[boc-l] HW: Hawkwind, and others, at A New Day Festival

[Jonathan Smith]

I was there for the Saturday too. Gong were good but all the songs sounded
a bit similar to me! All free jazz. I arrived too late for Arthur Brown,
sadly.

Caravan were rather good. I have still got Golf Girl going round my brain!

Hawkind were excellent. Dibs was really on form with singing and a poem--
he really 'channeled' Bob Calvert but was himself. Niall's bass paying was
excellent (I know Haz was gone but never mind). Both Dave and Magnus played
some great guitar. (I think Richard was really trying to avoid singing his
song-- his voice was way down in the mix-- what went on there?)

On Mon, 27 Aug 2018 at 07:22, Jonathan Jarrett via boc-l <
boc-l at lists.ispnet.net> wrote:

>         Dear all,
>                   I have been meaning to post about this since I got back
> from the festival, which seemed a lot like the old Canterbury Sound
> Festival that gave us the 2001 live album (which I am in fact listening to
> right now, which is why I remembered I wanted to post about it). The
> venue, rough time of the year and about half the acts were the same. I
> don't know if the old one went bankrupt or something, and no-one wants to
> admit a link, but it seemed pretty obvious to me. Anyway...
>
>         There were lots of interesting bands on the line-up: details can
> be seen here:
> https://www.anewdayfestival.com/
> but once you poked at the programme a bit it turned out many of them were
> one-original-member-and-entire-new-band formations. Thus were the
> Ken Pustelnik's Groundhogs, Jethro Tull's Martin Barre, Atomic Rooster,
> and I suppose Son of Man sort of count, though all of these were
> excellent; Atomic Rooster had Pete French on vocals, who was dreadful when
> I saw him with Leafhound back in, er, 2004 maybe, and now sounded like he
> did in his Cactus days again somehow, and their organist both sounded and,
> more surprisingly, looked like Vincent Crane. There was also Hugh Cornwell
> not being the Stranglers, Ruts DC actually doing a pretty good job of
> being The Ruts, John Coghlan leading a band probably more able than Status
> Quo ever were, John Otway doing an unusually low-energy job of being
> himself actually, and Carl Palmer's ELP Legacy being, well, Carl Palmer
> really but he is still amazing despite being I don't know how old. Bernie
> Tormé, just to break with the trend, did not pretend to be or play
> anything by any of the bands he'd been in as far as I could tell, and he
> was very good but probably not one of nature's frontmen, even now.
>
>         The most unexpectedly good band, for me, were Tygers of Pan Tang,
> who were also down to one real member but you wouldn't have known except
> that he was older than the rest. My partner and I had seen Iron Maiden two
> weeks before (my first time!) and I said to her, Maiden wouldn't have let
> this lot support--just that little bit too close to the throne...
>
>         Most predictably excellent was Arthur Brown, whose current band
> is one of his more fun and able and who somehow still sounds the way he
> did fifteen years ago when I first saw him, though he is now, if it
> possible, thinner. Still fully voiced though!
>
>         Gong, who are effectively touring the post-Daevid album _Rejoice!
> I'm Dead!_, I was expecting to be a wrench but they were actually not as
> deeply affecting as I'd feared--or hoped. They will be, I think, this is
> definitely a Gong band, but the second guitarist (Kavus Torabi,
> ex-Cardiacs, presumably unemployed while Tim Smith continues to fight for
> survival...) and now somewhat unwilling frontman needs to accept that he
> is part of the act and not the ringmaster. He spent a lot of time saying
> how incredible it was to be doing this, etc., which just detracted from
> any impression that he had really expected it to work... How can I put
> this? Have you ever seen Gong do the Temple suite and felt like maybe
> there was actually a building rising around you? Or 'Aum Riff' and you got
> to a state where no-one was actually playing the riff but you could almost
> *see* it anyway, so insistent was it? (That had last happened to me in
> this exact place, eighteen years before, which may be one reason why I
> found this wanting.) If you have, though, you will remember, every member
> of that band head down piling coal into the metaphysical boilers like it
> was all meant to be this way at this moment and they'd known the plan
> beforehand. But Kavus would be down in the front row pointing at it to
> make sure everyone had seen it. I get that stepping into Daevid's shoes is
> difficult, but if he's going to, he has to actually be the sorceror, not
> the apprentice. I hope to see them again and I hope he's beginning to
> understand how Daevid managed to make being really silly a solemn act when
> I do...
>
>         And... breathe. But the reason I post is of course Hawkwind, who
> were headlining the Saturday. It wasn't the magic occasion that the 2001
> performance was, but that was quite possibly the best Hawkwind gig I ever
> saw so it wasn't ever going to be that. Line-up was Dave, obviously,
> Richard also obviously, Niall on bass and synth, Dibs on vocals and
> MacBook, and someone whom Wikipedia tells me is Magnus Martin on
> keyboards, violin and second guitar. (What happened to Haz?) I didn't take
> a set-list but my impression was that apart from one track off _Into the
> Woods_, there was nothing from outside the 70s. They certainly opened with
> `Assault & Battery/Golden Void', followed it with `Shot Down in the
> Night', and the set also included `Damnation Alley', `The Watcher' and
> `Down Through the Night' (which I've never heard live before). No
> `Brainstorm', no `Masters of the Universe' and no `Assassins of Allah',
> and not really any problem with that. The band was very good together,
> there was what seemed to be genuine jamming in the breaks, and though I
> found Dave's guitar a little raw on the ears and there were times when I
> thought maybe one fewer member of the band needed a synthesizer, it was
> all a good performance, especially considering they had basically no scope
> for visuals. So that was good, but one little moment niggled, and it's
> what I actually wanted to tell you all about...
>
>         When they'd finished `The Watcher' and were setting up for the
> _Into the Woods_ number, which Richard was to sing, Dave told the audience
> as is his wont that `The Watcher' was an old Lemmy number, and Richard
> suddenly sparked up with words more or less like, "I've always wondered,
> Dave, why didn't Lemmy write more songs when he was in Hawkwind?" At this,
> as you might imagine, Dave went sulky and if he said `I don't know', only
> Richard heard it, though he then repeated it in schoolroom-sarky fashion,
> "Oh you DON'T KNOW, eh, really..." And Niall had to step in and cheerily
> remind Richard he was up next and this was his big moment and so on. It
> all seemed to pass off quickly enough but it was a brief moment of
> ugliness, and it made me wonder what was going on. I know that many a band
> member, and Richard among them, has had trouble getting their songs onto
> Hawkwind records while they were in the band, and that's effectively why
> we have Alan Davey's _Captured Rotation_ and the one-and-a-half Star
> Nation albums, and therefore by extension everything Bedouin ever did and
> the Earthlab album, and I would not wish to be without the first or last
> of those, so maybe it's OK. But I'd have said Richard had had a fair few
> songs on the last few albums, and has sung at least two on each, so I
> didn't quite understand where this was coming from or why he'd do it in
> such a fashion. I hope all is well on the bridge of the good ship
> Hawkwind. Or, I suppose, if not, I hope what it means is another Star
> Nation album rather than anything more serious... Anyway, that's quite
> enough from me. Hope everyone's well out there and can survive this
> 2005-style Jarrett post, yours all,
>                                     Jon
>
> ObCD: Hawkwind - _Canterbury Fayre 2001_
> --
> "So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since
>   it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has
>                a mind to do." (Benjamin Franklin)
>    Jonathan Jarrett, Leeds, jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk
>
>
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