Hawkwind On Track: Every album, every song

Sonicbond Publishing Limited

www.sonicbondpublishing.co.uk

Email: [email protected]

First Published in the United Kingdom 2020

First Published in the United States 2020

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:

A Catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright Duncan Harris 2020

ISBN 978-1-78952-052-1

The right of Duncan Harris to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Sonicbond Publishing Limited

Printed and bound in England

Graphic design and typesetting: Full Moon Media

Contents

Acknowledgements

Author’s Note

Introduction

1: Dawn of the Hawks (1969-1970)

Hawkwind (Liberty, August 1970)

2: The Day of the Hawks (1971-1975)

X In Search Of Space (United Artists, October 1971)

Doremi Fasol Latido (United Artists, November 1972)

Space Ritual: Alive in Liverpool and London (United Artists, May 1973)

Captain Lockheed & The Starfighters (United Artists, April 1974)

Warrior On The Edge Of Time (United Artists, May 1975)

3: Charisma and Quarks (1976-1979)

Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music (Charisma, August 1976)

Quark, Strangeness and Charm (Charisma, June 1977)

Hawklords – 25 Years On (Charisma, October 1978)

PXR 5 (Charisma, May 1979)

4: Measles and Heavy Metal (1979-1982)

Live Seventy Nine (Bronze, July 1980)

Levitation (Bronze, November 1980)

Sonic Attack (RCA Active, October 1981)

Church Of Hawkwind (RCA Active, May 1982)

Choose Your Masques (RCA Active, October 1982)

5: Night of the Hawks (1983-1991)

The Earth Ritual Preview: Night of the Hawks (Flicknife, January 1984)

The Chronicle of the Black Sword (Flicknife, November 1985)

Live Chronicles (GWR Records, November 1986)

The Xenon Codex (GWR Records, April 1988)

Space Bandits (GWR Records, October 1990)

6: Oldie Rock, Or, How Iron Maiden saved Hawkwind (1992-1998)

Electric Tepee (Essential, May 1992)

It Is The Business Of The Future To Be Dangerous (Essential, October 1993)

Alien 4 (Emergency Broadcast System, October 1995)

Distant Horizons (Emergency Broadcast System, November 1997)

7: War of the Hawks (1999-2006)

Take Me To Your Leader (Hawk Records/Voiceprint, September 2005)

8: Hawkwind Ascendant (2007-2019)

Blood Of The Earth (Eastworld, June 2010)

Onward (Eastworld, April 2012)

Stellar Variations (Esoteric Antenna/Cherry Red, November 2012)

The Machine Stops (Cherry Red Records, April 2016)

Into The Woods (Cherry Red Records, May 2017)

All Aboard The Skylark (Cherry Red Records, October 2019)

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the current band, particularly Dave and Kris Brock, Vicky Powell at Atomhenge and everyone involved with Hawkwind past and present.

Many thanks to Chris Walkden for his fine live pictures and a huge thank you to Stephen Lambe for allowing me to make my appreciation of the mighty Hawkwind known to the world.

For Sammie, who joined me on this great adventure

and, thankfully, loves to see Hawkwind live.

Author’s Note

Hawkwind have released a mountain of official studio and live albums. In addition, there have been a plethora of ‘grey area’ and bootleg albums that are, at best, only marginally worthwhile. This book will cover the main studio albums but will also include the three major live albums that have done the most to cement Hawkwind’s majestic reputation. In order to prove itself as useful as possible, this book attempts to arrive at definitive statements concerning band personnel, songwriters and other information concerning the band. All songwriters are listed purely in alphabetical order. In addition, several songs have appeared under different names, e.g. ‘Hassan I Sabbah’ is often quoted as ‘Assassins Of Allah’. Correct titles are noted [in square brackets] in the text.

I have taken a rather individual view of what constitutes a Hawkwind album: discounting 2000s Spacebrock (as it is just a Dave Brock solo album in a very penetrable disguise) and the Psychedelic Warriors trio side project White Zone but including Robert Calvert’s nominally solo outing Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters, the Hawkwind Light Orchestra’s Stellar Variations and the Hawklords album 25 Years On. The reasons for this will become clear later.

