Hawkwind - Bring Me The Head Of Yuri Gagarin

Hawkfans sense déjà vu again!

Otherwise released as Alive From The Darkside, Silver Machine: Live! and Live From The Empire Pool, and within the collections Welcome To The Future and Cosmic Overdrive, among others, this murky 1973 recording from Wembley has had more aliases than a Wild West outlaw. It first surfaced in the mid-80s, along with some cutting-room floor recordings of the legendary Space Ritual tour (Space Ritual Volume 2) and some BBC sessions (The Text Of Festival), and has dogged the Hawkwind discography ever since.

That’s the “buyer beware” caveat. On the other hand, though Hawkwind has a taping culture that rivals the Grateful Dead in its prodigious volume, good quality captures of Lemmy-era Hawkwind do not abound. Those that also include the mercurial poet Robert Calvert are even rarer. Calvert’s presence is the sole reason why this merits attention: here are the only known recordings of Calvert declaiming the Günter Grass poem In The Egg and the anti-capitalist rant Wage War. Hawkwind may have disowned this recording many times, but it didn’t stop them restoring the later gem to their own set a few years back. The sound quality, however, makes the rest of this set a chore.

1 stars

Plastic Head | PHRL 0003 CD

Reviewed by Ian Abrahams
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