Back when I was merely *approaching* middle age, if you wanted to see Hawkwind on the small screen, you had to get your hands on one of these!
The benchmark for this kind of product / performance has to be the original VHS release of ‘Solstice at Stonehenge’, which to be honest was not all that inspired, but proved that you could wring a decent audiovisual record out of a Hawkwind free festival performance, even with the technology of the day. Unfortunately the ludicrously misnamed Taste Productions have failed to do this with Treworgey Tree Fayre, because they smothered this video in abysmally amateurish effects. These largely consist of streamers and blotches of purple fog, similar to (but worse than) the stuff that the BBC used to overlay onto Dr.Who and Top Of The Pops when they were trying to be futuristic on a budget of shillings. To be sure, the stage is not brightly lit (I thought the awning overhead indicated they were playing inside a tent, at first) but there was surely enough illumination overall to have to made it work. But as it is, our first view is of purple blotches which resolve into Alan Davey & Dave Brock on stage. Simultaneously, electronic noise evolves into Brainstorm, complete with a strange
The setlist covers some surprises, such as Down Through The Night: the bassline never sounded so sublime as in Alan Davey’s hands. It’s not as “open sounding” as the Space Ritual Alive version, though this has some wonderful violin that the original didn’t, of course. There was already quite a lot of mid-70’s material in the set at this time (think of ‘Time We Left’, which featured in the Live Legends footage filmed in Nottingham TV studios 6 months later) but another surprise is Hassan-i-Sahba, sounding very like live renditions of the original as far as Simon’s violin is concerned (and at least there’s no ‘Space Is Their Palestine’ interlude in it). But the bass has disappeared from the sound and R Chad’s click-influenced drum patterns really aren’t much like Simon King’s... Having mentioned some of the other older material, Assault & Battery does actually sound a lot like the subsequent version they did at Nottingham on 25/1/90. It also has some of the clearest footage yet: but this is pretty much spoiled by having much of the lightshow overlaid on it. They follow on with Golden Void and Alan Davey sings it – never thought I’d miss Bridgett. Brock helps him out / saves him on the 2nd verse, though.
Back In The Box is where Bridgett does actually turn up, in clothes which might be the prototype for her swimsuited appearance in the Live Legends filming. It’s hard to be sure given the obscurantist approach to this video with the darkness of the footage and crap effects ("Aurora Blearyalis" I call it) overlaying everything, all the time. Arrival In Utopia is a case in point because there's enough light to support regular footage, and the sound is excellent, segueing into You Know You’re Only Dreaming, which is enough to make you weep: possibly the strongest set HW have ever done in front of a camera, and it’s been ruined.
After y.k.y.o.d., they go into Damnation Alley complete with the best ever rendition of Simon House’s excellent middle section, incorporating not only his lead violin parts but also lead guitar. During the first encore (Needle Gun) there’s a guest lead guitarist on stage, but I can’t see who it is, just that they’re playing a Strat-type guitar.** He’s also there on the next number, Ejection, and not only is it the wrong guitar for Mr. Langton, but it doesn’t quite sound like him either. I wonder if this is an early appearance by “Huw Lloyd Hillage”? (That’s Jerry Richards to you and me…) The video closes out with an excellent “Lost Chronicles”, having lasted about an hour and a half in total.
** My thanks to Bernhard Pospiech who points out that the mystery guest guitarist is in fact Steve Bemand
Out Of The Shadows
Void Of Golden Light
Acid House Of Dreams
Images
Treadmill
Time We Left
Heads
Back In The Box
Black Elk Speaks
Some of the new footage of band members has been filmed in a way that might be considered arty and would have been genuinely innovative had its pedigree dated from 1982 rather than 1992. Often superimposed on added effects (or vice-versa), the frame is pulled back to head-and-shoulders and unusual lighting is used to provide unexpected juxtapositions of line and colour. Bridgett Wishart is perhaps the main beneficiary of these decidedly “video” techniques, and in fact she largely does well out of these appearances. The oddity of what she does sits well with the frayed-around-the-edges feel of technology that had not been state of the art for a decade. Some of the resulting output has a real performance art air. (Mind you, I could do without her black chinstrap makeup in Images.)
There’s also some stock footage of office scenes and scurrying commuters employed in Treadmill, but unfortunately the Taste effects are by now strating to predominate. Somehow a bit of the Live Legends footage (the hippy ballerina) gets in here too, but I suspect there was no access to the original source! There is one very funny effect, though, with what may be a still shot of Dave, guitar in hand: it morphs and distorts on screen, from normal to pear-shaped, smile broadening to a foolish and fatuous grin, and the neck of his guitar stretches, thins and droops very phallically. Well, it’s very funny the first time or three that it appears, but the joke wears thin pretty quickly thereafter.
