By Bruce Cowie
“Pick an album from your past,” he said, “something you really enjoy, or that changed your life.”
Oh, cock.
I hate nostalgia. Looking backwards makes me uncomfortable. But, y’know, he asked nicely, so I’ll give it a go.
To have a truly honest stab at this, I need to go back a long way, because I am, shall we say, quite old. There are a lot of abandoned bands littering the maze of paths which lead me to where I am today, none of which I regret in any way. In truth, these bands ARE the paths, without which I would be lost.
Anyway, I pick my way back through the maze, and I reckon I find that album which was the gate, beyond which lies only the bland swamp of youthful ignorance and poor taste. And that gate is Hawkwind’s 1974 album (See, told you I was old!) Hall of the Mountain Grill.
I should set the scene. I was 14, maybe 15 and I didn’t have a clue. A mate of mine had just joined one of those mail-order record clubs. You know (don’t you?), those ones where you promise to buy ten full priced albums over the course of a year, and they’ll give you four free from this list of dross and remnants1. He can’t find a fourth, so he offers me the choice. I see an album with a weird title, and a picture of a crashed spaceship on the cover. ‘That’ll do’ I say.
A few days later, it arrives, I stick it on the turntable, and it blows my brain right out of my head. I had NEVER heard anything like this before2. That gate flew open right there and then.
Looking back – and I had to go to YouTube to do so – I find it hard to get excited by it now. It’s not their best album, nor is it their worst. All of the regular Hawkwind ingredients are present and correct – the swirly keyboard noises, the saxophone, Brock’s choppy guitar, Lemmy’s fuzz-bass, the metronomic hypno-drumming, songs about space, drugs and revolution, all of that. But today it all feels a bit....weak. The lyrics seem a trifle naive, all hippy student anarchy-lite or psychedelic science fiction/fantasy clichés. Nik Turner’s saxophone, once weird and wonderful, now sounds mostly like the honking of a flock of startled ducks.
There are still some nice things to be found -Simon House’s violin on ‘Wind of Change’ is sublime, the instrumental ‘Web Weaver’ is jaunty and very danceable, Lemmy’s ‘Lost Johnny’ is dirty and dark proto-Motorhead. The production values have also improved over those of its predecessors, but it loses the authentic weed-hazed roughness of In Search of Space and the monumental Space Ritual. It lacks the blunt –instrument thud of Doremi Fasol Latido. It has nothing to match ‘Brainstorm’ or ‘Master of the Universe’. Going forward, it can’t match the epic fantasy grandeur of Warrior on the Edge of Time or the dystopian-future poetry of Quark, Strangeness and Charm.
Reading back, it seems that I’m not making a very good case for Hall of the Mountain Grill as a thing to be remembered fondly. But, and this is the important bit, it introduced me to so much more. It led me through Pink Fairies to punk, through Motorhead to metal, Tangerine Dream to trance, Pink Floyd to prog (a path mercifully short!), ...and that’s where my alliteration skills break down. Bugger.
Anyway, there we are. Hawkwind’s Hall of the Mountain Grill. Not a great album, not a terrible one, but a significant one, to me at least. The first thing to show me there was interesting stuff out there. Directly responsible for the impeccable taste which I display today. Introduced me to live music (Hawkwind, Usher Hall, September 1976, my first of somewhere in the region of 600 gigs, to date...)
Definitely an Echo of the Past, but the past is where it belongs; a place where I can remember it fondly cherish it without having to listen to it again.
Footnotes:
1. They never turned out to be the bargain you thought they were going to be. The choices were crap, and if you missed a month, they would stick you with their ‘recommended’ album and charge you for it anyway.
2. Lived out in the sticks and had very little contact with ‘modern’ music. Parents into Opera and Scottish Country dance tunes.
