Hawkwind, Road To Utopia. Album Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10

Re-writing what has gone before is something we are often told is tantamount to papering over the cracks, the edifice perhaps has started to crumble, the foundations shifting and cracking in the oddest of places, re-writing what has once been laid down in stone is considered by many as finding a way to put a different stamp on ideas, perhaps make them more appealing to a new generation of ears, arguably revising some elements out of the history books and making a clean sweep of your own indelible past.

The much loved song suffers from this, artists of any genre find they can mix the tune they like and add or take away a distinctive heartbeat that once drove the piece on, and replace it with their own cultural want; for the most part this sense of musical analysis is primed for a different generation to proclaim they are on the Road to Utopia, that all is good in this cleaned, sanitised world.

The trouble with Utopia is that it is an illusion, a harking back perhaps to Sir Thomas More and his 16th Century assertion of England in the future, of the days in which The Tudor dynasty ruled over a country that was far removed from its outward appearance; Utopia, a dream of scale, and yet it still finds a way to enthuse and prick the conscious of those wishing to believe.

It is a rewriting of history in which the perennial delivers of ritualistic Progressive rock, Hawkwind, gather their troops together for another hurrah, and in which for the most part is a seamless join between what has gone before and this new, slightly odd delivery of the fantastical, still shining in ever gorgeous Hawkwind fashion, but one that is steeped in the celebration of adding a different style to the proceedings.

In the addition of Mike Batt to the producer;s chair, Road To Utopia is arguably unlike anything Dave Brock and the Hawkwind players have done before, reassuringly familiar, ominously strange and perhaps exotic, a dichotomy of the required need for change and the strangeness of comfort.

This recreation of Hawkwind songs with orchestral inducements will not fill some with pleasure, those that see history as an unyielding force of events, yet in its heart it has the ability to bring a smoother edge, a new rounded appreciation of what music can offer. In songs such as We Took The Wrong Step Years Ago, Strangeness, Charm and The Watcher, which includes Blues great Eric Clapton on guitar, it is a reminder that history is fluid, everything is up for debate, that even in stranger tides, the unusually perceptive is an open door to creating different memories.

The Road to Utopia is one we all wish to see emerge, sometimes you have to take a chance on the lesser known avenue in which to realise the dream.

Ian D. Hall