So, visually far more successful than Treworgey Tree Fayre, where this video falls down is, paradoxically, in the excellent audio material. I’ve no fault to find with it other than the fact it’s something that’s been very familiar for a number of years. Maybe some of the other video releases of the early 90’s will hit more bases than this did.
The sound is actually very poor, being quite bootleggy –hissy, muted- though I can’t be sure that this isn’t due to deterioration of 15 year-old videotape. The occasional loud clunking noises sound like a cheap microphone being knocked, but who can say. The visuals are adequate compensation though, with some excellent use being made of cyan lasers and smoke in the second number, Golden Void. Next is a synthy instrumental with something suggesting Andean folk music about it. To this Bridgett does the oddest little dance routine, juggling Indian clubs, hold of which she never actually relinquishes. But that passes and the song evolves into a menacing version of Harvey’s Acid House Of Dreams, and from there seamlessly into a lacerating You Shouldn’t Do That. Brilliant. All the while the lasers carve three dimensional stargate shapes from the atmosphere: you’ve reached your future state.
What could be a very good version of Back In The Box is up next, but the sound is now very poor (it had improved considerably to this point) and the main benefit of this part of the video is seeing a close-up of Bridgett’s method acting . It’s the old self-mummifying act, familiar from the Live Legends video, which predated this by six months, and covered basically the same show – with Simon House but without the lasers. Comparing the two videos, the band had more joie de vivre in Live Legends and are more of a ruthless, effective rock machine here. Brock and Davey in particular seem to be in telepathic communion when it comes to grinding out those unison riffs: real heavy metal, especially on Arrival In Utopia. (Hurrah!) Dave is playing his Les Paul Custom, by the way, and this was before he’d taken to retiring behind a wall of synths.
Images is a song I’ve always particularly liked, despite the incredulity of new fathers among us, but Bridgett does not sing it well on this video. Whether or not you can get along with her voice is a matter of subjective taste, but here it’s just plain out of tune and nowhere worse than where she bellows her way through the already irritating middle section. The ungainly flailing of limbs interspersed with transference of weight from foot to foot is not going to win any prizes either. I don’t know but I bet it was Alan Davey who threatened to walk out if she wasn’t removed…sorry, but that was *long* overdue on this evidence.
Thrashing versions of Hassan-i-Sahba and then Brainstorm are next, full of pace and power. Particularly during the former I noticed something quite characteristic of this video, and that is the way the shots are framed – mostly fairly close *in* to the members of the band, but not offering any close-*ups*. You rarely see much above any of the band’s heads, for example, nor is the zoom pulled back to show the entire stage very often. This is largely successful, though the lightshow does tend to be missed, lasers apart, as a result.
Ejection finishes off the video in frenetic mood, with lasers pulsing ubiquitously, spotlights playing, fog roiling on stage (dry ice, that is, nothing to do with ‘Taste TV’), fire eaters whirling, Bridgett not letting go of her juggling gear, Alan Davey shouting the single word “Ejection!” into the microphone for the chorus, and Dave grimly pounding the guitar throughout.
His last words –the last words on the video- are “Don’t pay your poll tax” - and if this isn’t a riot in the usual sense of the term, there is certainly an uncompromising sense of determination in the band’s performance here. There is maybe just a touch of the empty and mechanical about it, but after being in business for 21 years, this shows that they still meant business and could still do the business. A force to be reckoned with...shame about the sound.
The second song in, Right To Decide, confirms the sound as being boomy, with much room reverberation being audible on the vocals especially. The band, however, have gone for a clanking, grinding arrangement which retains a great deal of clarity despite the cavernous acoustics of the venue. Richard Chadwick’s drum sound in particular is fantastic, led by a crisp, penetrating snare. As Right To Decide melds into 7 By 7 (great inclusion in the set), Alan Davey’s bass has so much
The Right Stuff eventually takes shape from the inter-song randomized noises, during which much of the stage lighting is white only, which has the curious effect of monochroming rather than illuminating the pyramids, and all that is between, around and behind them. Perhaps this is because there is a black-and-white lightshow projection continuing across the back of the stage. As the song gets going, colour spots flash in and out within each of the pyramids: now a mellow tangerine colour as Alan Davey’s voice echoes hoarsely around the auditorium, now a cool aquamarine as Dave rips out a meandering guitar solo in the middle of the song. But this pyramid nonsense is really spoiling things – the band are plainly communicating musically, but surely cannot see each other or move about at all, and the effect is to expose a layer of immobility and artifice that we normally don’t see with Hawkwind live.
As if to emphasise this, Spirit Of The Age is as coldly mechanical a rendition as you’ve ever heard, with Brock’s vocals being heavily effected into a bassy robotic groan on the first verse and a tremulous truculence (somewhat Calvert-like, actually) on the second. He does play some nice harmonized lead guitar to partly compensate for this, though, and the song starts to really motor a bit with looping keyboard arpeggios pumped along by pulsing bass / drum sounds. The trebly Rickenbacker bass tone is very noticeable here and works wonders as we walk into The Iron Dream riff as a way of closing it out.
