The material (3 tracks of which are previously unreleased, aside from their appearance on the original “Weird Tapes Vol. 8” cassette version) is a mixture of archival pre-Hawkwind recordings and 1973-ish live tapes. The first of the latter is the opening track, credited as Space Is Deep (Space Ritual). This means not that it’s by Nik’s mob, but that it’s the same as the version that appeared on the Space Ritual Alive album. This works really well when heard in isolation from the rest of that ouvre, and has been well placed at the start of this album where it manages not to sound out of place despite having an entirely different sonic signature to everything that follows.
Down On Her Knees is one of the previously unreleased numbers, and judging by the surging rocked-out sound it’s a live recording from the very early 70’s. Musically it’s very basic: a mid-paced 2-chord workout. The low-in-the-mix vocals and rhythm guitar are unmistakably Brock’s, but there’s also a fuzzed, stinging lead guitar which sounds very like some of the stuff on the Captain Lockheed album. The bass is probably pre-Lemmy (it doesn’t have the jamming variability of his Space Ritual Alive contributions), so I’ll hazard this is of 1971 vintage. My guess would be that this is from a festival appearance with someone (Paul Rudolph?) guesting on lead guitar. It reminds me slightly of the Watchfield Free Festival tracks, in terms of having the same looseness of feel: and the wayward sound quality does suggest an audience recording with the band’s stage sound being blown about by the wind.
Live And Let Live is another of the new tracks and is claimed to hail from 1973. Again, it’s a somewhat sludgy live recording, quite experimental in that amorphous way that the band explored years later on tracks like Douglas In The Jungle. This could have been the prototype for that track, with a loose floppy bassline keeping some sort of time going, while Brock’s guitar chunders and snarls away, synths bubble and squeal and the vocals are no more than snatches of indecipherable conversation. It shouldn’t work but it does.
Etchanatay features an intro made up of a blend of swishing audio generator and echoed flute; then a typical Brock riff (think of the coda to “Lighthouse”) fades in and supplants it, with the rhythm guitar and bass in unison playing a chord pattern like E – F – E – D (though I haven’t checked if it is those exact chords) with more of the fuzzed lead guitar and some synth melody. This one too is claimed to be from 1973, and buried in the rather soupy mix is a familiar spoken vocal: the voiceover by John G. Neihardt which was later (1990!) included in the track “Black Elk Speaks”. You can make out the line “Hetchetu aloh!” which is Lakotah (Sioux) for “it is so!”. Seeing as I just posted a 1991 interview with Harvey Bainbridge (“Yesterday Pain” ?!) in which he claimed that this had been a new direction for Hawkwind in 1990 with the Space Bandits album, it is surprising to hear it featuring so early in the band’s career like this.
After this we hit a run of, to be honest, not very good tracks from the earlier end of the spectrum covered by this album. Taking them in order, Roll ‘Em Pete, Come On and Dealing With The Devil are all by the Dharma Blues Band and were probably laid down in 1966. Each was included in the Dawn Of Hawkwind Voiceprint album which I’ve previously reviewed here and there’s nothing much further to add about them. We also have Bring It On Home which is maybe from a year or two later and was a Dave Brock solo effort with session musician backing. It’s quite bit more polished than the Dharma Blues Band tracks but again, it’s covered in my review of Dawn Of Hawkwind.
This CD closes out with 2 more live tracks from the early 70’s – Dreaming (that is, You Know You’re Only Dreaming) and (You) Shouldn’t Do That. As with the other pieces from this period the sound quality is a little murky but the performances are good. Dreaming has some tasteful flute colourings and an arrangement that’s very faithful to the original studio recording (though harder-hitting) – which again, makes me suspect that this is from 1971 rather than 1973, not that it matters at all. If you listen closely to the drums, it seems likely that the honours are being done by Simon King rather than Terry Ollis (who Brock once described as a “downers freak” with an “extremely primitive style”) since there are a number of quite polished excursions round the kit; though the pace is definitely more Ollis than King, and it may have been early in the latter’s tenure with the band. (He joined on 6th January 1972.) The ending is also interesting, with a synth-dominated fade-out that contemporary episodes of Dr.Who or whatever always used to denote the departure of aliens, leaving the earth as their flying saucers ascend into the sky…
Interestingly, these last two tracks are flagged as being in mono (unlike the others of the same era) and are probably therefore from a different audio source. The CD packaging presents thanks to Nick Loebner and Steve Freight (Yahoo! Hawkwind Group stalwarts both) and I wonder if they perhaps were able to supply an audio source for these tracks to replace those formerly present on the cassette version of this album but since lost? This would explain the 5 year hiatus between the release of the other Weird titles on CD and the delayed appearance on Weird 108 (released on 27/3/2006).
Shouldn’t Do That, like the preceding track (from which it segues without any break), is a live recording that aims at replicating the studio arrangement of the original; and like the other live tracks here, doesn’t quite succeed in these aims due to the harder edge of live Hawkwind. This is mostly found in the overdriven rhythm guitar and dense pounding of the drums and bass. The vocals are buried fairly deep in the mix and sound like comatose moaning courtesy of Nik Turner, with some really dated backing vocals more to the fore. The sound quality of this and (You Know You’re Only) Dreaming is noticeably muddier than that of the other early 70’s live cuts, so this bears out the idea that these may have been sourced from audience recordings, probably made on one of the cheap cassette recorders of the day.
So, is it worth getting? Most of these tracks can be obtained elsewhere and aren’t anyway of the highest quality – so this title, like the others in the Weird series, is aimed at the hard core fan rather than the casual Hawkwind buyer. For those of us who fall into the former definition, the 3 numbers that don’t feature on any other album make this an essential purchase, but it’s not one of the strongest titles even among the Weird Tapes – it’s a little better than Weird 106 (another delayed release) but still struggles to get past 5/10.
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