Hawkwind – Electric Tepee -

396

5 Stars

***The striking album artwork by Alan Arthur with Brian Burrows compliments the music very nicely.***

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Hawkwind have now lasted over five decades, surviving this long whist releasing thirty studio albums, umpteen live albums, solo albums and compilations, and going through 47 band members plus auxiliary singers and dancers. The only mainstay of the ship Hawkwind has been Dave Brock, who has presided over all the comings and goings.

***Dave Brock (Photo by Harpic Bryant)***

What a celebrated list of personnel there has been over the years. The strangest has to be Ginger Baker, who one always felt had gotten lost on his way to the forum. Probably the best known was Ian Lemmy Killiminster, whilst drummer Richard Chadwick has clung on the longest, from 1988 until the present day.

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For a bunch of supposedly fun-loving, peaceful hippies, they do dish out some ruthless coups. Nik Turner was ousted twice for being too influential and popular with the Hawkfans. Many have dropped out of the ranks only to return a few years later. Just recently, the revolving door policy seems to have increased in power, with central characters disappearing in dubious circumstances.

Back in 1992, Hawkwind released ‘Electric Tepee,’ a sensational album of space rock combining intergalactic orbital rockers with huge chunks of Hawk dreamscapes that whisk you off on a sonic journey, clocking in at one hour and fifteen minutes.

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The band at this point had been reduced to a three-piece, with David Brock covering all guitar work and some of the keyboards, combining with Alan Davey, who, as well as bass guitar duties, played keyboards, whilst Richard Chadwick settled behind the drum kit. The vocal duties were shared by Brock and Davey. Along with standard rock ’n’ roll keyboards, the band utilized many sequencers, computers, and Moog Synthesizers to achieve their aims. This was gloriously put together here. The music wraps you up and takes you on an enchanting journey through the craters of space.

The striking album artwork is by Alan Arthur with Brian Burrows and compliments the music very nicely.

Musical space dust is layered throughout the album, with warrior chants breaking out mid-song, as well as spacecraft taking off and landing, alien-coded languages, evil laughter, even station announcements all intermingled over the driving power trio playing beneath it. The music drifts in and out of trance, ambient, techno, electronica, and heavy metal, including as near as Hawkwind got within this period to a hit single, ‘Right To Decide.’

The band introduces you to their spaceship on opener ‘LSD,’ eight minutes of driving space rock with all the frills, trilling guitars, driving pounding basslines, swirling keyboards, preaching vocals, and aliens taking over in the middle sections.

Preparing you for further adventures, next up is ‘Blue Shift,’ a complete Hawkwind drifting musical lullaby lulling you into its warm depths. At this pace, the album pulls you through, gently easing you at times into a luscious cloud before abruptly slamming the pedal to the metal and letting the guitars run riot as in the accelerated playing on the eight minutes of ‘Secret Agent.” Certainly one of the best Space Rock albums ever put together and a high point for Hawkwind.

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Remarkably, this trio remained the nucleus for the band for several more years before the departure of Alan Davey, who was at least spared the apathy of being involved in the album Distant Horizons (1997) – a very low point in the Hawkwind journey.

Who is in the band at present? Nobody knows, but certainly being one of Dave Brock’s Space Cadets is not necessarily a lifetime occupation. It always annoys the loyal fan base when the band has another critical and commercial burst and then sees the lineup that brought them this renewed energy and success being broken up and disbanded. But Dave Brock will continue to fly the good ship Hawkwind the way he and he alone chooses.