HW: Hawkwind Onward

[Mike Holmes]

On 06/06/2012 17:21, Carl Edlund Anderson wrote:
> On 15 May 2012, at 04:55 , Mike Holmes wrote:

>> 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!

In fact if Dave et al were up for it, I think there's a perfect project 
for a mass Hawkwind Fan Vote in here.

Open the whole of the 80's up for a poll of tracks to see which ones the 
fans would love to see done over. It'd be fairly easy to run via the 
interweb (hell, we did this sort of thing ourselves 20 years ago when 
software was a lot less sophisticated - so I suspect we could organise 
it fairly straightforwardly). It'd put the band in touch with more fans; 
it'd almost certainly get some press publicity; and I expect those who 
voted would be more likely to come to live shows or download tracks/buy 
CDs, to hear the results.

Of course there'd be the usual nonsense about rights to tracks, but Nik 
wasn't around very much during the 80's so that ought to be feasible to 
get around.

FoFP

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