“Emphatically proves that the current line-up is the band’s best since their mid-70s heyday”: Hawkwind’s Live At The Royal Albert Hall is much more than just another live album

The cynical response to the release of yet another Hawkwind live album – at least their fifth since 2015 – is to wave a dismissive hand as if wafting away a hippie’s morning-after lentil curry fart. But to do so would be to deny an impressive aural document.

The September 2023 event at the Royal Albert Hall was billed as An Evening Of Sonic Destruction 50 Years On… Celebrating The Rituals And Odyssey Of Space. It ostensibly celebrated Space Ritual’s half-century – while actually revelling in a career-spanning set.

What Live At The Royal Albert Hall emphatically proves is that, shorn of the lasers, lights and the other visual ephemera that are an integral part of their live experience, Hawkwind’s current line-up of linchpin singer/guitarist Dave Brock, singer-guitarist Magnus Martin, bassist Doug MacKinnon, keyboardist Tim ‘Thighpaulsandra’ Lewis and long-serving drummer Richard Chadwick is the band’s best since their mid-70s heyday.

The material from then-current album The Future Never Waits sits comfortably with the classics with which Hawkwind made their name. The expansive and pummelling heaviness of Rama (The Prophecy) – which is punctuated by a triumphant “Woo-hoo!” – matches the full-throttle delivery of You’d Better Believe It, while The Beginning hints at what ELO might have sounded like if Jeff Lynne had experienced an ayahuasca ceremony in the early 70s, as its five-minute opening grind gives way to baroque pop.

Perhaps Hawkwind would do well to record their next album live without studio embellishments

MacKinnon’s bass growls throughout like a guard dog roused from its slumber by interlopers at an ungodly hour as Lewis’s keyboards gurgle and bubble to great effect during Arrival In Utopia.

Augmented by electronic music producer and über-fan William Orbit, Lewis’ keyboard effects link one song to the next, creating a continuous suite of music that rarely lets go.

Chadwick’s gloriously metronomic drumming, along with his daring fills – witness Right To Decide – is the anchor that frees up Brock and Martin to blast off into gloriously amplified sonic realms as Brainstorm hurtles at warp speed towards the untrammelled raw power of Master Of The Universe.

What’s interesting to note with this recording – and as evidenced by a third disc of rehearsal takes and jams that includes unused readings of Mask Of Morning and a then-unreleased Frozen In Time – is how muscular and bedded-in this incarnation sounds.

So much so that fanciful thoughts occur: perhaps Hawkwind would do well to hire a venue and record their next album live without studio embellishments. But this will more than do for now.

Live At The Royal Albert Hall is on sale now via Cherry Red.

Julian Marszalek is the former Reviews Editor of The Blues Magazine. He has written about music for Music365, Yahoo! Music, The Quietus, The Guardian, NME and Shindig! among many others. As the Deputy Online News Editor at Xfm he revealed exclusively that Nick Cave’s second novel was on the way. During his two-decade career, he’s interviewed the likes of Keith Richards, Jimmy Page and Ozzy Osbourne, and has been ranted at by John Lydon. He’s also in the select group of music journalists to have actually got on with Lou Reed. Marszalek taught music journalism at Middlesex University and co-ran the genre-fluid Stow Festival in Walthamstow for six years.