This review looks at the Hawkwind DVDs that can be purchased and rates them, purely in my not-at-all-biased opinion... If anyone out there wants to review any older DVD or VHS video releases I would be very pleased to publish on this page. Email me here with your reviews.
At the time of writing (June 2002) there are three Hawkwind DVD's that are generally available, although they may not be easy to locate. Try the normal CD outlets such as Amazon & CD Services etc..
There are RealPlayer samples from the COTBS and Night of the Hawks DVD's, plus one from the Love In Space video at Outlaw TV
The most atmospheric part is when they play at dawn, with the sun rising. The Ken Barlow mantra is included, but is not one of the musical highlights....Uncle Sam's On Mars is probably the best track. This video is best watched with the sound turned down and a Hawkwind CD playing - there's plenty of local colour, with the punky vestal virgin dancers and closing shots of the encampment. (These are very nostalgia inducing!) But as a record of Hawkwind playing live in the setting that perhaps suited them best, it's disappointing. 5/10.
October 2004: There has been a subsequent DVD release of this which I reviewed separately here
There is quite a bit of interplay between band members, with Dave Brock exchanging grins with Simon House and with Alan Davey - Simon only smiles during the band's classic numbers, he looks as miserable as sin when playing less sublime cuts such as Night of the Hawks. In fact at one point, as the camera zooms in on his rather bleak expression I would swear he is thinking "I've played with Bowie - is this the only gig I can get?" To my ears this video echoes the Sunday Times reviewer who described EpochEclipse as being enthralling and appalling in equal measure - some of it is superb, some dire, with the low point coming in Back In The Box. For my money this is one of Hawkwind's poorest songs, and it trails off into a laughable piece of performance art, featuring Harvey, Bridgett and a kilted roadie (not Mr. Dibs)....but the next track, Utopia, is blinding, probably the best number they do. It outclasses every other version of that song I've heard.
Also appearing are Kris Tait and Wango Riley (fire-eaters) and Julie Murray (dancer). Julie Murray is dressed as a curiously sexless Hippy Ballerina and cavorts along to Out Of The Shadows and part of Night Of The Hawks. Quite effective. Wango and Kris feature in Ejection and Damnation Alley. Kris looked very different way back then...what they do is quite alarming, when you notice the open buckets of fuel on stage, along with their burning torches....
All in all this is a good DVD and is probably the most easily obtained of them all. 8/10.
3rd October 2004: Graham Hawker sent in this look at the Live Legends VHS video, which was the precursor to the Classic Rock DVD:
I’m not going to waffle on too much here because this is the same as the DVD except for the addition of Wind of Change. It has to be said though that Wind of Change is just fantastic and with it is twice as good as it would be without it. If I had to choose just one piece of Hawkwind music to listen too for the rest of time it would be this version of Wind of Change. It’s a real pity that it doesn’t feature on the DVD or the Live 1990 CD (CD 2 reviewed elsewhere). I thought the idea of DVDs was more not less. The DVD review doesn’t mention the segued pieces (see the CD review). I have to say these are particularly strong. Snake Dance has a great synth sequence which I would describe as Hawkwind’s best use of the sequencer and there’s a great move into Night of the Hawks. That sequencer just keeps going right to the end including the segued Seventh Star (relying on the name given in the CD review). The middle of Ejection again features Bridget Wishart which descends into chaos before a crescendo back into Ejection. I would admit the vocals aren’t great but the whole thing hangs together very well if that’s possible with something that is designed to sound like it’s falling apart. The reggae-ish middle to Damnation Alley is splendid as well with Bridget Wishart’s "your secret's safe with me" vocal really helping - her best contribution to the event. It’s hard to believe this piece became The Camera That Could Lie. Simon House sounds great throughout especially on the Golden Void and Wind of Change.
It’s hard to explain the climatic Wind of Change. It is a thing of pure beauty. All the elements of the original are there but more so. Strident chords from the keyboards, Chadwick’s drumming echoing the original as it should and proving as he does throughout the gig what a great drummer he is, stunning violin, perfectly muted guitar, perfect, perfect, perfect. The only problem is that it’s only about three minutes long.
I’d give this video a straight ten if it wasn’t for the embarrassing Back in the Box and the failure to sing all the lines in the chorus of Ejection which leaves it a little bare (there’s no “I’ve got to escape”, “Abandon this crate” etc).
19th October 2007: Julie, the blonde Hippy Ballerina dancer who features on the DVD, adds this:
The Bedrock gig was recorded at Central TV Studios, Nottingham. It was a difficult gig, largely due to the lighting being "overlaid" after the gig, which was recorded on a plain white stage and backdrop, having camermen underfoot focusing on my crotch and Kris's bosom was a source of constant irritation. The audience were a bit cheesed off having being admitted into a Hawks gig and told in no uncertain terms
that it was a NO SMOKING environment. A studio full of straight heads does not a good atmosphere make....Stil - as far as studio gigs go, it's a fair representation - albeit a little clinical and reserved.
