Resembling a lower tech underground version of Pink Floyd in almost every respect, I finally got to see my heroes Hawkwind live at Europa on Monday. Yes, the very day after Nuge. Turcotte came along for the ride, always up for hearing something new, and Lee who loves the records as well.Hawkwind has had a very long, complex and storied history that involves very distinct periods and exceedingly tumultuous lineup changes. I am by no means a Hawkwind historian, but from what I gather, David Brock makes Dave Mustaine look like a positively benevolent saint.
The band that performed in Brooklyn was a very stripped down four piece of Brock on Guitar/Synth/Vox, a bassist, a drummer, and a Keyboard player who rocked two Korg Tritons.
Opening up with the titular track from the "Warrior on the Edge of Time" record, the performance started off a bit rocky. The band wasn't really gelling and the vocal harmonies were way off. Whether the issues were performance related or technical is not really known, but as the show went on the playing improved dramatically. Most of the set concentrated around the Space Ritual era and the 1977 masterpiece Quark Strangeness and Charm.
There were video screens, as evidenced by the photos I posted, which were pretty low resolution and were showing computer animation dvds that had very little to do with the music. Some of the graphics were laughably low tech and looked like graphics from an old PlayStation one game. How do I know they were sourced from a DVD? Someone was physically switching the tracks back and forth as they played and you can see the commands "Previous" "Next" "Play" etc. on the screen as the appropriate buttons were pushed. But this only added to the overall charm of seeing ambition pulled off with limited resources.
What do they sound like? The only way I can really describe Hawkwind's sound is that the band found a whole bunch of shared connections between Pink Floyd and Public Image Limited and devoted their career to exploiting that middle ground. Punk and Psychedelia on paper should have no common ground but it is simply not true. Hawkwind is amazing proof to the contrary.
Opening the show was The Phantom Family Halo. They were a pretty great pseudo Kraut Rock/Glam band. The singer played drums standing up, but used a semi-conventional kit. It was more unique and less cheesy than lets say, Phil Collins rocking Su-su-dio. Stylistically the singer was a dead ringer for Jello Biafra, but the music was much more droney and psychedelic.