Shades-of-grey rotating slides and oil-wheel effects project not only onto the backcloth but onto the net curtain pyramids as an awful electronic cacophony builds under this monochrome scene. Simultaneously three bursts of tetrahedron-confined blue/orange light accompany the onset of coherent blasts of music. The band launch into Secret Agent from that year’s “Electric Tepee” album. Because that of course is what these pyramid things are and what the point of the whole ridiculous get-up is. Like the man on the radio said at the time: “Er, yeah…red indians in space…”
The next number, Hassan-i-Sahba, is actually announced (as “Assassins of Allah”, of course) and follows the template that’s by now been established, with the stage lighting diverting your attention to within the tepees during vocal or solo passages, and outside of them at other times. And so it continues for the remainder of this video, as the Brock-Davey-Chadwick trio work their way through Golden Void, LSD, Blue Shift, Brainstorm and the encore: Psi Power, Time We Left, Master Of The Universe and finally, Welcome To The Future. And it’s a good thing Hawkwind *were* only a trio when they took this concept out on the road. Had the extensive line-up that did the “1999 Party” tour adopted a similar theme, the stage would have been so crowded with electric tepees, it would have looked like an illegal traveller encampment. I can visualise Michael Howard spluttering in rage off to stage left, pantomime coppers and hatchet-faced council officials bearing down from the right…
One effect of the band being within tepees, though, is to make this entire video quite arm’s-length. No cameras seem to be located within the tepees, and so when the focus is drawn inwards to individual band members, they are filmed from without and therefore not in close-up at all. Mostly it is Brock on whom the camera homes in, with Alan Davey being picked up a couple of times. Richard Chadwick is pretty much never seen in this video. This distancing of the protagonists is of course peculiar to the video, but I’ve previously mentioned the isolating effect of the tepees with respect to the stage dynamics – it’s not something that seems to have bothered the crowd on the night at all. Their response to each number is as enthusiastic as you would expect of any Hawkwind crowd where the the band are playing a setlist as good as this, as well as this. But it may have unsettled the band themselves slightly: at the beginning of LSD, Alan Davey comes to the doorway of his tepee and partway out. The Captain does likewise, maybe to see what Alan wants (“Scuse me, could I borrow a cup of sugar?”)…but then Alan has to scuttle back in to his microphone as he’s taking the vocals on this song. This number features some great lights sequences, with backdrop, coloured stage lights and strange male dancer all co-ordinating brilliantly – except maybe for the latter personage, who skips and cavorts nerdily across the stage in what is probably meant to be a sexual and shamanic fashion, painted and apparently gourded as he is. But all the way through I kept illogically hoping the band would come out from their tepees - of course they can’t because they’re tied to their keyboards, microphones, and (in Richard’s case) drums, which are locked down therein. One can imagine the roar of approval from the crowd should the tepees ascend into the lighting rig, to reveal the inhabitants …it doesn’t happen! I’m obviously not the only person who wished it were so: as the gig wears on Alan spends as much time as possible partly out of his tepee, he obviously wasn’t comfortable being inside it. (Dave…Dave, can I come out now? No!)
Well I could go on and on, but that’s what it was like. Aurally a thundering good gig and soundtrack, but visually, it was a good thing that the Electric Tepee concept came and went.
It covers a number of tracks that have already been made available on other VHS / DVD releases, and some that haven’t. The opening cut is Watching The Grass Grow from Stonehenge 1984, and this is of course something that’s already out there, on the Solstice At Stonehenge title. No need for me to entirely rehash what I’ve already said about that, but this is a good one for Nik-watchers and admirers of the punky vestal virgin dancers who, er, enlivened that occasion.
Next up is the highlight of Hawkwind’s 1986 bill-topping appearance at the Reading Festival. It’s Silver Machine with Lemmy guesting – his gravel-throated vocals are unmistakable, but we don’t actually *see* much of him. The strange camera angle (high overhead in the lighting rig) and fiercely strobing light show make the band look like a collection of dazed
That same year Hawkwind played at the Bristol Custom Bike Show, and a video was released after the fact, which included their performance of Master Of The Universe, over footage of motorbike displays and a wet T-shirt competition culminating in the sight of several topless biker chicks. Well, there is a *bit* of footage of Hawkwind playing, with some more strange camera angles, high over Harvey’s head for example. Once again the visuals are no great addition but this is a great version of MOTU in the way that Hawkwind seemed to play everything in 1986 – tight, fast and very full-sounding. Check out the Chaos tour DVD or the aforementioned Friday Night Rock Show Sessions CD for reference.
