HW: Hawkwind Onward

[Carl Edlund Anderson]

On 15 May 2012, at 04:55 , Mike Holmes wrote:
>> The Scorpions just released a "new" CD that was all covers, many of which were remakes of their own songs, mostly the 80s stuff that all
>> sounded like crap because of horrible 80s production.  Miserable gated drums again.  So I can understand why a band would do such a thing,
>> esp. a band that is now effectively retired and won't have the chance to 'repair' that material again.  HW could do that with Black Sword
>> (which I think sounds fucking terrible in 2012) - same with Xenon Codex.
> 
> Yes, I'd love to hear "The War I survived", "Lost Chronicles" and "Sword of The East" with Richard doing non-eighties drums. As I've mentioned before, transferring the "Space is Their Palestine" insert from Hassan to Sword of The East would go very well. Dunno about redoing Black Sword, though I agree the robot drums make it fairly hard to listen to these days. Elric The Enchanter is possibly the one I'd choose to try a do-over.


There seems to have been being a trend for re-doing classic albums, often from the 80s, in their entirety. Girlschool, for example, just recently re-did "Hit & Run" .... Pretty credibly, actually; the first track, "C'mon Let's Go" starts off with the sounds of snoring rather than the revving motorcycle engine of the original. ;)  That little trick had me onboard for the rest of the show. :)

'80s production does seem to get singled out for special venom -- of course, it's hard to imagine a lot of '80s pop without those gated drums. I mean, would we remix "In the Air Tonight" to _not_ include them?  And would it make sense to re-do stuff by Bon Jovi or Def Leppard without the '80s vibe? :)  I mean, that stuff

On the other hand, it's probably true that a heavy production hand back them did not do wonders for many rock bands -- Hawkwind among them (and, among other things, '80s production approaches did the Sabbath recordings of that era little good, either).  I don't know that one would need to re-record COTBS or XC (well, OK, perhaps Danny Thompson's drumming is not gonna win any awards ... but we don-t wanna get accused of pulling a "Sharon" and stripping the original performances/performers off the record ... do we?) but a very serious re-mix might be in order. Depends, I guess, on whether or how much was recorded "wet".  Steve Wilson's recent re-mix of Tull's Aqualung stays very true to the original design of the mix -- just basically getting it all a bit clearer and detailed -- but that would probably not the the approach I'd take with CoTBS or XC .... :)

Listening again ... mmm, yeah, re-mixing the drums to make them a bit more organic (they could hardly be _less_ organic!) would do a lot to help COTBS even if nothing else was done. But, mmm, mere remastering, despite what can be done by a skilled mastering engineer, would probably be insufficient!

Cheers,
Carl

--
Carl Edlund Anderson
http://www.carlaz.com/