a soundtrack for technicians of spaceship Hawkwind
Written: Aug 27 '01
Product Rating:
Pros: clear mixes, classic Lemmy-era Hawkwind
Cons: shorter than the essential Space Ritual Live album from the same period
The Bottom Line: shorter by a third than Space Ritual Live, BBC Radio 1 In Concert still documents Hawkwind at their heaviest. a nice addition to the aforementioned classic.
prjt2501's Full Review: BBC Radio 1 Live in Concert by Hawkwind
Until fairly recently, the BBC Radio 1 concert was the only easily available document of the powerful band that Hawkwind were in the early 1970's. Musically based around the powerful bass playing of Ian 'Lemmy' Kilminster and Dave Brock's inventive guitar and vocal work, the early Hawkwind were a band more akin to first generation British heavy metal than the band they would eventually mutate into.
Released in 1991, BBC Radio 1 Live is taken from a performance at the legendary Paris Theater in London, location of many BBC In Concert performances. For this recording, the lineup consisted of Kilminster, Brock, Nik Turner (sax), Del Dettmar (synths), Simon King (drums) and Dik Mik (audio generator), and the evening's set was made up of material that would be the center of Hawkwind's live performances for years to come.
From a sound quality standpoint, the recording is excellent...perhaps a 9 on a scale of 1 to 10. Considering the age of the original source tapes, being able to hear a recording from 1972 in this condition is something special. And the performance documented here is one worth saving, even if it is a bit on the short side at under 1 hour (by comparison, the 1973 live album Space Ritual Alive clocks in at nearly 90 minutes).
BORN TO GO: the album opens with a countdown by dancer and occasionally officially listed member Stacia, preparing the audience for the aural assault that was soon to follow. This lead-in allowed the band to prepare for 'Born To Go,' their traditional concert opener. A frenetically paced rocker, this is Hawkwind at their most metallic.
SEVEN BY SEVEN: This track should more accurately be listed as 'The Black Corridor/Seven By Seven,' as the song actually opens with a Michael Moorcock poem from his Eternal Champions saga, spoken by Nik Turner, the band's mystical sax player. Seven By Seven features some very 'out there' synth playing from Dettmar and heavily processed sax work from Turner, with Brock and Turner alternating lyrical passages...Brock singing, Turner speaking. An interesting song, but not among my favorite HW tracks.
BRAINSTORM: Hawk-metal again, this time written by Turner. Brock and Turner handle the lead vocals here, singing the verses in unison whilst Lemmy wails over top of them. While Turner's writing for the band could hardly be called adventurous (much of his work is repetitive to the extreme), the openness of his compositions provided loads of room for improvisation by the rest of the band, including a killer Brock solo about 2:30 into the song, where one might think the distortion could melt speaker cones.
MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE: For many people, this 'is' Hawkwind...their most memorable track. More than likely this one song appears on more Hawkwind albums and compilations than any other. Dripping with early 1970's counter-culturalism and 'sci-fi' lyrics, MotU is really driven here (and in most live versions) by Lemmy's bass playing.
Again I must 'complain' about the track listing on the CD...the song is listed as being just over 11:00 long, but over 3 minutes of that is a synth/audio generator duet that has little to do with the actual song, and is more like the band's improvisational excursions. Better to have split this song into it's representative parts.
PARANOIA: Paranoia comes from Hawkwind's first album, where the band was less a hard rock/metal/space rock amalgam and more a product of it's times...blues-influenced, and drawing heavily from Dave Brock's experience as a busker in London's underground. This track was one of the few to show what direction the band was heading, but is for the most part nine and a half minutes of one or two chord vamps and chants. Easily skipped.
SILVER MACHINE: The band's only successful jaunt up the British charts was with this song, sung by Lemmy. Like so much of HW's early material, it's a 3 chord stomper, but there's some fantastic synth playing in the background, and typical Robert Calvert lyrics about an alien abduction. This track ends with a voiceover by the BBC announcer (Andy Dunkley) reciting the evening's production credits.
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