There follow two numbers from the Leeds Acid Daze festival in December 1987 – Levitation and Needle Gun. Neither of these clips have been available elsewhere as far as I know. The footage is shot mostly from the back of the hall, providing a full stage view, the camera zooming in towards individuals at times. The stage lighting is predominantly in shades of orange and green, with dry ice and bright blue-white-green lasers slicing here and there. The sound isn’t pristine, having that surging quality sometimes heard on live recordings where the sound levels are threatening to overwhelm the recording equipment. The band’s sound is also somehow less guitar-dominated than on the preceding 1986 cuts, with Harvey’s keyboards occupying a broader swathe of the audible spectrum. As matters progress the stage lighting brightens, with overhead arrays of white spotlights and floor-level blue/white strobes pulsing more insistently. There is a lightshow being back-projected onto the rear of the stage too, but it’s overwhelmed by the stage lighting and in any case seems to consist of not much more than rapid slide sequences of muted grey/black wavy lines. Musically Levitation features an instrumental mid section taking the first steps towards Hawkwind’s 90’s tranceisms. Needle Gun acts as a counter to this, though, being quite the most old-fashioned number that the band were playing at the time: sounded old when it was brand new. This number also brings the dancers to greater prominence and it looks very much like our old friends Screech Rock, with their fantastically over-the-top costumes and convincing impressions of positively-symptomatic schizophreniform illness. (Thanks to our neuroscience correspondent for those buzzwords, there…)
The Treworgey Tree Fayre took place in July 1989, and supplies the musically very decent version of Time We Left which appears next on this video. This is from the eponymous Taste Productions tape, and that is of course reviewed earlier on this page. Interestingly, there doesn’t seem to be as much purple fog on this excerpt as on the Treworgey video proper…the stage is dim and it’s not the greatest footage of Hawkwind as a result, but the perfectly blended rendition of the song more than compensates.
The Derby Festival footage is much more brightly illuminated and being from 1995 features a psychotic-looking Ron Tree on vocals. The camera alternates between on-stage close-up shots of Ron and sensual dancers / fire eaters, with long-range footage which shows a heaving crowd and the distant stage ablaze with actinic lights in shades of white, violet and blue. Not much is seen of other members of the band, though Mr. Brock’s muscular riffing is very evident on the “It is written” mid-section which follows the, IMHO less enjoyable Space-is-their-Palestine interlude. Generally the visuals are not high resolution, and the band sounds very much like they did on the Alien 4 album, with a few voicings therefrom making their way into this arrangement. This is a generally successful clip: file under “Good, not great”. It’s followed by Space (Is Their Palestine) from a year later at the Ghent Festival. This starts out with a fierce-looking female dancer who twirls swords and arches her back, but then appears to chew her own toenails after one of her platform boots falls off. I’ll take that over Screech Rock any day. This segment seems to have been filmed from within the audience and so is limited in terms of the field of view. We do see Ron once again, hunched over a microphone stand, while the dancer abandons her swords in favour of some anatomically improbable things involving crossing her legs at the ankle behind her head. Ron writhes a bit in sympathy, and, er, that’s it, really.
The last cut here is Right To Decide from Brixton Academy in 1992. It’s *not* from the “Brixton 15892” tape, since the band are seen here on stage as per normal, not hidden inside tepees. As you would expect, the musical performance is taut and rippling. The stage lighting is at times relatively subdued, which affords greater prominence to the stars-and-squiggles back-projected lightshow, and quite a bit of the camera work is done on stage, providing profile close ups of the Captain and other members of the spaceship crew (yeah, both of them). At other points there is a riot of colour spotlights and some very effective brilliant white light wheel effects going on behind the band. Dave at least seems to be enjoying himself, grinning away, and it’s one of the best segments here, although like all the others, it is a bit grainy. I suppose that is to be expected given when most of this stuff was filmed, and that the light conditions were never optimal. And it’s inevitably patchy as this is a compilation spanning a period of 12 years, but this tape is worth getting if one crosses your path.
Another one from Hawkwind Merchandising, this was presumably homegrown like a number of other titles they offered at around the same time (see graphic)…by comparison with the Visionary / Jettisoundz offerings, and even those of Taste Productions, it is far from polished. But that’s not necessarily any detriment…one notable thing is that the sound levels are very high without resulting in unwanted distortion. This is good – a more professional production probably would have had a greater degree of safety margin built-in. This pumped-up sound is quite noticeable during the disjointed opening sequences of band and roadies standing about looking perplexed (and sometimes moving in what is apparently slow motion) over a rough musical backing which I would guess is a soundcheck. There is also the semi-comic sight of a homespun slideshow of a number of album covers, several of which are now definitely persona non grata…
And so onto the footage proper, which opens with Assault and Battery / The Golden Void, both sounding as good as Hawkwind have ever done them. While not at any kind of
Treadmill, by contrast, is filmed on a large stage in an empty hall under what seems to be plain white light: doubtless at a soundcheck as there are road crew ambling about, and eventually even the band, too, meander here and there around the equipment. It’s no wonder that the version of Treadmill that is playing sounds identical to that on the Palace Springs album – it’s the very same, adopted here as the soundtrack to this rather desultory footage. Halfway through it cuts over to some live visuals of crowd and stage overlaid with oil wheel images and more of the polarized monochromatic shots of the band.
