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Dave Brock Presents… This Was Your Future: Space Rock (And Other Psychedelics) 1978-1998 CHERRY RED
IT WAS A SCENE THAT OFTEN BRISTLED WITH A RIGHTEOUS ANGER.
Worthy document of the post-70s free festival scene.
Curated by Hawkwind’s master of the universe, this three-CD set is a trip back in time to a scene that, even when it was happening, was rarely given any attention in the music press, existing instead as a next-generation space-rock underground based around club nights such as Alice In Wonderland, free festivals and DIY cassette labels.
Rather than just being a re-run of countercultural Ladbroke Grove circa 1971 – although there are certainly strong elements of that – this was a scene that often bristled with a righteous anger inspired by increasingly bloody confrontations with the Man, most notoriously at 1985’s Battle Of The Beanfield when the police forcibly prevented the Stonehenge Festival from taking place. Listen to how Omnia Opera’s Space Bastard mutates Hawkwind’s stun riff template into cosmic aggro while ranting about ‘brain police’ and ‘the people in high places’. Mandragora’s Rainbow Warrior
has a similarly tough sound, like the Edgar Broughton Band at their most stroppy. It’s a vibe that seems to have crossed the Atlantic as well, with the American bands here favouring a harder, more wired take on space rock, from the dense, churning heaviness of ST 37’s Ghosts Of Tempera Nymphs to the industrial goth of Pressurehed’s Red Delta.
It’s certainly not all doom and gloom, though. In fact, there’s a lot of good-natured daftness on display here. Toadstool Soup by Boris And His Bolshie Balalika (ahem) is a bouncy campfire drug song that morphs into a rather good parody of Kashmir; Dr Hasbeen’s Spirit Of Brock speaks for itself – ‘The spirit of rock – Dave Brock!’; and Dumpy’s Rusty Nuts’ Hawkwind (keep up at the back) is actually an entirely credible if amusing take on its source material. Prog gets a look in too. Poisoned Electrick Head come over like a HGTG version of Cardiacs on Astral Tjunc; Moom’s The Higher Sun is replete with Canterbury Sound vibes; and Kava Kava’s Poke is airy and soulful in a psych-prog vein. And then there are the outliers, such as the mantric riffing of Kryptasthesie’s An Evening Following A Cutle-Fish or the echoplexed, low-slung groove of Dead Flowers’ Altered State Circus.
Unsurprisingly, there’s plenty here from Hawkwind’s friends and relations, pick of the bunch being the Sonic Assassins’ wild, synth-drenched Golden Void and the wonderful glam punk of Dodgem Dude by Michael Moorcock’s Deep Fix. With sleevenotes from Hawkwind biographer Ian Abrahams, this is a fascinating archive of a genuine ‘alternative to the alternative’ scene.