Captain Lockheed & The Starfighters

Product Information

The vinyl release of Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters includes a 4 booklet with extensive liner notes. I’m too high to die” intones Calvert, and Rudolph proceeds to tear it up with yet again before the final crash.

I'm very allured by psychedelia and many other releases of these spaceheads, but this is just different kind of music than majority of their releases. Recorded at about the same time as Calvert’s first and only studio release with Hawkwind during their tenure on United Artists, the “Urban Guerilla” / “Brainbox Pollution” single, Hawkwind all appear here (minus the recently-departed Dikmik. I have this original version with insert containing lyrics and dialogue stapled to inside center of gatefold. The sputtering of a trashed Luftwaffe plane starts up the album over Calvert’s brilliant portrayal of the West German Defence Minister as a raging psychopath who begins angrily berating his country’s air force power, which mutates into a vainglorious fantasy of a “reawakening of German air supremacy” as his raving overdubs into backward Strauss masking and into the first of four 1973-styled Hawkwind hard space rock thrash outs, “Aerospaceage Inferno. Calvert must have felt a strong affinity with them as he too was unreliable, difficult to control and unstable as hell.

Hardly the stuff of fluff, it’s no surprise that Calvert, who, according to the liner notes, always wanted to join Britain’s Royal Air Force (he even wore R. Arthur Brown's turn at vocals gives us "The Song of The Gremlin" parts one and two, one of the top tunes on the CD. The sketches between tracks are comedy gold, displaying a sophisticated, very British humour and help expand on the album's theme.

The purchased fighters were converted to unconventional operational military usage for saving money, which caused many accidents. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. The only non-Calvert composition (co-written with Dave Brock) “The Widow Maker” follows, and it is pure Hawkwind: all churning guitar and Rudolph’s (or Lemmy’s? Please consider supporting us by giving monthly PayPal donations and help keep PA fast-loading and ad-free forever.With more tracks, most of Hawkwind, (including Dave Brock and Lemmy), along with Roxy Music's Brian Eno, Pink Fairies Twink et al as musicians, the god of hellfire, Arthur Brown singing one track, and the Bonzo Dog's Viv Stanshall as an actor / character within the dialogue, what more can a fan want? And I am hugely impressed, previously, I had the Hawkwind album around Moorcock's works, and that was fun also as a space opera. Both music and storyline are more sophisticated and serious than in an average Hawkwind album, maybe because Robert had more control over the production. In the seventies I purchased the vinyl single ejection by captain lockheed and the starfighters thinking this was a one off novelty single. And admittedly it's the bonus tracks that have an immediacy, that the rest of the album may not have.

Former Hawkwind bassist Alan Davey revives the Psychedelic Warlords, including frontman Craig High, keyboardist Zoie Green and guitarist Simon Wilkins, for an acid trip down memory lane on this spectacular live recording! I think this realistic theme is interesting subject for contrast of more abstract cosmic operas, though Hawkwind also has had political themes on their agenda. The concept was based on the German Air Ministry's purchase of the Lockheed F-104G Starfighter, which was eventually nicknamed Widowmaker by Luftwaffe pilots. And co-joined by Paul Rudolph (on 6 string and bass guitar), Twink, Arthur Brown, Adrian Wagner, Brian Eno, Vivian Stanshall and Jim Capaldi the result was a virtual Hawkwind EP peppered by spoken word skits and a two part Arthur Brown-tormenter, “The Song of The Gremlin. The musical guests included Hawkwind, Arthur Brown and Brian Eno, making for a unique and legendary album.I was so happy to get this remaster and glad to see that it offered three bonus tracks, including an extended version of "The Right Stuff".

It wasn't recorded at the time but it was eventually recorded in 1984 with Calvert's wife Jill Riches on lead vocals and included on the Hawkwind, Friends and Relations Vol.Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters is the solo debut by Robert Calvert, the former singer of the space-rock band Hawkwind. I first bought this album as an LP in the 1970's and played it to death, so naturally I cannot recommend it enough. It was these severe structural modifications which rendered the jet unstable and difficult to control. If you like everything about Hawkwind, and need to have as much as you can relating to the band, then this may be as essential to you, as it is to me.