A brief impromptu interview sequence comes next, with Dave being sat on a bed in a hotel room, watching videotape of Hawkwind live (presumably just filmed, and maybe included here!) as he responds to the question of how he puts setlists together, how much control he has over the visusls, etc.. It seems to be Hassan-i-Sahba playing in the background, and the questions are intercut with full segments of this before segueing, rather splendidly, into a fabulous two minutes of “Down Through The Night”. Thereafter Harvey occupies the interview spotlight to air his views on a couple of topics, in between segments of Damnation Alley, which again sounds like it’s from Palace Springs rather than what accompanied the actual live footage that is being shown.
More cosmic slides and alien worlds / cloudscapes are shown over an undoubtedly live “Wind Of Change” which nevertheless stays as faithful to the original arrangement on HOTMG as it is possible to do in the absence of Simon House and his violin. But just as you think this heralds a return to concert footage there is instead some up-close coverage from the rehearsal room, which features a rough, but excellent “Needle Gun”, along with the usual cacophony of any rock band in that situation, between numbers. Oddly, the visuals are very posterized in this segment – one wonders why this was done, since straightforward footage at such an intimate range would have been very valuable. As if to match the washed-out quality of the visuals, the band proceed to get completely snarled up in “Needle Gun” and it crashes to a halt with Dave calling “All right, all right, enough of that!”
And then it’s “Time We Left” from Palace Springs playing alongside bursts of orange stage lights and flashes of mauve, oil-wheel back projections, etc.. As with all the other stage sequences in this video, this is pretty grainy, low resolution and dark. Budgets, technology and lighting conditions probably explain that, as noted previously. And that’s pretty much it, with just the closing credits to follow, overlaid onto some sort of backstage gathering with the band and a few others standing around chit-chatting inconsequentially like you do…
But what’s this? An encore? Another section is tacked on, this time showing the band with Bridgett Wishart semaphoring from inside an industrial NBC suit, in front of a purplish backcloth. Pretty soon stuff is being projected onto it while the band launch into a clearer, more streamlined rendition of “Needle Gun” than anything heard hitherto on this tape. The visual quality is different too, less focussed and more contrasted than before – no shades of grey, just deep inky pools of blackness behind and brightly coloured blobs closer at hand. Though the camera’s viewpoint is quite distant from proceedings, giving the impression of being located at the rear left-hand corner of the venue. The editing too is more amateurish, with some very awkward cuts in both the opening number and in “The Golden Void” which follows. But the soundtrack did plainly originate with the visuals rather than being tacked on from a contemporaneous live album – though in fact it’s not that much different from the live albums that cover this period in such depth. For instance, the third number into the set, Ejection, is opened with Bridgett’s awful spoken piece which is already familiar from the California Brainstorm CD.
And then fittingly we get a somewhat frayed version of “Brainstorm” itself, with Alan Davey really coming to the fore for almost the first time on this video. The lengthy instrumental passages here are dominated by fierce white/violet strobing until a mellower orange glow heralds the reggae-ish middle section over which Bridgett performs “Your Secret’s Safe With Me” – one of her better moments here, though overall I feel her shortcomings with Hawkwind can be largely ascribed to mismatch rather than to individual failings solely on her part. Anyway, I’ve wandered almost as far as this segment of “Brainstorm”, which gets back on track with some excellent work from Alan Davey, whose bass parts lead from the front and drag the rest of the band along in a high-octane rush for the finishing line: over which they all fall, breathless but together.
As if to underline Alan’s burgeoning domination of proceedings, his song “Wings” is featured next. To be honest I thought Bedouin did it better, with more -soaring- lead guitar, and fewer layers of keybord than are here. Visually the backdrop is a steady blue with bird silhouettes,and Bridgett throws the odd literally statuesque shape – fortunately for her there were no pigeons in the vicinity to lend further verisimilitude. (The song is not called *Rats With* Wings, after all…) Proceedings liven up with “Out of The Shadows”, and Dave comes to the fore with his guitar sound riding high in the mix and the camera even closing in on him during the protracted first verse. The footlights start to dominate during the instrumental section which follows, and the band here give a great demonstration of playing it structurally loose, seeing as this is basically just a jam, but in terms of arrangement they are tight as a drum.
