Music from the Hawkwind family tree

Music from the Hawkwind family tree - Part 16

Thanks to Graham for these reviews

Worth A Listen: Space Ritual - Live at the Venusian Electric Ballroom

A nicely played and nicely produced CDR of the alternative Hawkwind. The overall feel is organic and relaxed, with a set of familiar songs taken at a fairly leisurely pace. The sleeve notes offer a bit of self-mythologizing and Dave Anderson finally gets his writer’s credit on ‘Master Of The Universe’.

Just one inevitable gripe: there is nothing new here. The only unfamiliar title (‘Cosmic Chant’) is basically a jam with Nik Turner doing the “Ghost Dance” vocals. Yes, as the sleeve notes tell us, Nik “wrote seminal underground Hawkwind anthems ‘Master Of The Universe”, ‘Brainstorm’ and ‘D-Rider’…” and all are present and correct here, along with “Watching The Grass Grow”, the token Calvert track (‘Ejection’) and the inevitable ‘Sonic Attack’ and ‘Silver Machine’. Only the inclusion of ‘Born To Go’ is even mildly surprising.

This is a fine piece of nostalgia and, furthermore, the band have evolved a distinctive sound – something akin to the original Space Ritual era Hawkwind but with a lead guitarist. It is a million times better than “2001 A Space Odyssey Live” and better than the live offerings of almost all of the pick-up bands Nik Turner has recorded with over the years. Space Ritual have, on this evidence, finely honed their performances to a satisfying degree and should be well worth catching live. (How about a trip north of the border for a change?)

As is the case with the mothership though, the absence of new studio material in the marketplace makes it hard to think of them as anything more than a nostalgia act. With the continued non-appearance of Brock and Co’s TMTYL (perhaps doomed to go the way of the Earth Ritual, Death Generator, or Mars projects), and no sign of Space Ritual’s studio opus, it looks like both bands are doomed to grind out a few years more twilight existence touring third rate venues before finally retiring. Please prove me wrong!

Worth A Listen: Judge Trev and Jackie Windmill – Live at Glastonbury

The link with Hawkwind is pretty tenuous here: both featured artists have performed alongside Nik Turner outside Hawkwind and Ron Tree puts in a guest appearance on two songs.

Trev Thoms has contributed to some of the worst Hawkwind-related releases of recent years (Bajina for example). He also appeared on some of the best, including Inner City Unit’s magnum opus The Maximum Effect as well as producing some good but low key solo material. This live album places the emphasis on the latter, with live acoustic performances of several songs from the God and Man set. Jackie Windmill proves to have an excellent voice and sings lead on some of her own songs as well as providing backing vocals on Judge Trev’s tracks.

There are some mis-steps: the opening ‘Wey Hey

Hey O Weya’ does what it says on the tin and no more, with Jackie chanting to the accompaniment of a didgeridoo. ‘Raj Neesh’ is the token ICU track and sounds out of place. Jackie Windmill’s poetry reading is also not a high point. Otherwise, it’s all very relaxed, pleasant and folky until Ron Tree appears and treats us to some tuneless ranting. ‘Negative Positive’ might have worked in the 1997 era punk-thrash version of Hawkwind but is rubbish as an acoustic number. ‘Number One’ is only marginally better. Trev then rescues proceedings with the closing sea shanty ‘Battle’.

Despite the two tracks here (and the entire Bajina project), Ron and Trev are capable of excellent joint performances - if the samples on the MOAB website are anything to go by. Sadly, Live at Glastonbury would be improved by excising Ron’s appearance. The CDR is available direct from Real Festival Music (REALCD 006).

Worth A Listen: Robert Calvert – Hype

(Review by Steve)

Featuring an all-star cast of Simon House, Michael Moorcock, Nik Turner, Trev Thoms, Pete Pavli and erstwhile Bethnal members George Csapo, Pete Dowling and Nick Michaels, Bob Calvert released this album in 1982 to accompany his novel of the same name. It was subtitled "The Songs of Tom Mahler" - who was the hero of the book, a rock star cynically exploited by his record company. This comes across as rather a scrappy way to put an album together, and it's as far from space rock as you can get: Over My Head is a case in point, comprising as it does a sparse, 60's bubblegum vibe with a clanging guitar and chiming keyboards. Ambitious continues in the same vein, though for the first time I can hear why Calvert's vocals used to be compared to those of Bryan Ferry. In fact this could almost be an early Roxy Music number, with the quavering keyboard and mannered vocals. However it's more minimalistic than anything Roxy were doing, and the 50's / 60's chord progression

(it's almost doo-wop without the vocal arrangements) is quite different to their 70's decadence.

