Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music is Hawkwind at their most unruly and least predictable — a jazz-flecked, whimsical record made by a band in total flux, and the first for their new label. Released in 1976, it delighted the critics, baffled a good many fans, and remains one of the strangest turns in a career built on strange turns.

The short version

Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music (1976) is Hawkwind’s first album for Charisma Records, made by a seven-piece around founder Dave Brock: saxophonist Nik Turner, new permanent frontman Robert Calvert, violinist Simon House, bassist Paul Rudolph and two drummers, Simon King and Alan Powell. Cleaner, jazzier and more playful than the space-rock churn that made their name, it takes its title and sleeve from the old American pulp science-fiction magazines.

A band in flux

Everything around Hawkwind was changing. Their long relationship with United Artists had ended, their manager had gone, and Lemmy, the bassist whose battering-ram style had defined their sound, had departed during the previous American tour. In his place came Paul Rudolph of the Pink Fairies, a more melodic and conventionally musical player. Robert Calvert, long an occasional collaborator, was now installed as permanent frontman, bringing a theatrical delivery that owed something to Bowie and Bryan Ferry. Simon House added violin and keyboards. Signed to Tony Stratton-Smith’s Charisma, this line-up made an album quite unlike its predecessors — and founder member Nik Turner would be dismissed soon afterwards.

The sound

The swirling vortex is largely gone. In its place are jazz-tinged instrumentals, loose psychedelic wanderings and a much cleaner mix, the sonic murk of Space Ritual replaced by something spacious and oddly relaxed. Paul Rudolph’s bass sings rather than pummels; Simon House’s violin lifts whole passages into the ethereal; Nik Turner’s honking saxophone still nudges the music sideways into another dimension. Dave Brock’s fuzzy, grimy guitar keeps a foot on the ground. It is Hawkwind audibly enjoying themselves, and audibly refusing to make the album anyone expected of them.

Reading up on British prog? The books go deeper →

The songs

‘Reefer Madness’ opens with a swagger, and ‘Steppenwolf’ — borrowing its title from Hermann Hesse — is the album’s centrepiece, an eerie, sprawling piece in which Simon House’s violin roams free beneath Robert Calvert’s strange incantations. ‘City of Lagoons’ and the gloriously named ‘The Aubergine That Ate Rangoon’ drift into instrumental jazz-rock. ‘Kerb Crawler’ is a pumping boogie that was issued as a single, and ‘Kadu Flyer’ shuffles along in its own quirky, mystical way, before ‘Chronoglide Skyway’ sends the record off into the ether.

Reception and legacy

The album divided Hawkwind’s world neatly in two. Music journalists, long dismissive of the band, found much to admire in its wit and its playing; a large part of the faithful, expecting another blast of interstellar overdrive, felt abandoned. Time has been reasonably kind: it is nobody’s idea of essential Hawkwind, but it is far from a failure, and its jazzier corners have aged better than anyone predicted. Simon House’s playing here so impressed David Bowie that he recruited the violinist for his 1978 tour. Within months the line-up had fractured again, as Hawkwind line-ups always did.

The verdict

Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music is not where to meet Hawkwind — In Search of Space and the thunderous Space Ritual come first, and Warrior on the Edge of Time after them. But for anyone already converted, this is a rewarding curiosity: relaxed, funny, ethereal and full of fine playing, the sound of a band cheerfully wandering off the map. Come for the eerie sprawl of ‘Steppenwolf’ and the boogie of ‘Kerb Crawler,’ and hear seven musicians proving that space rock could go somewhere nobody expected.

Browse the bookshelf in the footer →