Introduction

Inner space as much as outer space

Early Hawkwind is the sound of musical Barbarians at the gate and, apart from their aberrant ‘Silver Machine’ single, they have never been allowed into the mainstream. Often their outsider status has been physical as well as a state of mind. Jimi Hendrix dedicated a song to ‘the cat with the silver face’ at the 1970 Isle Of Wight Festival, and that ‘cat’ turned out to be Nik Turner, founding member of Hawkwind, who had painted his face with silver stars and was playing several free gigs outside the festival wall with the band in protest at the high ticket prices.

As well as being renowned for playing free gigs and festivals Hawkwind were also initially infamous for their lack of musicianship. Most of the early band members were people who had taught themselves to play instruments (Nik Turner, Dik Mik). Some were solid players, but their ideal gig was to turn up, play a freeform psychedelic rock jam (usually entitled ‘Sunshine Special’) for one or two hours straight through, without any breaks for applause, and then leave to a standing ovation. The band was inspired by the avant-garde elements of Pink Floyd but also cite the vast Krautrock movement (particularly Amon Duul II, Can and Neu) nascent in Germany at the time.

While bands come and go, the name Hawkwind carries on, producing striking music and almost representing an entire lifestyle. Always enigmatic and outside of the mainstream most people associate Hawkwind with ‘whoosh’ noises, ‘Silver Machine’, Lemmy and the occasional recognition that they produce something called Space Rock music. Even from the cursory glance afforded by this book it will be clear that there is far more to this group than this long-lived but inaccurate stereotype. Hawkwind’s longevity can be ascribed to both luck and determination, but part of the secret of their long life is that they actively accept and promote change both musically and, inevitably, in personnel.

Perhaps surprisingly one of the band’s early stated aims was to create an atmosphere for the audience combining music, lights, dance, theatre and mime that was psychedelic and tripped out without the need for illegal drugs of any kind. Most of the band members dabbled if I can be politic, in hallucinogenic drugs to one extent or another, and the tales of the band’s drug intake are legendary. This has to be looked at in context, of course: the principal drug of the day, LSD, had only been criminalised by Parliament in 1966 and many people had carried on using it, particularly when it seemed that other bands had continued to use only recently illegal drugs themselves.

The band officially came together in late 1969 as Group X – mostly because they couldn’t think of a name for themselves and they had a gig that night. John Peel saw them and recommended to Doug Smith that he sign a management deal with the band there and then. The band continued looking for a name and settled on Hawkwind Zoo. With that settled they recorded their first demo, consisting of three songs, and Doug Smith began hawking it around various major labels. Almost immediately the nascent Hawkwind signed contracts with Andrew Lauder’s Liberty label, under the name Hawkwind Zoo. However, before another note could be recorded, founding guitarist Mick Slattery suddenly departed for Morocco with wanderlust triumphing over the music. In order to record an album, the band felt they required a new lead guitarist. In keeping with the times, they found one easily, a startlingly adept soloist in the form of Huw Lloyd-Langton, and they were back on the road.

At the same time, the band was attracting interest from other Ladbroke Grove/Notting Hill creative people. Michael Moorcock, even then an iconic SF/fantasy/literary author, was invited by South African-born poet and writer Robert Calvert to come to a Group X free concert, and meet the group, and both were struck by the band’s chaotic maelstrom of sound. Moorcock characterised them by suggesting ‘they were like the mad crew of a long-distance spaceship who had forgotten the purpose of their mission...’

Doug Smith ran the new name past John Peel who suggested dropping the ‘Zoo’ part as he felt it was too American, ‘to Haight Ashbury.’ Thus christened they entered a studio with The Pretty Things’ guitarist Dick Taylor as producer, to record their debut album.

The real Hawkwind

Over the years, many spurious and highly amusing explanations have been given for the Hawkwind name ranging from the daft to the sublime. The perpetuation of various myths has always been part of the band’s psychology, but with the advent of two detailed biographies, the truth has re-emerged.

Hawkwind are so named because of Nik Turner. He was, and still is, infamous for his incessant farting (the ‘wind’) and frequent bouts of hawking up phlegm and spitting it out (the ‘hawk’). Spurred on by Michael Moorcock’s Hawkmoon character the band shuffled the words around and a band name was born. It helps that Nik possesses a hawk-like nose and that the hawk is both an ancient Egyptian and pagan symbol, but the fact of the matter is that farting named this band!

