August 13, 1999

Epocheclipse: 30 Year Anthology

"Hell of a band," was how their erstwhile bass player [a]Lemmy[/a] described the stroboscopic, bare-breasted, drug-ingesting charabanc of no fixed hygiene that was [a]Hawkwind[/a] in 1972....

8 / 10 "Hell of a band," was how their erstwhile bass player Lemmy described the stroboscopic, bare-breasted, drug-ingesting charabanc of no fixed hygiene that was Hawkwind in 1972. And while you'd be rightly suspicious if he were telling you about a "hell of a recipe" or a "hell of a doctor", in the matter of bands you'd have to acknowledge that Ian Kilminster knew his spiked psychedelic onions pretty well.

/img/Hawkwind999.jpg In the period covered by this three-CD compilation, Hawkwind were a band of two fairly major halves: in the early-'70s a whiffy collective more often than not either wholly incapacitated by Mandrax or raddled to gnashing on amphetamines. They would turn up, blind you with projections, spaced-age paranoid incantation and the trance-inducing power of repetitive riffing. They had a bloke called Dik Mik in them, and nobody knew why. By the late-'70s, though, the influence in the group had shifted to the tidier, if still massively psychotic vision of singer Bob Calvert. Influenced by the anxiety-centric science fiction of Isaac Asimov, they found a new way to express themselves that was powerful, repetitive and sinister.

Track names? Names are limiting, man. You don't want their, like, names. But just as the world is Hawkwind's free festival now, be advised that it was their potent psilocybin mushroom then, and this is a worthy document of that long strange trip.

Several men on drugs. Quite possibly playing in your garden now. Hell of a band.