During “Seveth Star” Bridgett does some effective whirling of bright hand-held flashlights, emulating or evoking the fire eaters who seemed to be obligatory fixtures of UK shows at the time. The lightshow echoes what Bridgett is doing, with circular ripples of white light across the otherwise darkened backdrop. Meanwhile Dave and Harvey are doing the de rigeur lead parts, and as expected Night Of The Hawks emerges on cue…the stage is in practically complete darkness by this point. That and the overfamiliarity of the material and arrangement make this a relatively uninteresting segment of the video, even allowing for Bridgett’s revolting but pointless horned demon / cat mask. Only a muscular two-chord coda (along “Spirit Of The Age” lines) does anything novel. Fortunately Bridgett’s next mask is a good deal better and comes out while one of Harvey’s synthscapes is grinding away disturbingly. In still shots I’ve likened this particular mask to the visage of Baronness Thatcher: but in it, Bridgett also manages to look like the nightmare teacher figure in the video of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”. The mood remains dark, even if the lightshow does not, with the band moving into “Back In The Box”. This would be one of Bridgett’s better renditions of this song, her restrained vocals nicely set off by some staccato dance and a strangely insectoid alien baldy costume. But then the double act with Harvey happens along and it’s complete rubbish in my view. I’ll say no more about that.
Finally Hassan-i-Sahba emerges to deliver a welcome slice of ambient-free blanga, and Harvey in particular really strengthens the middle section with some clarion chords just ahead of the “It is written” passage. Meanwhile the lightshow generates parietal lobe shapes of crystalline mirrored geometries, if that means anything, and after a quick introduction of the band members by Dave, they launch into what feels like the last number of the main part of the set: Images…and so it proves. The staccato bridge is done brilliantly, each chord is a punch slammed to the midriff, but as always with this song, focus is lost during the formless middle section…not even the lightshow is doing anything other than displaying an unmoving green and yellow slide as Bridgett does her crap vocal bit… But at last the spaceship gets moving again, with Dave throwing some nice 6th/7th chord pairs to add some good old-fashioned rock and roll credentials which round the set off excellently.
They come back out for an encore, of course, and surprisingly, it’s “Reefer Madness.” Or maybe not surprisingly, recalling the California Brainstorm set. The lights are used most effectively of all here, with strobes, coloured stage lighting and shimmering monochrome lightshow all dovetailing very effectively. For some reason Bridgett is in bearded male drag here, and takes centre stage for the “stole my stash” monologue, so there’s the cloud to go with that particular silver lining.
Anyhow, the video ends there, which is a good move as attention is starting to flag – the thing is two-and-half hours long in total, with the structural incoherence of the first hour making it quite a disjointed experience to sit and watch the entire tape at a single sitting. The last hour and a half being from a single set does bring it all back together, but with the quality not being that far above bootleg, it doesn’t quite stand up to some of the other 90’s videotapes, and certainly not to the professionally produced standards of later DVD’s. On the plus side you do get to hear the band at a time when they were unstoppable live (including those tracks where the audio has been lifted from Palace Springs!) – but there is a plethora of contemporary live albums that are as good or better. Overall then, this one is for kompletists only IMHO.
Subtitled “Concerts, Festivals, Private Parties”, this was a title offered by Hawkwind Merchandising in the 90’s, and not via any other outlet as far as I recall. As the title and subtitle indicate, it’s a hodgepodge of various clips with consequent variation in quality. In fact, it’s more or less all downhill from the opening segment, which is a topnotch clip of the band playing World Of Tiers in a TV studio in 1980 or so – a rarity in that Ginger Baker is seen behind the kit. It’s so good I’ve made it available on my Free Hawkwind Downloads page!
After this comes a run of concert clips from the very early 80’s, mostly quite dark and indistinct, and starting off with Tim Blake’s Lighthouse, from 1979: which sounds good, but shows us little more than a laser or spotlight set up on Tim’s keyboard rig. This ends precipitately and we move straight into a somewhat bootleggy sounding Shot Down In The Night, with the camera zoomed in on the back projections behind the band. These consist of monochrome 1930’s cartoons, which allied to the squishy sound make this particular clip not worth bothering with, until about halfway through the instrumental midesection, when the camera pulls back
The same line-up next serves up Silver Machine, and it’s aurally familiar, this exact recording having appeared on a number of compilations, notably on the Hawkwind Collection – which I see from the Hawkwind Codex is actually version 8L. Unfortunately the stage is quite dark in this number, so there’s not much more to see than some uninteresting back projections. But they segue into Master Of The Universe, and for once the stage is well lit, with coloured spotlights and dry ice going full blast – as do the band: this is a slamming early 80’s rendition of the old classic, well suited to the two-guitars-bass-drums line-up. Best thing on the tape so far!
