If Pink Floyd were always just businessmen in loonpants, Hawkwind really did appear to live the dream – or was it the nightmare? The early Seventies people’s band looked as though they permanently camped out, though live at least they weren’t easy to see: just masses of tangled hair, glimpsed through flickering strobes and acid-fuelled projections, their music a wind tunnel of remorseless two-chord riffing. Indeed, while "Silver Machine", their one hit single, is a true rock'n'roll classic, Hawkwind’s albums always seemed the least reason to get excited about them, compared to freakin’ out at their gigs, trying to get arrested with them or fantasising about their über-voluptuous dancer Stacia. Anyone who was into Hawkwind "just for the music" was missing the point.
So it seems odd, 40 years after their period of greatest influence, to be attempting to listen, without benefit of stimulants, to a new Hawkwind album from beginning to end. The opener, "Seasons", is pretty much what you’d expect: layers of shimmering guitar and spacey atmospherics – just like the old Hawkwind, but far better recorded – though the vocal by bassist Jonathan Darbyshire sounds almost polite. That contrast is symptomatic of an album that takes us through two CDs of driving space rock, gentler, folkier numbers and jagged, punky pieces, while never quite convincing us of its reason to exist beyond the fact that Hawkwind are still managing to make albums. Yet if the riffs are 10th-hand and the lyrics, what you can hear of them, banal doggerel, the overall effect isn’t unpleasant. "Southern Cross" takes us into atmospheric ambient territory, courtesy of ex-Gong keyboardist Tim Blake, while the horribly trite "Right to Decide" transmogrifies into a transcendant, glistening guitar workout from Dave Brock, the band’s original leader and the one who’s still holding the show together.
There are hints throughout of the things that made these prog-rock deviants pivotal influences on forms as diverse as punk, rave and industrial metal. It would take a genius of a producer to draw all that out and make it concrete and relevant to now. But if it ever happens I’d be dead keen to hear it.
Hawkwind live in Manchester, 2011