Robert Calvert
‘Dim visions smoked his brain. Pictures of people standing and screaming and a band playing loud shrieking metal music…’ Extract From The Saga of Doremi Latido Fasol
It’s November 1972, and something extraordinary is happening in the sleepy Norfolk market town of King’s Lynn. The Corn Exchange venue is packed to the rafters with East Anglian heads and freaks, along with the local chapter of Hells Angels and a smattering of terrified teenyboppers.
It’s the first night of Hawkwind’s Space Ritual tour, an event that’s been trailed by the band for more than a year now. It’s the culmination of three years of intense gigging around Britain and Europe, a multimedia sci-fi spectacular featuring dancers, space age poetry, the most ambitious lights and visuals show on the circuit, and more than two hours of continuous, mind-expanding music.
This was the year that David Bowie became Ziggy Stardust and incorporated mime and kabuki theatre into his shows; the year that Peter Gabriel started to recite strange stories between Genesis songs and wear a fox head and dress onstage; the year that Pink Floyd first experimented with quadraphonic concert speakers and played gigs with a ballet company.
Yet none of these innovations rivalled the sheer visceral, multicolour trip of the Space Ritual. It was unlike anything experienced before in the nation’s provincial music halls, a gathering of the underground tribes with Hawkwind as their cosmic spirit guides – not just a show, but yes, a ritual as well.
The Space Ritual tour is one of the great highlights of Hawkwind’s ongoing 53 years-and-counting mission to the outer reaches of space rock, with the Space Ritual album – released in May 1973 and regularly touted as the greatest live record of all time – their highest-charting LP. But the story of the Space Ritual had begun 18 months before at the tail-end of 1971 with the release of the band’s second album, In Search Of Space.
An integral part of that album was its unique design, which featured a die-cut sleeve that opened up to reveal inside The Hawkwind Log, a 24-page booklet telling the disjointed story of the “spacecraft Hawkwind” and its journey to save the Earth. The man behind this startling package was Barney Bubbles, who would go on to produce a complete visual identity for Hawkwind, while the writer of the …Log was poet and conceptualist Robert Calvert, who officially joined the band as their irregular frontman following ISOS’s release.
Both men were absolutely key to the formulation of the Space Ritual, with being just the first chapter of their recasting of Hawkwind as mankind’s musical saviours from the stars, psychedelic freedom fighters inhabiting a science fictional universe. And it