It's The Same leavens these elements with a more direct, new-wave influenced vocal, but by now has established the overall *initial* direction of the album, with the 60's pop overtones and Ferryish vocal style. However, the following track (Hanging Out On The Seafront) pulls a foreboding element into this mix, with dark, staccato verses which aren't completely lightened by the slightly chirpier chorus. This one ends strongly with vamped violins and restrained seagulling synths swelling with subtle menace.

Sensitive features (semi-) distorted guitars for the first time, but once again there's so much space left in the mix that this seems to just emphasise the starkness of the arrangements. The actual recording quality is excellent throughout, though, making clear that the minimalism is by design and not on account of tight recording budgets. Nik gets a blast of his own right at the end, and it's nicely produced, being fat and bright. Whereas the following track, Evil Rock is anything but. It's an old-fashioned number which even in 1982 might have sounded somewhat geriatric. Nik Turner's greasy sax solo is probably the best thing about it, but there is a real Calvert pedigree to this song, which sits easily alongside other of his musical compositions like The Right Stuff or Only The Dead Dreams Of The Cold War Kid. Neither of those had a honky-tonk piano, like this does, though.

We Like To Be Frightened - ooh, some synthesizer, and a song with a bit of bounce to it too. Like many of Calvert's solo songs, musically it's unexceptional, having a fairly unremarkable chord progression. The real skill, as ever, is in the lyrics, and although this particular song doesn't have any message, there are some trademark clever rhyming couplets like "With a dangerous dental arrangement / Count Dracula showed us what 'strange' meant".

Teen Ballad Of Deano returns to the archetypal pop moves and even throws a nod lyrically to the Shangri-La's (Leader Of The Pack, anyone?). The prevalence of these influences on this album, along with the seeming autobiographical element of some of the lyrics (Margate is evoked in "Hanging Out On The Seafront") suggest Calvert was going back to his roots for some of this material. But the album does not just dwell on the early 60's, but smoothly conjoins this to what was then an up-to-the-minute vibe: Flight 105 is more contemporary synth-pop, though much darker than the Casio-inspired rubbish that was troubling the charts in 1982. There's a touch of Weimar-style cabaret in the world-weariness of the vocals, though oddly, the effect is once again to recall the Roxy Music comparison - this might be "A Song For Europe"'s minimalistic little brother.

The Luminous Green Glow Of The Dials Of The Dashboard (At Night) continues with the then-current sound of electronic drums and crystalline synth. This one is more in the vein of Ultravox as they were before Midge Ure joined them. It has a more European feel than the earlier tracks on this album, and there's a real progression at work, with Greenfly And The Rose working this groove a little deeper, into a real piece of early 80's electro-pop, which is then fully expressed on Lord Of The Hornets, in terms of the electronic instrumentation. The vocals have that Ferryesque quaver to them, and this is perhaps the only song on the album that has any echo of Bob's 1970's work to it. Overall, "Hype" seems almost like a determined attempt to exorcise that era and the shade of Hawkwind, so studiously does it strive to avoid space rock, both lyrically and musically. Whether or not this was conscious I don't know, but musically this album connects the 60's to the 80's without going through the 70's, and shows a side of Bob Calvert that is largely not discernible from his work with Hawkwind. It's not his best work but it is worth a listen.

Approach With Caution: T30 Control - Blade Of The Sun

This CDR (POA27CD, © The Life Central Force) is mostly instrumental, in the ambient / trance mode. The first seven tracks are all relatively short and pleasantly melodic. The first is called “Paradox” and, with its use of synths and sequencers, is a dead-ringer for mid-1970s Tangerine Dream, as is track 4 (“Rise Into The Sky”) and, actually, most of the other tracks too. Only the slightly more modern electronic percussion gives away the recent origin of the material. Track 8 features some gentle organ textures
and somebody explaining repeatedly that “Peace is a state of being” – which is either relaxing or rather irritating depending on your own state of being at the time.

The Hawkwind connection is that Nik Turner recites some words during the closing “Sunphazer Suite”. Stretched out over 22 minutes, this builds gradually and promisingly for

five minutes, with sequencer tracks coming in and increasing in intensity. Unfortunately it then slows right down again and Mr Turner enters at just past the 7-minute mark to recite the “Blade Chant”, accompanied by various spacey sounds effects – a bit reminiscent of the spoken tracks on WOTEOT but lacking their intensity and aggression. Almost half-way through now and the track consists of nothing but a few random effects. Just as you want to reach for the “stop” button, the synths and sequencers finally come back in and the earlier pattern is repeated: five minutes of promising material before it runs out of inspiration and energy again. Turner briefly reappears near the end.

This is probably of interest only to fans of Tangerine Dream and to Hawkwind completists. It is available from C&D Compact Disc Services.

