Tripping The Light Fantastic
Jonathan Smeeton, aka Liquid Len, talks about how the groundbreaking lightshow for the Space Ritual tour was created.
“When I joined Mike Hart and Alan Day, I had an up-and-running light show complete with artwork, animated slides, projectors, liquids, things like that… I just had to adapt the artwork. We used lots of spacey backgrounds which I had bought from the Planetarium gift shop in London!
“We did stuff in certain sequences. It got very sophisticated. And the band had a good dynamic through the show; it had a beginning, a middle and an end. There were places where you drifted off and places where you paid attention… It never really stopped, either, or paused for people to applaud. It just went on and on! It was a long show, but very hypnotic in its own way.
“We had an array of five slide projectors; they had a little carriage on the side and it shuffled the slide in and out. We had an arrangement of slides, and by using one slide projector at a time, rapidly backwards and forwards, you could create animated sequences. We made the Silver Surfer bounce back and forward behind the band!
“The keyboard controller we used to run the light show was very important. It was built by John Perrin. He was our secret weapon, but he was the most impossible person to deal with because he wanted to keep everything absolutely secret! He’d build electronics and then pour resin all over them. But he turned out some great gear well before its time.
“The keyboard had 15 keys: reds, blues and greens, in groups of five. And some of the sharps made combinations, like all the reds, all the greens. Some of the keys were used for advancing slides on the projectors by remote control – that was revolutionary in those days.
“People were starting to use these tiny lasers, but they were really expensive. So I ended up turning a projector around, putting
pummels the air, a thrilling exercise in velocity and propulsion; Orgone Accumulator is a hip-swivelling, footstomping slab of space-age biker boogie; Brainstorm is Hawkwind ramraiding the doors of perception, the paranoia police in hot pursuit.
One of the unique features of the show was the spoken-word pieces delivered by Robert Calvert with icy precision, a chance for both band and audience to catch their breath, and a coolly enigmatic presence at the heart of Space Ritual’s fearsome engine. The most renowned piece is Sonic Attack, which was issued as a one-sided promo single ahead of the album.
“Sonic Attack was a government health warning concocted by Michael Moorcock,” explained Nik Turner. “It was the dark side of what was going on. The government were issuing all these warnings which were completely stupid: you know, in the event of a nuclear attack, get under the table and paint
THE SPACE RITUAL ALBUM, RELEASED IN 1973 AND WORTH THE WAIT. a really long lens on it and a slide with a 10 micron pinhole, and out came this tiny beam of light, which I shone onto a mirror that was strung on elastic bands in this old tennis racket. I could then beam it back onto the stage and have it bouncing all over the place by shaking the racket! It was beyond Heath Robinson.” your windows white. It was crazy. If that’s what they think people will believe, they obviously don’t have a very high opinion of people!”
On May 27, Hawkwind promoted Space Ritual’s release with a major gig at Wembley Empire Pool (now OVO Arena), their biggest headline show in the UK. Doug Smith says: “I was sitting behind these big WEM speakers we’d hired from Pink Floyd. We’d invited the head of the American label over to see the show, and there was this look on his face of, ‘Fucking hell!’ We’d been dubbed the poor man’s rock’n’roll band, but Wembley just proved a point…”
The Space Ritual would be the basis of Hawkwind’s live show until the end of the year, when the band toured the US for the first time, selling out the 6,000-seater Chicago Auditorium before they’d even got on the plane.
It was the concept that took the band to a new level of adulation among fans while heightening their notoriety among the more conservative members of the press. It was a special moment in rock history that showed it was possible to do something radically different with the live format – and an unforgettable experience for everyone who was there.
This article is dedicated to Nik Turner (1940-2022). Unless otherwise noted, all quotes from Nik are from an interview conducted with the writer in 2017.
We Are Looking In On You is out now via Cherry Red. See www.hawkwind.com for more information and tour dates.