More pedals and gizmos than a dalek factory, more bum notes than fleeing escapees, it was simply an experience unlike anything else at the time. If you were there, Space Ritual embedded itself in your DNA, like an alien abductor’s microchip. Strap in, it might be a bumpy ride with unstable gravity, the ejector seat no longer functions properly, but the trip will be cosmic for sure.
It’s almost unimaginable that the hardy genre of Space Rock first took off fifty years ago, as anniversary pods of Hawkwind’s classic live double Space Ritual via Cherry Red Records attest. In truth it was really a coming of age, as exploratory probes had been sent into orbit by the cosmonauts in the afterglow of three prototype LPs by UFO from north London a couple of years earlier (appropriately on Beacon Records) charting in Germany and Japan alone. Space Ritual remains however the ultimate space rock, less subtle perhaps but heavier and fuller. Hawkwind’s module owed more to ‘kraut rock’ (at least one of them had links to it) mixed into combustible fluid with avant-garde jazz (ditto) and new electronica.
A culmination then from implants four years earlier as Group X then Hawkwind Zoo, seeding a debut 7” Hurry On Sundown (an extended demo is on the same label’s Deviation Street compilation) evolved into what this LP and career stand for. A 1970 eponymous album’s adverts (reaching #70 in the UK) proclaimed “Hawkwind is space rock” (even “90 minutes of brain damage” in those innocent, robust daze!) but wasn’t yet on the same plane as Space Ritual when a psychedelic vehicle for three different style guitarists, more so if we recall their Famous Cure (with yet another, the late Mike Slattery)who toured Holland in ’67. X In Search Of Space (#18 in 1971) shows this trajectory in title as well as content.
The “musicnauts” (as the original LP put it) were a septet: Dave Brock (vocals, guitar), Ian ‘Lemmy’ Kilmister (vocals, bass), Simon King (drums), Nik Turner (saxophone, flute, vocals), Bob Calvert (vocals, lyrics), Dik Mik (i.e. Michael Davies, keyboards/audio generator)and Del Dettmar(EMS synthesizer). Dettmar, from Croydon, had been roadie for the Pretty Things then road manager for Edgar Broughton Band, Arthur Brown, Juicy Lucy and Cochise; he was first recruited for that role by manager Doug Smith, whose own job was suggested by John Peel at the band’s first gig in Notting Hill. Nik Turner had been in Dave Brock’s Famous Cure (because of his tripping sax or flute was immune to the cans of drink lobbed at him to stop when singing started), while Simon King and Lemmy were in Opal Butterfly who recorded flop singles for CBS and Polydor.
The project grew from Calvert’s dream of a space opera and a shared idea of the cosmos encompassing the music of the spheres awakening a starship fuelled by an audience’s energy. Sci-fi novels inspired the art and Michael Moorcock’s novels and poems personally involved lyrics. It developed with a large cast (the “heavy metal kids”): Barney Bubbles who designed the cover package and some but not all other art, Jonathon Smeeton (aka Liquid Lens, a light show first built for the band Traffic plus over 200 graphic slides, 50 of which came from London’s Planetarium), “Mothership Control” i.e. DJ Compere of Roundhouse and Marquee fame Andy Dunkley, Stacia, Miss Renee and Tony Carrera as dancers.
A bigger budget was due to the success of earlier albums: a fan (and Lemmy) fave was the rather silly-named Doremi Faso Latido which landed at #14 in the month the Space Ritual Tour took place, December 1972. More of a surprise was that Silver Machine, a Calvert/Brock single, hit #3 in August, recorded live but re-dubbed with Lemmy’s vocals. BBC’s Top Of The Pops filmed a dummy excerpt of the show with the lights on at Dunstable’s Civic Hall, as well as playing the single over their Xmas show credits that year. The BBC also flew a transcription disc for worldwide radio broadcast of four Ritual tracks plus Silver Machine recorded at the Paris Theatre in London just prior to the tour.
These all led to the Space Ritual Tour’s bigger venues and a later American tour as the space bandits’ cosmic immersion for stage and crowd partied more like bikers on acid in your face than flowers in your hair. Elemental heavy riffing and psychedelia around a thundering power trio core meant spaceship rocking like nothing before to defy gravity for chartless interstellar exploration.
Rehearsing at the famed Middle Earth club in London’s Covent Garden, the tour launched in November ‘72 at King’s Lynn Corn Exchange. A free comic programme was handed to attendees before a 20-minute intro (a repetitive chant by Calvert such as “This is your captain speaking…” building up to “Your captain is dead”) before a roaring lift-off with Born To Go. Non-stop music, lights, dancing and visuals (landscapes, sci-fi book covers, mandalas, even silent film horror scenes) created a pulsing lunar-pull of audience and spectacle as if a single organism I recall with flashing colours linked to a keyboard console like waves of crescendos either side of floating cruise. An almost symphonic breadth was collective while audio expanded consciousness in the shadows, like a pagan opera without ego to breathless effect. It’s a pity no film exists, Turner told Mojo.
It was recorded by Vic Maile (who engineered Who’s Live At Leeds, Hendrix, Dr Feelgood and Motorhead’s Ace Of Spades) on 16 track with the Pye Mobile at Liverpool Stadium (a Xmas show) and Brixton Sundown as the year closed. At least that’s what the original LP says, including an Australian double cassette, before multiple reissues every decade since including FLAC. Others mention the Sunderland Locarno gig from the day after Liverpool, as does this new box. The double hit #9 and silver after release in May ’73, despite no Silver Machine, just two weeks after performing at the old Empire Pool Wembley.
