electronic equipment and posters for concerts spanning the four decades since Hawkwind formed. This is the home world of the band that became a project, the project that became a tribal gathering, of the tribe that became a great British institution and probably the most influential group ever in British music, bar the Beatles – only those under the influence often don’t know it. Hawkwind: the band that has impacted on every “genre”, hence the need for a genre all of their own: space rock.
Forty years ago, Hawkwind played their ever first gig, in Notting Hill in west London. As a local adolescent, it was my first gig, too – and as everyone knows, the branding iron of a first love leaves a mark like no other. As a result, I own more Hawkwind music than any other band’s; I’ve seen them play more than any other band. And tonight and tomorrow, Hawkwind will return to their old neighbourhood – to Porchester Hall, just up the road from Notting Hill – to celebrate that anniversary and their own endurance. “I suppose we always kept that down-to-earthness,” says singer-guitarist Dave Brock, “which kept us sane and kept us in touch with our people. Eating our tea in cafes, kind of thing, so we never got too big-headed.”
At the kernel of Hawkwind is Brock, the band’s founder, driving engine and sole remaining original member. If some 50 musicians have passed through Hawkwind – some loyal forever, some dead, others leaving acrimoniously – then “all the more reason for the captain of the ship to keep it afloat”, Brock says. “Because according to the rules, the crew get to bugger off in lifeboats if it sinks, while the captain stays aboard.” He prefers a different analogy: “I love football, and don’t want to compare myself to Arsène Wenger, but it is like managing a team. And as a team, we are top of our league, even if it’s not the Premiership.”
In the mid-60s, like many of his British rock contemporaries, Brock was hanging around the blues and jazz clubs of west London. But while they concentrated on getting their Sonny Boy Williamson licks perfect, Brock was at work with other forces. He worked at a design studio and visited Holland with his band Famous Cure, and then the embryonic Hawkwind investigated psychedelic visual effects and electronic experiments in German music. By the time of their debut gig (billed as Group X) in August 1969, Hawkwind had fused blues, folk, British symphonic rock and a driving electronic pulse into something of epic proportions.
“Well, it was basically freak-out music, wasn’t it?” Brock says. “We were using plenty of LSD, tape loops, repetitive riffs, colours and lights. But I was still making more money busking. After Don Partridge made that bloody song called Rosie, everyone wanted a try, and there’d be punch-ups for the cinema queue pitches in Leicester Square. But at some point Doug Smith [the band's promoter] had to tell me: ‘Dave, either you turn up and play in this group or you go busking.’ So I turned up to play, and that became Hawkwind.”
The band became the local fixture in turbulently psychedelic Notting Hill. They were our local band, carving their own furrow, with politics driving the music and vice-versa. They became the beacon of the benefit circuit, playing for the White Panthers, Friends of the Earth, Release and striking coal miners in 1985 – so much so that Brock would tire with band members forever promising his and everyone else’s time: “We had to do something for money, dammit.”
Crucially, though, Hawkwind remained the emblematic band of early Glastonbury and the free festival movement, of the peace convoys and solstice gatherings at Stonehenge, cut down brutally and bloodily by the police and Thatcher government at the Battle of the Beanfield in 1985. “I am serious about people’s right to make music and dance where they have made music and danced for centuries,” Brock says. “We are tribal, and want our music to be accessible to all ages. That has been important to me ever since I saw the West Indian bands in Notting Hill, grandparents and kids, all together. That is what I understand by a music festival.”
“We never supported a cause which encouraged violence,” says the effervescent Kris Tait, who joined Hawkwind in the 1980s as one of the famous dancers that became integral to the shows, and is now Brock’s wife and the band’s manager. “Well, we did sometimes,” chides Brock. Every attempt to tour America is still dogged not only by spent marijuana convictions but by the song Urban Guerrilla: “Let’s not talk about love and flowers/ And things that don’t explode/ We’ve used up all our magic powers / Trying to do it in the road.”
