Hawkwind

Underground stawarts’ mid-70s ‘best of’ gets sharply remastered.

Released in 1976 as an era-encapsulating full stop, after the band parted with Lemmy and signed to Charisma, is a concise compilation covering their five-year stint with United Artists. Its was no mere superfluous end-of-deal cash-in. It represented the first time both the seven-inch-only and singles were made available on album. The latter had been withdrawn after just three weeks (as its ’73 release coincided with an IRA bombing campaign on the mainland the BBC initiated an airplay ban, which killed it stone dead). And the former? In many ways, was bigger than Hawkwind. A unique collision of sci-fi, progressive rock, proto-metal and irresistible commerciality, it held its own among an incredibly strong batch of timeless classics in summer ’72: . And while it’s Bowie’s breakthrough that gets the lion’s share of BBC4 documentary footage, changed just as many lives, taking a nation’s neophyte psychedelians on a trip from whence they’d never quite return.