HW:Distant Horizons

[Jonathan Jarrett]

On Wed, Feb 28, 2007 at 09:01:56PM +0000, pete howe typed out:
> Distant Horizons is a pretty awful album.Up there with the worst IMO.If you 
> want to hear a half decent studio song from the richards/tree period, try 
> the song "hippy", from the half studio/half live "in your area" cd(still 
> available)..That track is a HW classic, and worth  the price of the cd for 
> that track alone.

	It's interesting how opinions differ. I agree that `Hippy' is an 
excellent track and it deserves a reissue somewhere, though given that 
almost all its writers are now, er, estranged from the band I suppose 
that this will never happen. And there are two or three other pieces on 
_In Your Area_ I don't mind but basically I never play it. This may in 
part be because for the live stuff, the versions on _Hawkwind 1997_, 
which I *do* still play, are a lot better to my ears. Mainly because 
Rizz is actually contributing something here and there.

	_Distant Horizons_ on the other hand I still like quite a lot, 
mainly because it shows Ron actually being good, and before the whole 
ranting-about-insects-and-genetic-mutation that seems now to be the 
limit of his particular art form had got old. It's an oddly split album, 
with Brock hardly being noticeable in the upbeat stuff and his own stuff 
being only solo-release quality, but I still quite like the whole 
thing, instrumental of `Love in Space' excepted. On the other hand, 
there is absolutely no way that it's worth what you'd currently have to 
pay to get a copy. I paid well over the odds for it at the time just 
because of wanting to buy a new Hawkwind release on the high street. And 
it is lo-fi, lacks production values and the artwork's awful. So yeah. 
But I was quite into that nu-punk thing they were doing in 1997-1998 and 
for me that's that album. Yours,
				 Jon

-- 
"When fortune wanes, of what assistance are quantities of elephants?"
	    (Juvaini, Afghan Muslim chronicler, c. 1206)
 Jon Jarrett, Fitzwilliam Museum, jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk