Hawkwind - the Onward tour, UK & Eire

Hawkwind will soon be entering their 43^rd year of space trucking and it's customary for Hawkwind to take to the stage and produce some spacey effects. Tonight, Mr Dibs generated effects on his electric cello before narrating "The Awakening", the oldest track in the setlist. The band first did this Bob Calvert space poem in 1971, I believe.  Dibsy has his critics, but I think he's a good space poetry narrator, even if his dress sense does raise a few eyebrows, but more on that in a minute.

The distinctive strains of "You'd Better Believe it" then kicked in, and this is where I switched my pocket camera off and started bopping around by the right speaker stack.

My start-of-gig clip is on youtube, if you want to see how a 2012 show kicks off. Sound quality is rough, but it captures the 'feel' of the event quite well, I'd say.

The Hawkwind squad

Over the years, Hawkwind's line-up has seen more squad rotation than just about any other band: hell, even Rafael Benítez would be impressed.  This continues into individual gigs, too. At the Bridport gig, people further back from the stage might have thought the distorted wah-wah guitar riffing was coming from Dave Brock, but it was Nial Hone... and Brock made a "showcase" gesture with his arms at one point, as if to say "no, it's him doing it, folks!"

Incidently, Hone is the newest member – he joined in 2008, from the psychedelic prog band Tribe of Cro.

Dibsy would be playing bass on these tracks, but during other pieces, Hone would switch to bass duties, and Mr Dibs sometimes used a weird figure-of-eight object – an electric cello. Meanwhile Tim Blake generally plays keyboards or the theramin, but did the lead guitar on some tracks, on his keytar. Prior to the gig there were rumours of a surprise guest (what, rumours among Hawkwind fans? – wow) but as it turned out there weren't any.

Mr Dibs surprised a lot of us by coming onstage in a kind of black kilt, and chunky calf-high boots with arrays of silver buckles, and with bare legs showing!

The Hawkwind setlist

This current tour promotes the new studio album "Onward."  Naturally enough, there was some new stuff, some from that rather good "Onward" album, but older fans were comfortable with hearing the likes of Hassan i Sahba, Sonic Attack, Assault and Battery / Golden Void, Damnation Alley and Psychedelic Warlords – all of these dating from the "golden age of Hawkwind" in the 1970s.  Love in Space was a surprise return to the set, though, a Brock cosmic ballad from the mid 1990s.

One oddity is that the new album makes heavy use of dynamic range compression, and during "The Hills Have Ears" I was listening to Richard Chadwick's drumming and Nial Hone's guitaring, and I reflected that it sounded clearer live than it does on the studio album. Now, I call that weird.

And so the tour is under way...

Hawkwind's blend of old and new stuff was performed in a pretty high-energy way... and the band looked like they were enjoying themselves. No "first night nerves" then, or any loose bits; they looked well-prepared and just got on with the biz. The night was extremely hot in the other sense of the word, too, as most of us were sweating profusely.

Next stop for me is the Southampton gig in just over a week, and I'll be interested to see if there's any differences in the setlist or performance.  For now, I'll just say the Hawkwind legacy of space rock is still safe in Dave Brock's hands,