Going by the name of Jane (or just J) these days, she is still dancing for the Assassins of Silence and Dr. Hasbeen amongst others. Check out her Myspace page!
There is at first what looks like a lot of annoying interference, consisting of white stippling against the dark areas of the screen, such as you get when a VCR is not tracking properly...but it appears to be an "effect". After a while it disappears anyway, and the thereafter the visual quality is pretty good. As for the content...
How to say this? This is Spinal Tap territory - terribly cheesey. Dave Brock plays the entire gig (except for the encore) in a hooded black robe, a real Angel of Death. Staging a rendition of Michael Moorcock's most escapist Eternal Chumpion stories probably doomed it from the start - but the whole thing is a hoot, rather than being merely dire. Elric spends the whole time sporting attitudes with his sword (which is a bit too short to drink souls if you ask me, and wouldn't be very balanced given the elongated pommel and guard). He also spends a few minutes throwing himself around in a rather stiff-buttocked manner, which is puzzling until you realise that he's miming riding a horse. And, oh yes, during Needle Gun he does his best to look evil while seeming to whet his sword with a dagger. He nearly puts Dave Brock's eye out, but the overall effect is comic, with Elric leering in overdone greasepaint waggling his bits of wood ineffectually....which is not to denigrate Tony Crerar, really: it was an impossible brief.
The stage set is pretty good, consisting of a fabric backdrop and impressive lightshow. See the "Photos - Gallery 4" page for a photograph and link to the lighting designer's website. Musically, it's great and I won't attempt to describe the main part of the set since it is probably already familiar to most Hawkfans as the Live Chronicles album. The encore is nearly up to the same standards, with Mr Moorcock restraining his normal vocal style ("moaning and raving") on Coded Languages, which he duets with Harvey Bainbridge. Born To Go is short and ragged - Utopia is decent and segues into a brief instrumental Levitation. The DVD/video ends with the promo of Needle Gun and we're back to Elric and his sword sharpening.
Overall: I ought to hate this, but I don't. It is cheesey, but the band play well, and everyone involved carries it off with enough chutzpah to make it highly entertaining. Perhaps not in the way it was intended, but this one's a must for hairy-arsed Hawkwind fans everywhere. 7/10.
Personnel: Dave Brock (vocals, guitar, keyboards), Harvey Bainbridge (vocals, bass, synthesisers), Huw Lloyd Langton (vocals, lead guitar), Clive Deamer (drums), Nik Turner (saxophone, flute, vocals), Dead Fred (violin, keyboards). Nik fronts the band in prime "hippie's nightmare" mode, sporting a partial mohican with one-piece bodysuit and black and white greasepaint, which makes his face look like an igloo with an oversized letterbox. He also has Dead Fred (ex-ICU) and Clive Deamer along with him, who weren't in Hawkwind for long - a shame, as they're both good musicians (especially Fred). The band is tight despite the presence of these two new members.
The camera work is good, better than the Stonehenge video. We get plenty of close-ups of Nik and the synth-laden intros to many of the songs (where nothing much is happening on stage) are usually accompanied by slow motion replays of the light show. Sound quality is very clear, although somewhat "clanky" - this may have been nothing to do with the filming but the bass register is mostly missing. Nik does a lot of talking between songs and the number entitled "Martian Disco Stomp" is actually The Iron Dream (from the Quark Strangeness & Charm album) with a lot of added Turner tomfoolery, verbal and physical. This is followed by the first of two versions of Brainstorm, and fairly mundane it is too - musically. A great visual spectacle though, with the camera angle moving back into the audience and showing the band and front row with hands aloft silhouetted against white strobe lights.... The musical highlight is the encore, Psi Power and Silver Machine, and the bonus track. Dave sings Psi Power and it makes a refreshing change (although we are compelled to see the sight of N.Turner's black plastic bin-liner -clad arse all the way through Huw's first guitar solo). Silver Machine unfortunately provides the backdrop for a dancing competition wherein several misguided young persons come up onto the stage and grind away foolishly.... It reminded me of one of those clips you see from mid-70's editions of Top Of The Pops (invariably hosted by Tony Blackburn) and they had some daring "rock" group on, like Mud....and the audience did what they thought was expected of them... Well, this *was* filmed in 1984. In Ipswich.