The selections on the tape are in fact laid out in chronological sequence, and a handful of tracks from the 1982 Choose Your Masques tour are up next. The title track is followed by Solitary Mind Games and then Waiting For Tomorrow – all pretty Huw-dominated. Visually, the stage tends to be dark, with rhythmic flashes of orange, green and mauve, and the bank of 16 TV screens mounted high above the drum kit at the back centre of the stage. The sound is pretty good (although somehwat fuzzed throughout by having been recorded on an early 80’s camcorder) with some very effective reverb on Dave’s vocals in particular. Nik contributes some excellent flute to Solitary Mind Games, in which we also get some slo-mo close-ups which are unfortunately quite blurry. The coverage of Waiting For Tomorrow is shot from more of a face-on angle, and pulled a little further back – this is actually more effective. Nik does some tasty sax here too, and in fact this is musically one of the strongest performances of this particular song that I’ve heard. Harvey pumps it out on the bass and Huw’s little lead guitar figures are very strong. He’s in excellent voice, too..
From 1983 comes “Master Of the Brainverse”, a rehearsal clip featuring Nik Turner, which again I’ve made available as a clip on the Free Hawkwind Downloads page, so there’s no need to say any more about it here. It’s followed by the execrable Ghost Dance. This and the succeeding tracks (Sonic Attack and Coded Languages) are, according to the video cover, from the 1983 tour which featured the same stage set as the previous year’s, on this evidence. Once again the footage is dark, and the music chaotic – Nik is by now really fronting the band and getting into that stuff that I personally find very tiresome…it’s only when Dave takes the microphone for Psi Power that it really feels like the proper Hawkwind and not some version of ICU. Perhaps the brighter stage lighting helps – plenty of blue, yellow and orange.
The next chunk is unambiguously from the 1985 Chronicle Of The Black Sword tour. The camera attempts to zoom in on Tony Crerar’s and Kris Tait’s dance routine during “Choose Your Masques” but there’s not enough ambient light for this to work very well. Then there is the Elric Fight Sequence, which always was rather unfortunate, so it’s a good thing that we move swiftly on to the 1986 Bristol Custom Bike show. This was previously seen (and written about) on the Festival 1984-96 tape – so we fast forward to the Reading Festival 1986, from which we get a brief bit of Assault and Battery, plus Assassins of Allah. In the earlier review of the Festivals 84-96 video, I mentioned the strange camera angle used at this performance, and the fact that the musical recording also made it onto the Friday Night Rock Show Sessions album, so there’s not much more to add here.
Magnu, Angels of Death and Lost Chronicles hail from some 1987 gig, and the video quality definitely takes a turn for the better here, although the excessive focus on the back projection is tedious (– it’s the same dull stuff that I described in my review of the 1986 Chaos DVD). Needle Gun, which comes next, is I think the same as on the Festival 84-96 tape, i.e. from the Leeds Acid Daze gig with Screech Rock dancers. It’s a pity the superior picture and audio quality serves only to highlight their, umm, act!
The next sequece finds us in the rehearsal room in 1988. Harvey plays a Moog and clowns for the camera, with others such as Huw and Richard Chadwick wandering around making cups of tea etc.. Hung on the wall behind Harvey are some bona fide Hawkwind artefacts such as an enormous Acid Daze poster and the eight-arrowed shield from those ridiculous COTBS promo shots. Despite the constant din being made by H.Bainbridge esq., Huw seems to be engrossed in writing out a shopping list. And then…we segue to Dreamworker. This is a live clip from 1988, and the camera dwells on the lightshow beinbg projected behind the band – space scenes mostly, and quite well suited to this downbeat, understated material. (Which oddly, seems to have Nik Turner’s voice reciting the lyrics).
The final segment on the tape comes from a private party in 1989. The line-up, jammed together in the corner of a room rather than up on a stage, is Dave Brock, Harvey Bainbridge, Alan Davey and Richard Chadwick. They’re fairly well lit – there’s no light show as such, just a couple of different colour lights on the band, one of which seems to pulse in a fixed pattern. The band run through versions of Assault & Battery / Golden Void, Treadmill, Levitation, Damnation Alley, Needle Gun, Brainstorm and Angels of Death. It’s musically a very solid performance, without frills, but meaty-sounding: and the crowd, dancing with abandon and clustered around the band (Alan Davey is pretty much surrounded) are plainly enjoying themselves. Lucky b******s :-)
So the conclusion here is very much the same as for the Festivals 1984-96 video: it’s bitty and patchy, a lot of it is pretty low quality, but worth having if you’re a seriously dedicated, i.e. hairy-arsed, Hawkwind fan.
