HW: All the Christmas Parties No. 2: HW at Walthamstow

[M Holmes]

Jon Jarrett writes:

>         `Assassins' is never bad but it's predictable and we had to come
> down somehow. We did so in the techno mid-break which was that Brock-
> Blake-Chadwick idea that worked so well last year. Not so well this year,
> I think mostly Tim's fault. Last year he seemed to build the shapes that
> Dave lopped noises through while Richard found beats for it. This year,
> well, it was just unremarkable techno and mostly playd by Richard in so
> far as any of it was worth anything. The actual song was very good, of
> course, but too short to pick the excitement up as it had been

The night before, in Brighton, they extended this techno riff and it
really came alive. If they produced an album of that quality then it'd
be what Electric Teepee should have been.

> I was also looking out for the `Seeing
> It As You Really Are' coda and in fact I'd never realised that that's
> what the version on the _Space Ritual_ remaster is doing, so when they
> just did that, I was hugely pleased and then wondered where `Seeing It'
> had gone for a few moments afterwards. Stupid boy . Anyway. THye really
> finished it off with a second take at `Earth Calling', another new riff
> married to it and more new words, not the _Spacebrock_ version as I'd been
> expecting

The music was still Seeing It As You Really Are, as on the 1st album and
on Roadhawks.

> but still not a full song and still much too short.

Indeed and if an extended version appears on the new album I'll
forgive them for again not including a fuller version of "Where Are
They Now?"

> The encore `Somic
> Attack' left me a little underwhelmed; too drawn out, and they did insist
> on playing `Spacebrock' under it, which doesn't fit with any rhythm you
> can give the lyrics at all.

Yeah, it bombed for me, but then the only time I've lked Sonic Attack
when Nik wasn't doing it was the version from the Sonic Attack album.

If they're going to marry poetry with instrumentals as "new tracks" then
I'd voe for something with Wind of Change.

>         Overall, well, I've seen better gigs than this and they've all
> been recent. At Canterbury I was explaining to Jill how Carl Anderson was
> less bothered about seeing Hawkwind gigs now because he reckoned he'd seen
> a good few good Hawkwind gigs and given that one can't be sure one'll get
> one it wasn't really worth risking it. Jill said something like, "But you
> can never be sure you've seen the best one ever", and given that we were
> possibly at it.

Well, I've been at a few Hawkwind gigs and I can honestly say that
Brighton this year was one of the best I've seen.

FoFP