Hawklords: Glasgow 19/10/12

[Mike Holmes]

Arrived in Glasgow to meet an old friend for a meal at the Roundhouse 
near the SECC - now a Chinese/Japanese/Thai restaurant and had a very 
nice Tom Yum soup and Crispy Chilli Beef.

Over thirty years ago Tony and I were students together and ran 
minibuses to Edinburgh and Glasgow to see Hawkwind gigs. I also did my 
first Glastonbury and Stonehenge festivals in his company. So Tony, his 
new wife Julie, and Lucy and I set off from there to The Ferry.

I'd been expecting one of those under-the-boardwalk nightclubs and was 
pleasantly surprised to see that The Ferry was in fact a boat. The 
insides had been hollowed out to form a nightclub, with a bar and stage 
on the lower deck and a kind of three sided balcony upstairs with more 
tables and a bar.

Unfortunately the backing band was one of those who figured that quality 
can be traded with volume and came on at such an earsplitting level that 
simple thought, let alone conversation, was impossible.  Or so I thought 
anyway. Julie is in fact a sign-language interpreter and had a hurried 
conversation in Sign with Tony. Even an Aspie could have figured out it 
was Sign for "Let's get the fuck outta here!"

Since Julie's day job is to interpret into sign, she values her hearing 
perhaps more than most of us. She'd decided to call it quits. I tried 
suggesting that Hawklords were unlikely to do the same, but she was 
clearly upset.

We all walked her back to her hotel and had a drink there before heading 
back. The band had started when we got there. The lineup was Ron tree, 
Jerry Richards, Harvey Bainbridge, and Adrian Shaw. I didn't recognise 
the drummer. I'd expected Steve Swindells since he's on their new album, 
but no luck there.

They played a mixed set between stuff from the new album and older 
tracks. I recognised "We Are One" and "The Mothership", "Time Split 
Vision" and "Spark In The Dark" from the album and they played "Psi 
Power", "25 Years", "Master of the Universe", "Brainstorm", "Damnation 
Alley" and "Silver machine". It was a pretty energetic performance (at 
reasonable volume) with Ron being his usual self. Harvey and Jerry were 
very much on form and made the gig for me, and they were pretty tight 
and clearly rehearsed, with none of the looseness that comes with some 
of the Nik-inspired outings. They brought at least some of the new 
tracks to life in a way that just doesn't come through on the album, 
mainly I think through Harvey, who really is a wizard of the keys these 
days. I bet he could do a mean Doctor Who theme.

FoFP


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