Then there's a beautiful boobs competition, wherein 12 young ladies get up on a darkened stage and strip
off their shirts to the bayed delight of the male crowd. I'm all for this sort of thing and it's very annoying that the footage is so grainy - as a dispassionate observer I would love to be able to confirm that the
Finally onto the real reason for watching this, and that's Hawkwind live, tackling 'Dust Of Time'. It's early 80's bootleg quality in that you can't really make out any detail other than some blobs on stage that are lighter- coloured than the homogenous fog making up the remainder of the picture. The filming looks like it was done some way back from the stage, with the zoom fully engaged to home in on the central area, perhaps some fifteen feet's width of it being within the camera's field of view. The cameraman does compensate for this by doing a few slow-mo pans to take in other things going on, for example Nik's sax solo in the next song up, 'Waiting For Tomorrow'. The white-jacketed Huw can be distinguished by the fact that he's at the mic, and Harvey is also recognisable. But that's about it. What is decent enough is the audio quality, which despite suffering a couple of drop-outs here and there is up to what you would expect of a top-notch audience recording of the period, or better. It looks very much as though the entire video was shot by a single camera located at the mixing desk, and the fact that the sound is so much better than the visuals makes me wonder if the audio isn't actually from the desk itself.
Next is the execrable 'Ghost Dance', which is mercifully abridged and supplanted by a surprisingly fast and
thrashy 'Psychedelic Warlords'. You would think this has all the hallmarks of Nik's influences on the band
during his 1982-84 stint with them - but it's Huwie who takes the lead vocals. In the instrumental workout
during the middle of this song the camera zooms out to show Dave stalking across the stage to join the others (Nik, Huw Harvey) out front, and there's plainly a full-blown lightshow belting away behind the band too - I recognise the "Shroud Of Turin" face being back-projected behind the band, but the dingy green monotone of the picture quality basically robs the visuals of all interest. It's important to note that this isn't a criticism but a description of the limitations of the available technology at the time; this was, after all, only the second ever Hawkwind video to be released (the 1982 Choose Your Masques tour video being the first).
'Utopia 84' follows and it's the same dirgey rant you've all heard on the Zones album - it cuts straight into
'Angels Of Death' which showcases, not for the first time on this tape, the superb form Huw Lloyd Langton was in at the time. And this number is as sharp and punchy as Huw's soloing is incisive - the band as a
whole were cooking that night, and it underlines the pity that 1983 was such a quiet year for Hawkwind,
with their live work being curtailed by personal upheaval. Dave does admittedly fluff the beginning of the
next number, 'Motorway City', but straightens himself out before the rest of the band come in and crash
their way through this one very satisfyingly. They even make a decent fist of 'Silver Machine', though the
audio signal goes walkabout in the middle of it - and not at quite the right time to obscure Nik's verbal
meanderings. They rescue the song by getting back into the main musical theme of it for a final verse and
chorus, which even features a decent sax solo from Nik. Another notable thing about this is that the stage
lighting suddenly seems to get brighter, lending greater definition and even some colour to the visuals on
the tape.
The band did not seem to go off stage at any time but this has the feel of an encore as Nik asks the audience whether they want any more, before 'Brainstorm' is announced. A right old synthy mess it is too, to begin
with, the bleeps and farts only subsiding once the Captain rips out the familiar chord sequence to kick off
the song proper. Once again it's classic Hawkwind that starts and finishes strongly but is let down by a
somewhat weak and amorphous middle section. They do actually go off stage at the end of this, so that is the end of the main part of the set - and then Nik draws the winning raffle ticket for the prize of a bike, which you don't see at every Hawkwind gig...unfortunately.
The encore gets underway with 'Ejection', which Nik tells us is a dance tune, and the band certainly play it
with enough pace and bounce to make it so. This continues as the song diverts directly, medley-style, into an abbreviated 'Shot Down In The Night', and thence into 'Master Of The Universe'. Up until this point the "medley" had been very focused but much impetus is lost as MotU wanders into another formless mid-song miasma which seems to last well over ten minutes. Where's the fast forward? And it's needed again after MotU finishes because there's yet more raffling from Nik before the band finally shamble back on stage, to Nik's intensely irritating parroted repetition of "Are you feeling better now?", to round proceedings off with 'Sonic Attack' (performed in the style of the 1981 remake) and 'Death Trap'. Once again Sonic Attack is allowed to drift all over the place is loses all cohesion. Death Trap does it too, if not as badly.
At the end of the tape are a couple more snippets of rehearsal footage from Rockfield Studios. This comprises two separate segments of the band messing around between numbers, and to be honest, would not even be worth offering as a free download.
Overall then, a valuable record of a one-off occasion, that sees the band playing an early 80's festival and
sounding splendid in so doing. But the tape's visual qualities are severely compromised by the primitive
technology that was available and affordable at the time, and suffers further from a lack of editing - there's too much crap included in it and some of the numbers the band plays could really have done with being edited down. But this was an amateur effort and I doubt any editing took place at all, so perhaps the idea is unrealistic. Probably as unrealistic as the notion of this ever getting a reissue on DVD, since it offers
such a constrained viewing experience.
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