One Of The Best: Adrian Shaw – String Theory

(Review by Steve)

Mirrors opens with a sludgefest of dark distorted guitars, sounding detuned – a great way to introduce the hallmark Shaw sound without the murky implications of some of the production techniques on his previous albums. There’s also a little skirl of Brian May-esque lead guitar squalls, and Shaw’s own ensemble’d vocals, which like the unison guitar / bass, tend to dwell in the lower register. Some tasteful greasily traditional keyboard parts round this out to make a pretty perfect Adrian Shaw track, i.e. three-minutes of dark psychedelic paranoia...

Thirty Two relies on some warped organ sounds, laden with hefty swoops of portamento on the verses, to underpin Adrian’s measured vocal phrasing. This is leavened on the chorus parts by acoustic guitar arpeggios and nimble bass runs – which oddly, are something one rarely hears on Ade’s recent work. The vocal line is no more

upbeat than on the verses, but the entire mood is lifted by the change of arrangement. This continues into the tasteful guitar solo (by Paul Simmons) which has a touch of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” about it, but lasts six times as long, fading the song out on the eight minute mark.

Another Shaw trademark is the sudden juxtaposition of musical styles, and here the countryish Do It Again does it, er, again. It’s more country rock than true country and western: the lyrics thankfully avoid the “git-yore-tongue-outta-mah-mouth-cuz-ah’m-kissin’-you-goodbye” paradigm :-) This is one of the briefest numbers here but is quite beautiful, with another ensemble vocal arrangement that reminds me of ‘Rhododendron Mile’ on Ade’s “Look Out” album – it’s the melodies he picks out (they’re very difficult to sing) as well as the harmonisation that makes this stuff unique. Next we go into more orchestral psych territory with Cotham Hill –think of the classical instrumentation that George Martin used to deploy on the Beatles’ latter-day records– though this I am sure was played on a keyboard rather than by stuffing a fifteen-strong tuxedo’d string section into a cramped studio somewhere in Walthamstow. This song really consists of no more than these vamped arrangements and another deft vocal line, replete with unexpected melodic twists and turns that Shaw has made into one of his defining motifs. But it needs nothing else, being yet another understated masterpiece.

Bide My Time eases us back into more claustrophobic confines, again with some dark bubbling keyboard parts offsetting wild flights of wah’d lead guitar: they pretty much take turns in the limelight. The vocal parts are more pedestrian, and keep the song anchored to reality. And unlike some of the earlier work in Ade’s solo career, there is plenty of space left in the arrangement, so that the whole thing never feels soupy. He has also now mastered the art of arranging slower numbers so that they don’t drag, as evidenced on Lost For Words, a generally unremarkable number in the context of this album: but as with everything else here, listen carefully, and you have a clever little oddity on your hands, which never does quite what it ought to...

It’s almost a relief to say that I don’t like Stirrup Cup much, but it’s also a pity since this departs from the highly standardised production of the rest of the CD, placing reverb-shrouded multitrack vocals high in the mix and dead-centre. Often, individual layers of these numbers appear to be biased towards left or right, but I think it’s a clever psychological effect, achieved I know not how. Purely subjective on my part – I’m just none too taken with the song itself. Oak and Brass, the succeeding number, also does not float my boat particularly, being a coupling of piano and vocal which for my money only begins to get interesting when the strings and woodwind voices start to blend in. Unusually, the vocals falter a bit here, too.

Non-Stop Dancing ups the weirdness quotient with looping keyboard parts which quickly usher in some distorted rhythm guitars and phased-shifted vocals. This song inhabits some kind of weird interior universe with no connection to the outside world, and so doesn’t obey any of the normal rules of rock songs, rather splendidly. Bari Watts contributes another suitably unhinged, meandering guitar solo which perfectly complements the vibe. But there’s an utterly different vibe on the next song, which is also the last cut on the album: Saving Grace pulses along with tabla and sitar overlaid with vocal samples and interspersed with mad subvocalized interludes…a nightmare from the Indian restaurant at the end of the universe, which suddenly metamorphoses at 3:21 into a tasty psych/rock song, as close as Mr. Shaw gets to conventional – which is really not very close. This squelches along very satisfyingly for a while, but just keeps going and going until you realise it’s turned into a major psychedelic opus, clocking in at over 18 minutes! Interest is sustained by the constant evolution of lead guitar parts, which are provided by no less honourable a roster than Bari Watts, John Perry (ex-Only Ones) Ade’s son Aaron and Nick Saloman (Bevis Frond). A very smart move to interchange and rotate all these guitarists, since even the most prodigiously talented individual would likely start to pall over this timeframe.

In conclusion, it seems that with each album he releases, Adrian Shaw hones his songwriting and production skills yet further, with the result that each effort is simpler, and yet better than the previous one: progressive in the finest sense of the term (though I night quibble about the relative merits of “Displaced Person” surpassing those of its’ successor “Look Out”). This stuff is never going to take the top 40 by storm, but what this artist is doing is searching for his own particular Holy Grail and getting closer all the time. One day he’ll find it and *that* will be an album to hear, as is this. Excellent.