A Hawkwind overview

Hawkwind are underground in more ways than one. In a remarkably familiar situation to many other bands, they are most famous for a song that they dislike and which doesn’t reflect the main musical thrust of the band. ‘Silver Machine’ may be the only familiar piece that the general public has ever heard. This is unfortunate because, even at the time, it was regarded as a joke and, apparently, overdubbed as if it was a stereotypical Hawkwind song.

This is a shame, because the band, and Brock, in particular, have produced some of the finest rock songs of the past half-century: songs that should be famous: songs that should be all over rock radio and played by today’s buskers. ‘Master Of The Universe’, ‘Brainstorm’, ‘Urban Guerilla’, ‘Assault and Battery’, ‘Quark, Strangeness and Charm’, ‘Hassan I Sabbah’, ‘Night Of The Hawks’, ‘Needle Gun’, ‘Right To Decide’ and ‘Love In Space’ are all superbly written, largely concise and certainly innovative rock songs with playful and exciting lyrics that deserve to be heard. As it is Hawkwind have to rely upon their undoubted influence on generations of new groups to see their legacy live on.

Describing Hawkwind has always been a tricky proposition. Originally, they were part of the underground, at whose head strode Pink Floyd, but they never really fitted into the categories that followed. Various magazines make a case for them as progressive rock, but their attitude, lack of ability and musical style somewhat precludes that description. Hawkwind followed the Krautrock path of repetition and riffs rather than the intricacies, musicality and perceived bombast of the major progressive rock bands. It’s fair to say that Hawkwind have almost nothing in common with ELP, Yes, Genesis and their ilk although a resemblance to early Pink Floyd experimentation is sometimes apparent.

No, Hawkwind’s free-playing, people’s band mantle and brutally aggressive musicianship had much more resonance with Punk Rock when it arrived. It’s no coincidence that artists as diverse as Chrome, The Sex Pistols, Dead Kennedys and Monster Magnet have all acknowledged the profound influence the band have had on them. Sometimes musically and sometimes in attitude Hawkwind have a pervasive influence that belies their sales figures.

Hawkwind stand as a testament to the power of the repeated, and repeated, and repeated, and repeated, and repeated riff and the joy of musical chaos and for much of that time they have been lead by one man:

Dave Brock, the Captain

Although difficult to isolate the precise time it’s become pretty clear that Dave Brock took much of the control of the musical entity Hawkwind somewhere around 1972 with, ironically, the success of ‘Silver Machine’. By co-penning their biggest hit and writing the bulk of their material at that time, he was able to declare himself as the Captain of Spaceship Hawkwind. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. The majority opinion seems to be that most bands need a leader or a dictator. Groups that rely on collective composition tend to end up in self-indulgent backwaters, exploring musical blind alleys or exploding into several pieces, all of which have afflicted Nik Turner’s various musical endeavours.

The problem that has always faced Dave Brock is that some people believe he took the reins because he wanted that control. Brock, and others suggest that someone had to take charge and, as nobody else volunteered to do it, he stepped in. Whichever is correct and, I suspect, both motivations can be interpreted as the truth, Dave Brock has undoubtedly set himself up as the figurehead (and therefore target) for anyone who wishes to throw brickbats at the band. An argument could be made that Brock wanted to control the musical direction of the band but, given his extensive songwriting contributions, that would have happened naturally anyway.

After the gradual sidelining and then ousting (and occasional reinstatement) of co-founder Nik Turner in 1976, the band have only ever had the one continuous rock around which the band revolves, Dave Brock. It should be noted that during the labyrinthine internecine battles that occurred in 1976 even Brock was sacked from the band which suggests that his control of the band was far less than is claimed by some.

