Yikes! A glorified advertisement for future product releases. The cover art is the best thing about this release. Well….besides the cover there are a few worthy inclusions. The remake of Uncle Sam’s On Mars is a good one, but who really needs a remake when there are two excellent Bob Calvert live versions? Next are songs that are essentially poems read over a music foundation. Ode to a TimeFlower is probably the best, but this is really not my thing. The poem is read by Robert Calvert, the music by Dave Brock –not really Hawkwind material and not much fun to listen too. The Reality of Poverty is pretty good, with Arthur Brown handling the vocals and the full band adding some music to the proceedings -this is a true Hawkwind song! The Silver Machine remix is another big “?”. Who was pining for this one? It uses Lemmy’s original vocal track and the music gets updated, but with essentially the same arrangement –pointless.
The Video side does not fare much better. The best is Utopia / Arrival in Utopia because it is well recorded and rocks pretty hard. Harvey Bainbridge is back for this tour and he contributes some nice spoken word interlude in this track. Assassins of Allah is rocking version with ZERO bass in the mix –too bad, cause the performance was otherwise great. The Golden Void is sonically a mess. Don’t be Donkish is a Dave Brock solo instrumental and as these things go, a pretty good one (I ripped it to WAV and include it with the other audio tracks). Paradox is the same recording as the bonus track from Take Me to Your Leader and is a redundant inclusion here.
So all-in-all this is a skippable release and for completists (like me) only.