This is rather by-the-by here though because Cherry Red’s Atomhenge acolytes have expanded a limited edition Space Ritual to a stellar 10 CDs with a Blu Ray disc, remastering the original plus a new 5.1 Surround mix by Stephen Tayler (who’s done Moody Blues, VDGG, Marillion) which means that Brainstorm and Time We Left This World Today are restored to first-recorded lengths as on Space Ritual Vol.2 in 1985, with one encore (You Shouldn’t Do That) heard way back on Roadhawks (1976). A 68-page booklet with a repro of the poster-format tour programme comes with the full edition, a period booklet without liner notes (alas like the band’s website which still lacks a discography) for the two CDs plus uncuts and encore. A transparent double vinyl set is also out. For a band with a hundred albums including compilations and off-shoots as well as a dozen live sets spanning aeons (I mean decades) this is a new experience.
First mixed at Olympic Studios, a former cinema near Putney London that pioneered design-technology including four-track, Brock recently said the band were all on LSD hence “a bit messy in places, but that’s the way it was then”. It opens with Calvert’s eery Earth Calling leading into a ten-minute comet-buzz of swirling wah-wah and drum-rolling propane Born To Go (sometimes Brainstorm or Seven By Seven) before the glide over lurching bass of Brock’s Down Through The Night in short rhyming couplets like the later Lost Johnny, reminiscent of the debut LP, before The Awakening closes the first side.
The overdrive of Lord Of Light blitzes in from recent release Doremi… as does the joyful chord sweep—almost ’60s in feel were it not for the spacey lyrics—of Space Is Deep, the rock alternating with almost baroque vocals split by Moorcock’s Black Corridor, amusingly spoken among windy bleeps as if the ’80s had arrived. The spacey Electronic #1 closed the vinyl’s second side but CD 1 breathlessly continues with the sax-inflected, drum-pounded Orgone Accumulator based on the maverick—and probably silenced—psychologist Wilhelm Reich (all head shops had his work back then), a little overstaying until guitar solos stratosphere proceedings. The air-punching Upside Down points to future explorations. Calvert’s hypnotic Ten Seconds Of Forever detonates the sonic wave of Brainstorm. Not many poems can silence a rock audience then propel as does this proto-metal classic; it’s impossible to describe the effect of this new propulsion, not because of its minimal chords but visceral energy stretching 13 minutes here, closer to its studio version. Seven By Seven opened the original’s final side with raucous fun, as if orbiting a destination planet, drifting into Moorcock’s Sonic Attack which was a promo-only single in a special sleeve. Its wry advice for impending apocalypse has come full-circle.
Time We Left The World Today, restored to its expansive original size (i.e. doubled) opens dreamily then lifts into the launch-thrust of one of their all-time classics—probably space rock’s zenith—Master Of The Universe, the only track from their first two albums (apart from encores) with its own lightshow specially prepared. Co-writer Nik Turner recently described it “as if written on the back of a fag packet or something” (Mojo), though they also disparaged Silver Machine (sometimes singing it live as Washing Machine!) so we can assume some tongue-in-astronaut-helmet involved. Free and Black Sabbath described their first hits in the same way. The spectacle closed with a briefly spoken Welcome To The Future, and sometimes an encore.
The near two-hour extravaganza crossed for a Euro tour then an inaugural 10-date US landing the next year. Although low budget compared to today’s shows, it was costly to transport in that bygone era before jet tours and luxury bourgeois cruises.After the LP’s release and another that was part live (again at Edmonton’s Sundown in January ’74) titled after a Portobello Road café—where International Times was printed upstairs—and Edvard Grieg’s music (Hall Of The Mountain Grill #16, 1974), a follow-up single Urban Guerrilla was withdrawn due to BBC censorship during the IRA’s terrorism. By 1975’s Reading Festival it was in the outer zones, though like all good cosmic events was luminous in its trajectory.
Bob Calvert found it difficult to leave his character persona, even all night, and left to make two great solo concept albums. Dik Mik also left before the Moorcock-linked Warrior On The Edge Of Time (#13, 1975, their last on the Billboard chart) then Del Dettmar too, Simon House (ex-High Tide) replacing him. On the stateside tour, Lemmy was jettisoned without a parachute when arrested for drugs, soon starting Motorhead (the last song he wrote for them). Hawkwind’s return to earth saw a change of label to Charisma Records, one of the few left who pushed boundaries.
Creativity spans time and space because borderless, continuous, as are most interstellar projects. It even predates the still-active Voyager probes in the same year the Skylab space station was launched to cruise at five miles per second. Just as the two Voyagers’ computer power was less than a modern I-phone back then, so was the audio and SFX gear, yet still work. Such encounters travelling countless routes can uplift: Ritual traverses time and space, past to future. Groundbreaking and unsurpassed, later styles owe their ignition to the rings oscillating from this live LP, a format which didn’t really sell before ’73 so were usually enticements (e.g. doubles etc.) or budget-priced, such as Pink Floyd’s Relics, Genesis Live, the overblown triple Yessongs or stablemates Man’s modest (and police-closed!) Xmas At The Patti. Most magazines and websites list this LP as too important to miss: if you like your rock to ignite core elements, ditch the soma, this timeless trip is worth climbing aboard.
Brian R. Banks