Intriguingly it seems that Brock actually works better in collaboration with others. From the formation of the band to around 1976 the band played largely as a collective, with some strong musical personalities coming to the fore. After Turner’s dismissal, it became the Robert Calvert and Dave Brock group, which didn’t last too long given Calvert’s ongoing mental health issues. From 1979 until 1989 the pairing involved Brock and Huw Lloyd Langton, although it is arguable that Alan Davey’s contribution from 1984-1996 could be seen as superseding Lloyd Langton’s role. Brock, it seems, has always needed a strong bass player to really anchor his own playing. Dave Anderson was both creative and impressive but didn’t last long. Lemmy, of course, was Brock’s undoubted musical soul-mate and often commented upon the fact that he shared an almost telepathic connection with Brock that he was never able to replicate. Brock, in return, says that ‘there was a magic between us. Some of the best times I had were with Lemmy in the band.’

Now, of course, Dave Brock has earned the right to call himself the Captain and has presided over 50 years of an active Hawkwind which has left a prodigious body of work and one that deserves celebration and recognition.

The politics of Hawkwind

Whether the political philosophy of anarchism was introduced to the band by Michael Moorcock (a respected and committed speaker about the subject) or whether he was attracted to them because of their unconscious anarchism is unclear, but the end result is a band that has, by example, shown their clear anarchist tendencies. Playing for free, organising their own festivals, guesting with other people, shedding and gaining members almost at random and constantly pushing at their own boundaries has given the band a large black flag following.

Throughout the years though it has become apparent that Hawkwind have represented one core vision more than any other, whoever was writing words for them. Hawkwind, and by this I mean the collective entity rather than any individual, see the future as essentially dystopian. In short, the world is going to Hell. Ruined cities, starvation, unemployment, plagues, environmental disaster, mental breakdown, global warming, the death of people, the death of planets, the stark emptiness of space, the belief that the Universe is essentially hostile and the terror of no longer being human have permeated the vast bulk of 50 years worth of recordings. A song on every album, sometimes whole albums, are dedicated to the underlying theme that the Earth and its people are doomed unless we make changes and improve ourselves before it all ends.

Given the variety of writers (Robert Calvert, Nik Turner, Lemmy, Dave Brock, Michael Moorcock, Huw and Marion Lloyd Langton, Alan Davey to mention a few) it is surprising that there is such a consistency in the point of view and such devotion to a central idea. Space and science fiction may be their overriding fixations, but it’s a blackness of heart and soul as well as the darkness of space that truly sets them apart.

1: Dawn of the Hawks (1969-1970)

Having come from a busking blues and jug band background the advent of Pink Floyd, Arthur Brown and Jimi Hendrix fired Dave Brock with a desire to follow a more psychedelic musical path and the concurrent beginnings of a large German musical scene, later dubbed Krautrock by the UK music press, all siphoned into the sound of Brock’s as yet ill-defined new musical venture. Brock continued, however, to busk to maintain some sort of income as he was already married with a child.

Early live appearances were legendary, not only for their sax and riffs and rock’n’roll music but also the primitive use of lights and backdrops that would come to fruition only a few years later. Live is where the band clicked, and it attracted the attention of future band members, DJs, future managers and a great deal of the Ladbroke Grove intelligentsia.

Still, before that, they had the little matter of Mick Slattery’s desertion, the recruitment of Huw Lloyd-Langton, and the recording of their debut album to contend with.

Hawkwind (Liberty, August 1970)

Personnel:

Dave Brock: vocals, guitars, harmonica, percussion

John Harrison: bass guitar

Huw Lloyd Langton: lead guitar

Terry Ollis: drums

Nik Turner: saxophone, vocals, percussion

Dik Mik: electronics

Dick Taylor: lead and back-up guitars (uncredited)

Produced at Trident Studios, London, April 1970 by Dick Taylor and Hawkwind.

Highest chart place: 75 (UK)

Running time (approximate): 39:40

In the studio for the first time, the band wanted to keep everything simple for their debut album. Given their relative inexperience, the band have all given due credit to Dick Taylor (guitarist for late ‘60s almost-seminal group The Pretty Things) for creating songs from the chaos. The band had played-in their single, hour-long, song live for months beforehand, and essentially played their live set in the studio three or four times. Then they picked the take they liked the best and tarted it up with a bit of musical spit and polish. The band had six recording days and spent, according to several sources, three of the days on ‘Hurry on Sundown’ alone. ‘Mirror of Illusion’ had time spent on it too. Looking back the reason is obvious: these were the two most commercial songs and were slated as the single release to promote the album.