But among all this, between the gigs among pagan stones and the bloody-mindedness and the drugs stories, the music sometimes gets forgotten. So what is space rock? “Actually,” Brock concedes, “although it was simple to play, it has always been as complicated as you want it to be, and musically there is rather more there than meets the eye.” Space rock, apparently, has energy and eschatalogical direction.
“Ultimately, it is optimistic,” says Brock, in comparison to, say, Pink Floyd, whose music is, “Well, a bit doom-laden, isn’t it?” Space rock aligned itself to the writing of – and performances by – the poet Robert Calvert and novelist Michael Moorcock. “We were all reading science fiction and after the first moon landing, exploring the idea that everything could change,” says Brock. “We were taking LSD, and the journey outward was also an inner journey, I suppose.”
Crucial to Hawkwind’s endurance has been the group’s ability to connect with successive generations – “The audiences are now younger than ever,” says Tait. Rather than try to keep up with the underground music of the time, Hawkwind have tended to prefigure it. Punk and grunge listened attentively (John Lydon was a dedicated fan; Mudhoney have covered Urban Guerrilla). Hawkwind were gurus to the trance generation, both musically and philosophically – pioneers in both electronic exploration and the connection between ancient ley lines and psychotropic technology, so much so that the Orb recorded a tribute called Orbwind. From 2002, as the raves subsided (just as the free festivals had years earlier), Hawkwind began their annual Hawkfests, “which was a way,” says Brock, “of carrying on free festivals as a membership occasion, just as you might hold a gathering of custom car enthusiasts. They are membership occasions, though the idea is to stay accessible – there’s no backstage at a Hawkfest.”
The band emerges from the studio to join us. “I’m one of those people who loved Hawkwind before I knew who they were,” says the bassist, Mr Dibs. “I was into the Buzzcocks and Joy Division, but was given a tape of Hawklords [a pseudonym Hawkwind adopted briefly for legal reasons in the late 1970s] without knowing what it was, and thought ‘This is me.’ So I was a fan, then a roadie for 12 years and now I’m in the band – a dream come true.”
“We create a sound which is our own, whatever music it is,” says drummer Richard Chadwick – at 21 years, the band’s longest-serving member apart from Brock. “The model is the Beatles, in as much as whatever they did – be it the first heavy metal in Helter Skelter or the first world music on a sitar – the sound was the Beatles. That’s our intention: what you hear is Hawkwind and could only be Hawkwind, whatever we are playing. I came to Hawkwind through the anarcho-punk scene of the 1980s, so for me the music is the politics and the politics is the music, which means not becoming a ’star’, but playing what could only be Hawkwind. If you take this sound to the audience in a stadium or at Glastonbury as it is now, it will inevitably change. So we survive, with a sense of decency. I’ve seen Dave [Brock] turn down those opportunities time and time again – his own show on MTV, this supergroup or that. And that is how this band has lasted 40 years in the way it has.”
“Yes, there have been plenty of chances to become a star,” Brock says. “Just the other day, they wanted me to get together with Lemmy and that bloke from Jefferson Starship – Paul Kantner – but I thought, ‘Oh Christ, please no.’ If I get pushed into that, they’ll push me into something else, then something else. I’ve seen people do it, doing it the way someone else wants it, away from their families, away from home. Some people like it – Lemmy’s got his place in Los Angeles with a pool and that, lives on the road and will die on the road. But I’ve got raspberries to pick as well as Hawkwind music to work on. I mean, we can’t play the same old stuff the same every time.”
Brock smiles, more to himself than to anyone around the table, and tells the story about how he found Hawkwind’s old red lighting-gear van for sale in Auto Trader. He bought it – and there it is in the farmyard. “Lots of my friends have got yachts,” he says, “but how many yachts does a person need?”
Then Brock explains what he needs. “First, we bought that field, but we were still visible, and audible. So we bought that meadow there – and Kris and I raised horses for a while. Now, we have that piece of woodland, and from the top of it, there’s a sea view, right as far as where my parents retired.” The idea is, clearly, that intergalactic headquarters be as close to sealed off as it possible to be on this crowded island, and thereby as close as possible to – to what? Space? Or something Hawkwind are still looking for.