The Judge
RAVES!
Date: 22/01/14
Hawkwind - "Paradox" (1974)
Time for another trip in the time machine, folks. Jump aboard the Starship Boobyprize, and away we go-o-o-o-o!!!!
I can't be very specific about dates and times in this case; just a general period of my life which the track evokes.
The house in which I was born and brought up was on the edge of the Penygraig estate, the edge which looks out over the Cheshire Plain (and which, at that time, also overlooked part of Brymbo Steelworks).
Unfortunately, I have no remotely usable photographs of the view eastwards from my bedroom window - the inevitable consequence of only having a Kodak Pocket Instamatic to take pictures with at that time - but the vista was, shall we say, extensive, covering from the western outskirts of Chester and over towards the Mersey beyond Stanlow oil refinery all the way down to the eastern parts of Wrexham and right out to the mid-Cheshire ridge and Beeston Hill.
But if it was interesting by day, by night it was little less than spectacular, as the knotted lights of Chester and Wrexham and the roads connecting them and other places out to Farndon, Tarvin and beyond created a spider-web of yellow, white and green dots. This would be dismissed as 'light pollution' nowadays and people would argue that "something ought be done about it", but to me it provided the opportunity to get a sense of scale and distance, especially with the large expanse of sky above it with stars which were, for all the artificiality below, still clearly visible.
It's the one thing I really miss about living in that house, where all I have had as a 'view' these past thirty years comprises the fronts and backs of other people's houses and a sky blotted out almost completely by street lighting.
It was last Sunday evening, when I was walking back down from my brother's house, that I paused just below the top of Dyke Street to look out that way again. And, almost unbidden, what you are about to hear (if you bother to click on it, of course) came into my head.
I've mentioned before how I 'got into' Hawkwind, and I think the first record of theirs I actually bought was the 7" single of The Psychedelic Warlords (Disappear In Smoke), which I got from my college friend Ni(c)k in about 1979. Thanks to fellow devotees amongst those who congregated around the record player in the Common Room of Yale Sixth Form College, I got to hear the whole album it came from, 1974s Hall Of The Mountain Grill.
I finally bought my copy of the album in March 1981 with the money from winning two prizes at the College Eisteddfod that month. Here you see a picture of the lucky winners:
(I'm the one second from right holding the prizes; one for English Short Story, the other for Poem in Welsh by a second-language student. In this latter category, I was assisted in my triumph by virtue of being the only entrant. When they did the engraving on the trophies afterwards, they spelled my surname wrong, too.)
But back to Hall Of The Mountain Grill. The LP came towards the end of Hawkwind's first 'Golden Age', which had perhaps peaked with the Space Ritual double live set the year before. There was plenty still left the next year, however, especially with the addition of keyboard player and violinist Simon House. House brought an almost ambient and orchestral sense to the Hawks, and this is to be heard in excelsis in the arrangements on Mountain Grill and particularly (to my mind) on the closing track, Paradox, a number which was recorded live at the Edmonton Sundown and also featured (in edited and remixed form) as a B-side in France and Germany.
Already-familiar elements are still there: the brain-skewer guitar riffs, the amphetamine-fuelled bass of the legendary Lemmy; but the contribution of House, the Mellotron on strings setting for example, give the piece a density and depth of texture which was far more coherent and disciplined than people had been used to hearing from them.
The whole effect is of a sort of soaring, slightly melancholic feel which creates the feelings which can still be engendered in me by the sight of a clear night sky and the tracery of lights across the plain below, just as I saw them from my bedroom window all those years ago.