Uniformly the band members of the time are proud of their debut and look back on it with fond memories. From an outsider’s point of view, it has its problems. In essence, the album is bookended by two songs and, in the middle, is a single sprawling piece of experimentation, soloing, improvisation, avant-garde sax, audio generator effects and free form rock split into four parts and given random titles. These twenty-eight minutes actually comprise a somewhat edited version of the hour-long ‘Sunshine Special’ song broken up into smaller bite-size parts, with occasional additional overdubs.

‘Hurry On Sundown’ (Dave Brock)

If you are going to set out your stall as the prime psychedelic experimentalists of the UK, then the best place to start is with a winsome and startlingly melodic, folk/busking hybrid that bears no relation to the rest of the music that is about to explode in your ears. It starts with nicely jaunty twelve-string guitar picking and a minor chord before moving into a bluesy harmonica part and a rock-steady bass high in the mix, combining with a relaxed lead guitar (almost definitely from producer Dick Taylor); the song then rolls along in sprightly fashion arriving at a sweet chorus melody and a surprisingly disappointing singles chart position. The lyrics clearly drip with hippie anti-war platitudes and suffer from bland repetition. It is a straight, frankly commercial, blues-tinged folk song with a lot to recommend it in the musical department. Needless to say, it isn’t representative of the band.

Astonishingly it was inspired by the twee folk trio Peter, Paul & Mary and their song ‘Hurry Sundown’ (from the album See What Tomorrow Brings: can you see what Brock did there...) – this is hummable busking material at its zenith. No longer lightweight and faintly desperate, as the earlier demo shows, this song sees the invention of busking psychedelia which went on to spawn future Dave Brock epics like ‘We Took The Wrong Step Years Ago’, ‘Down Through The Night’ and ‘The Demented Man’ before disappearing from the band’s musical repertoire almost entirely.

Having virtually defined catchy psychedelic folk, the group immediately abandoned the style for more free-form fare; a studio rendering of the sprawling and partially improvised ‘Sunshine Special’:

‘The Reason Is?’ (Hawkwind)

‘The Reason Is?’, like all great sonic experiments, starts with a shimmering gong strike (echoing Pink Floyd and, ahem, the group Gong) and then plunges the listener headlong into an area previously only inhabited by German bands like Amon Duul I & Amon Duul II and doesn’t let up for almost half an hour. Although it undoubtedly says 3.30 on the cover, the following four songs are all parts of the same over-arching piece, as evidenced by the real lack of any breaks in the music, until ‘Mirror of Illusion’. Here ‘The Reason Is?’ proceeds to provide ethereal voices, wind effects, endlessly circling cymbals and a brief bass throb introduction before it mutates into:

‘Be Yourself’ (Hawkwind)

Opening with a heavy bass and guitar riff before stumbling into a brief section of stentorian vocals exhorting you to, unsurprisingly, ‘be yourself’, its’ simple repetitive rhythms and chords disappear, only to be replaced by the first sign of Nik Turner’s saxophone on the album over tumbling drums. This leads to a rather fine guitar solo (also likely to be Taylor’s work) and then it returns to the foghorn vocals before suffering a mini-musical breakdown which inevitably leads into:

‘Paranoia (Part 1)’/’Paranoia (Part 2)’ (Hawkwind)

The short musical vignette of Part 1 is a ham-fisted Black Sabbath-like doom riff, only halted by the end of the original vinyl LP side getting in the way, illustrated by the winding down of the music as if the turntable is slowing. The game is given away completely when Part 2 restarts on the flip-side and sounds much the same as its earlier counterpart, only with an introduction of deep bass, more swirling cymbals, Brock exhorting everyone to get ‘higher’ and the blunderbuss return of the main riff to proceedings. Finally, here, Dik Mik’s electronics really come to the fore as he makes the sound of whip cracks and synthesised attempts at imitating a theremin. Without stopping (although it does slow down as it nears the end, as with Part 1) the piece goes directly on to:

‘Seeing It As You Really Are’ (Hawkwind)

Beginning as a slowly drifting miasma of electronic effects and the ever-present cymbals and wordless voices this part finds Turner mostly sitting out on the saxophone but apparently contributing the improvised vocals instead. Huw Lloyd Langton undoubtedly has a moment to shine on the guitar solo, but this quickly devolves into the sound of screaming and a pounding final section that, at last, highlights the forthcoming Hawkwind ‘sound’. By the time ‘Seeing It as You Really Are’ ends the experimental section, it’s clear that the band have explored this musical blind alley to its limits. They would go on to use a lot of the ideas and atmospheres in forthcoming albums but they would do it with greater aplomb and a modicum of succinctness.

