Music > Live Reviews
Hawkwind @ UEA
24/04/16
Until about six months ago, I was, I fear, not ripe with knowledge regarding Hawkwind. Sure, I’d heard the name, and knew they’d been making crazy psychaedelic prog rock inspired by sci fi novels since the 70‘s and that they were well known for their wigged out, no holds barred live shows. It’s not every day you get to experience this kind of star spangled vibe in Norwich, so I took myself to school, checked out their back cat, interviewed original member Dave Brock for Outline (he was charming, like a lovely uncle who plants his potatoes in wellies covered in stick on silver stars http://www.outlineonline.co.uk/music/interviews/hawkwind) and looked forward to tonight, when I would enter the domain of Hawkwind with all my spaceguns blazing.
They’re here to present their new album The Machine Stops, a concept album based on an EM Forster short story from 1909. It’s a story of the future, and EM predicted with chilling accuracy how the technology can separate us from each other unnaturally and runs our lives in 2016. It’s a brilliant read. Go read it. The album’s gone into the Top 30, their first for many many years, and has been hailed as their best work in decades. It all bodes well.
It’s an early start tonight, and daylight is still slipping through the gaps in the ceiling as the show starts off at a slow pace with a trippy, mindbending video on the big screen for several minutes. It serves as a great way to get us focussed for the evening. Members of the band gradually appear on stage, with the biggest cheer going to Dave himself on guitar and vocals, wreathed in smiles and flowing grey locks.
They start off as they mean to proceed with humdinger All Hail The Machine. Vocalist Mr Dibs has something of Shaun Ryder and John Lydon to his vocals, and cuts an imposing figure onstage, a serious man with shades and hat on throughout. Visually, the huge screen is constantly changing, from fractals to images to things that partly shimmer and shake in front of my eyes til I can’t tell if it’s my mind creating them or not. I’m a bit sad, however, that the promised silk dancers have obviously not found the LCR’s stage set up to be safe or suitable for their part of the proceedings, so we don’t get the full stage show. Never mind though, because I have all I need in the music.
I am overwhelmed. New, young bass player Haz Wheaton is incredibly talented, channelling Lemmy, and suitably so, his riffs and complex arrangements perfect every time, performed with love, panache, confidence and joy. He and Dave enter their own little love bubble during most songs, facing each other and jamming in such a way that I almost want everyone else to shut up so I can hear exactly what’s going on there. Dave is a guitar wizard, his screaming, wailing rainbow arcs of pure, clear notes hit my sweet spot - he knows what he’s doing. There’s such magic between the two of them, a spell that we’re all bewitched by and it’s a simply pleasure to watch two musicians play so easily and naturally together. Drummer Richard Chadwick is a master, again demonstrating his outstanding abilities with fast runs, belting away at the skins with all his might for the upbeat, whirling, driving passages that I love.
It’s tight as hell, but at the same time I feel like it’s all hung together on the tiniest point of the tiniest star; the sound wafts around so organically between them, yet they always know exactly what’s going on even when it’s at its most spacey and wild. There’s something new to hear every single second, and there’s such depth to it all I’m mesmorised. It’s hard to take all the layers in, so I just try to concentrate on floating on my own little Astral plane and allow myself to soak it in as a whole. Hexagone is a pensive moment about halfway through the album and sounds amazing tonight, as does A Solitary Man, the first single from the album, which is almost an indie rock classic in style, but with a madness behind it that you just don’t hear these days from the kids. Shot Down In The Night is one of the highlights of the evening, strong, punchy and balls deep in majesty and triumph.
This is a band who have spent years making their own kind of music, singing their own special songs, but have allowed all their knowledge of the world (and worlds we do not yet know) to be sucked into that music. It’s such well educated stuff. I can hear shoegaze, indie, metal, rock, dance, psych, drone...it’s a melange of all the music from the past 50 years, picked apart and glued back together in a crazy heady Hawkwind way. Plus a massive dollop of their own unique sound. With an encore of You’d Better Believe It, taken from their fourth album Hall Of The Mountain Grill, the night sadly comes to an end, we're turfed out onto Earth's rude soil to fend for ourselves, and it’s only 9:30 on a Saturday night! How can the fun possibly stop there? It doesn't, but that's another story.
Hawkwind travelled trough time and space to bring us two spectacular hours of the most complicated, original and despite their heritage, modern sounding music that I think I may have ever heard live. It’s like being in a musical hurricane and not giving a single fuck. All hail Hawkwind. A mighty, mighty band, still very much valid in 2016.