Now I have to confess to having a soft spot for early Hawkwind. The first time I saw them was in a youth club in Hatfield circa 1970. They turned strobes on the audience, Terry Ollis drummed naked. Nik Turner was seriously weird in the best way and Dave Brock earthed the whole thing and played mean guitar.
Imagine our collective suprise when it was chucking out time that they had played for four hours it was well past midnight and the boy scouts running the club were seriously pissed by the beastliness of this band. oh, not to mention Mr Ollis and the condoms thrown into the audience and a whole lot of anarchist/subversive mags. In short it was a bloody good night and the aged fifteen Hertfordshire male collective we would attend other such occassions again and did, many!
And none did disapoint. So this on vinyl. Great record store day 2015. Like fucking genius Eno’s „my squelchy life“, or fucking genius Nelson’s „teatro“. All on vinyl. In New Zealand I played this Hawkwind debut from 1970 (look at the cover!) in a music class for my 6 weeks I attended Takapuna Grammar – it met with disinterest only getting traction when I moved into a flat-barely 16 with a group of dope smoking architecture students.
It is a classic but maybe not as good as the follow up „In search of space“ a seriously brain altering bit of mayhem-particulalry in certain conditions-through cans and enough stereo effect to get shifting sounds. But Hawkwind is a cross roads into something other than the mainstream prog rock of its era.