The Night of the Hawks track, which is very faithful to the studio version, shows the band leaping about on stage and enjoying themselves. Again, Dave sings, and wild frontman though Nik Turner is, he can't hold a candle to Dave in terms of being a vocalist. This is actually the best thing here.
On the whole this is a very well put together document of what was (in my view) one of the worst periods Hawkwind ever had. If you like the anarchic style of Hawkwind fronted by Nik Turner, as they were in 1983-84, you will find this to be an excellent DVD. It doesn't do it for me, but the technical quality of the filming makes it better than the Stonehenge DVD, while it's not as good a musical performance as COTBS. 6/10
Tracklist: Abducted, Death Trap, Wastelands, Are You Losing Your Mind, Photo Encounter, Blue Skin, Sputnik Stan, Robot, Alien I Am, Xenomorph, Vega, Love In Space, Kapal, Elfin, Silver Machine, Welcome To The Future and (groan) Assassins of Allah. In fact, it's the exact same recording as on the Love In Space live double album. And one nice thing about this that there's more lead guitar than usual from Dave - Sputnik Stan and Love In Space showing this off in particular.
The show starts with two Alien-masked dancers as Ron Tree
The sound quality is excellent and there are some video production values here, too: each track is heralded by on-screen subtitles (which I don't like very much) and distance stage shots of the band are interspersed with freeze-frames of dancers and elements of the lightshow. Best of all, though, are the close-ups on stage, which are angled in such a way as to show what the stage is like as a working environment - rather than the more usual face-on footage of individual band members.
The track Photo Encounter features a very good dance routine which skillfully represents astronauts adjusting the controls of their spacecraft in a weightless environment. The two dancers (one male and one female) stay on stage for Blue Skin and are joined by fire eaters (Kris of course, plus Wango Riley) - and the shortcoings of this exercise are starting to become apparent. Unlike a lot of Hawkwind albums, Alien4 has a reasonably strong concept and story line to it. But the stage show, which could have tied it all together so well, instead consists of a number of disparate elements - all Hawkwind trademarks to be sure (costumed dancers, fire eaters, amazing cosmic lightshow) but the concept gets lost. And this DVD generally spends far too much time lingering on the dancers - good though they are, they're meant to be incidental colour.
Going back to Ron, he cuts a fairly sorry dash in Alien I Am by coming out on stage dressed as the Alien in question. The trouble is, he has to manoeuvre the microphone under his rubber mask in order to be able to sing. And this makes the mask buckle now and then - the effect is more Woolworths than Wolf 457. This is a classic case of the ambitions for the show outstripping the budget, an all too common occurence with some of these elaborate efforts by Hawkwind. And given the general cheesiness of it all, we are in some ways back in Chronicle Of The Black Sword territory. Ron does not help matters by throwing some coquettish attitudes when the lyrics are going "I...have no emotion". This is not the time to start doing impressions of Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited.
The pace picks up at the end, starting with Silver Machine. This seems to be the only part of the DVD where footage from more than one gig is mixed in - Ron appears first as a Smack Bono, secondly as a pudgier, camouflage-clad Richard Beckinsale gone to seed. The main set ends with Welcome To The Future, and then (what else?) Assassins Of Allah is trotted out for the encore. However it's not the blanga version but is actually Space Is Their Palestine, which I like even less than A of A, although it is rescued by the "It Is Written..." section of the original version of Hassan-i-Sahba (this number has too many titles as well as too many appearances at live gigs!). The dancers are prominent once more (after the closing credits have rolled by), Kris and Wango are out there eating fire, the light show has all the stops pulled out, and - it works better like this. Take the Alien 4 theme away and the incoherence of these elements ceases to matter, it's just a great Hawkwind live experience - a real multimedia happening. You don't know what to look at next.
Overall then, a mixed result. This is probably the most professionally produced Hawkwind DVD yet, but it misses the spot in terms of video editing - I would have liked to see more Hawkwind and less dancing. Most of what there is of Hawkwind focuses on Ron, never my favourite member of the band, and there is something about his performance here which manages to combine lethargy with desperation. But the boy can sing! Musically, it stands up alongside the Classic Rock DVD (it's less patchy than that one) and the Chronicle Of The Black Sword DVD (which has better material) - it's only the visuals which I felt were slightly disappointing. But as the soundtrack has been made available previously as the Love In Space album, this DVD maybe would not be considered an essential purchase for those who own that. However, as the original artwork to the album is said to be lost, it may not be reissued anytime soon - and so, if you *don't* already have that album, this DVD *is* an essential purchase. For me this DVD doesn't have the charm of Chronicle Of The Black Sword but neither does it plumb the occasional depths of the Classic Rock or Night Of The Hawks efforts, either. So we'd better make this one a 7 out of 10, I think.
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