By Jim Rowland
An archive Hawkwind recording is always welcome, especially when it’s a BBC one. That’s just what you get here with ‘Dreamworkers Of Time: The BBC Recordings (1985-1995)’, a new three-CD box set from Cherry Red featuring all the live concert recordings and BBC sessions of Hawkwind spanning the ten years from 1985 to 1995 in the life of space the rock legends.
All the recordings here are newly remastered from the BBC master tapes, with the three discs housed in a clamshell box with an illustrated booklet. What’s more, 16 of the total 26 tracks are previously unreleased, and with these being BBC recordings, excellent sound quality is guaranteed, which is most definitely the case here.
Star of the show for me is disc one, which covers the original Tommy Vance Friday Rock Show broadcast of Hawkwind’s triumphant headline slot at the Reading Festival in 1986. This writer was actually in the audience for this show, and I still own a cassette of this from when it was first broadcast all those years ago. It was certainly a special performance, although the BBC edited it down to 60 minutes for the broadcast, which is what you get here.
Hawkwind were in a rich vein of form at this time, having released the excellent ‘The Chronicle Of The Black Sword’ album the year before, with a quality line-up of Dave Brock, Huw Lloyd Langton, Harvey Bainbridge, Alan Davey and Danny Thompson. It’s an energetic, fast paced set featuring pumped up versions of 70’s classics like ‘Magnu’, ‘Brainstorm’, ‘Assault & Battery’, ‘Master Of The Universe’ and ‘Assassins Of Allah’ (‘Hassan I Sabha’) alongside then more recent selections like ‘Utopia’, ‘The Pulsing Cavern’, ‘Needle Gun’ and ‘Dream Worker’. The encore was pretty special as they were joined on stage by Lemmy and Dumpy (without his Rusty Nuts) for a sprawling version of ‘Silver Machine’ with Lemmy taking the lead vocal as he did on the original record. It’s an excellent recording and a good reminder of how good Hawkwind were in the mid-80’s.
Disc two fast forwards two years for a BBC Radio One ‘In Concert’ broadcast of a show at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1988, when Hawkwind were touring the ‘Xenon Codex’ album. Once again edited down to broadcast size, the set relies more heavily on the 80’s material, with ‘The War I Survived’, ‘Tides’, ‘Heads’ and ‘Wastelands Of Sleep’ from ‘Xenon Codex’ itself, and the likes of ‘Utopia’, ‘Rocky Paths’ and ‘Sonic Attack’ from the start of that decade, along with a rare appearance of ‘Moonglum’. The old chestnut of ‘Brainstorm’ rounds things off as the only remnant of the early material, and it’s good to hear the more metal-leaning ‘Shot Down In The Night’ in this set. It’s pretty fair to say that Hawkwind during the 80’s did lean a little more in the metal direction, certainly compared to their 70’s incarnations. Another quality Hawkwind performance captured, and again with great sound quality.
Disc three moves away from concert performance and into the realm of the live session. The first one is a 1985 session for the Friday Rock Show, which strangely doesn’t actually feature any tracks from that year’s ‘The Chronicle Of The Black Sword’ album, and goes back in time. It was the band’s first BBC session since 1972. ‘Assault of The Hawk’ combines ‘Assault & Battery’ with the ‘Night Of The Hawk’ single from the previous year, the obscure ‘They’ve Got Your Number’ is decent enough, and ‘Magnu / Dreamworker Of Time’ is another mini medley. The second session goes forward in time ten years to a 1995 Mark Radcliffe session, by which time Richard Chadwick had joined on drums, and remained ever since. Ron Tree had also been recruited on vocals, although his stint was to be shorter. Tree does his best Bob Calvert impression on the likes of ‘Death Trap’ and ‘Assassins of Allah’ from the glorious late 70’s period of Hawkwind. Whilst not quite hitting the heights of the first two discs, there’s plenty of good, interesting stuff to get your teeth into from these vintage sessions, which get a CD release for the very first time here.
‘Dreamworkers Of Time’ is a pretty essential release for any Hawkwind fan and comes highly recommended here.
- ‘Dreamworkers Of Time’ is released on Friday (25 March). You can get your copy HERE.
- All content © Über Rock. Not to be reproduced in part or in whole without the express written permission of Über Rock.