‘Mirror of Illusion’ (Brock)

A sound like a rattlesnake and then a basic guitar jangle greets the listener for the final song on the album. Plastering on electronic noises from the audio generator and imitating the theremin again can’t disguise the fundamental busking/folk nature of the song. Not as supremely catchy as ‘Hurry on Sundown’, and featuring a clunky demo-quality guitar sound and quirky percussion fade-out, it nevertheless has a shiny commerciality to its melodic vocals that belies its weak instrumentation. The sound of Lloyd Langton’s delicately melodic lead guitar is a welcome relief from the somewhat aimless previous half-hour. No wonder it was the single’s b-side.

Lyrically Brock presents an early warning of the dangers of drugs with couplets like:

And the dream-world that you’ve found

Will one day drag you down

The mirror of illusion reflects the smile

That ‘smile’ is more akin to the Joker from Batman than any sign of happiness. Brock then specifically identifies the psychedelics, apparently so prevalent in the band at that time by saying:

You think you’ve found perception’s doors

They open to a lie

Although William Blake coined the phrase ‘the doors of perception’ in his poem ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ it became widely disseminated by Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception; an account of Huxley’s psychedelic experiences on Mescaline, a naturally occurring hallucinogenic, which has comparable effects to LSD and psilocybin (the active ingredient of magic mushrooms) in its mind-altering properties. Hawkwind gained notoriety later on for their apparent over-indulgent drug use, but lyrically this virtually pre-dates the group and certainly comes before the band’s hedonistic drug culture defined their early 1970s image. Ironically, the band claim on the sleeve of their debut that:

We started out trying to freak people (trippers), now we are trying to levitate their minds, in a nice way, without acid, with ultimately a complete audio-visual thing. Using a complex of electronics, lights and environmental experiences.

Twenty-two years later Brock would resurrect this song, retitled ‘Mask of Morning’, and while the musical setting was completely re-tooled, he retained almost the entire vocal melody and, in passing, demonstrated that his voice had barely changed over the decades.

Hawkwind Zoo Bonus Tracks

Given the extraordinarily tight recording schedule, it came as a surprise to be presented, over 40 years later, with the original recording of ‘You Know You’re Only Dreaming’ from the debut album sessions. All shouted vocals, strummed acoustic guitars and propelled by wildly thrashing drums the avant-garde breakdown into a ‘Sunshine Special’ musical quotation at around the three-minute mark makes this early version of the song from X In Search Of Space a very different beast indeed. Dave Brock pulls the piece out of the morass after a few minutes to return to the lyrics, but it’s a losing battle to find a decent song amongst the confused structure and disappointing vocals.

Although recorded as demo songs in 1969, the Hawkwind Zoo bonus tracks give a schizophrenic impression of the band at the time. ‘Kiss of the Velvet Whip’ (aka ‘Sweet Mistress Of Pain’) is a blatant S&M themed song that points to other, more radical, lyrical destinations that the band could have pursued but wisely never did. Musically it is a basic rock thrash-about (with a disarmingly pretty guitar introduction) which puts frantic guitar, blaring sax and pounding drums ahead of a decent melody or a sense of brevity. The song is about two minutes and several lyrical repeats too long. In a somewhat strange move, the band re-recorded the song in 1971, extending and rearranging it to fit in with the changed band dynamic of the era. Although better produced the song still retains its aberrant (and possibly abhorrent) lyrics. Nik Turner plasters sax all over the cracks, but this remains a disappointing slog around that wouldn’t have added to the majestic X In Search Of Space one iota.

Most illuminating of the Hawkwind Zoo demos is the version of Pink Floyd’s ‘Cymbaline’ which, as a song, was intentionally left off the debut album in order for the band to forge their own sound rather than saddle themselves with endless comparisons. Dave Brock handles the vocals well, the song sounds just as lush and ethereal as the original, but the production is