Levitation is the Hawkwind album with Ginger Baker on the drum stool — the only one — and the first the band made without Robert Calvert writing the words. Dave Brock called it a return to the spirit of the debut, ten years on.

The short version

Levitation was released by Bronze on 17 October 1980 and recorded at Roundhouse Recording Studios in London in July and August of that year, produced by the band with Ashley Howe. It is the tenth Hawkwind studio album and reached number twenty-one on the UK chart. The line-up is Dave Brock, Huw Lloyd-Langton on second guitar, Harvey Bainbridge on bass, Tim Blake on keyboards and Ginger Baker on drums. ‘Who’s Gonna Win the War?’ followed as a single on 7 November, backed with ‘Nuclear Toy’. Bronze changed manufacturer partway through the single’s release, which is why copies exist with two entirely different labels.

A new deal and a new drummer

The band had regrouped in late 1979 around Brock, Bainbridge and Simon King, with Lloyd-Langton returning to the guitar chair after roughly nine years away — he had played on the 1970 debut — and Tim Blake arriving from Gong. They toured Britain without a record to promote, which brought the Bronze contract and the live album that preceded this one. King then left partway through these sessions and Ginger Baker, formerly of Cream, took over the drum tracks; he stayed for the tour that followed. Baker had been brought in for the sessions only; the invitation to stay came afterwards, and he accepted.

The sound

With Calvert gone, the words thin out and the instrumentals multiply, and the record leans on playing rather than on narration. Blake’s synthesizers give it a cleaner, more sequenced surface than the 1970s albums, while Lloyd-Langton’s lead guitar puts melody back at the front. Baker’s drumming is the element every reviewer reaches for: heavier and more jazz-inflected than the motorik pulse Hawkwind had run on for a decade. The studio had just installed a 3M digital machine, and the album was cut on it — which accounts for a clarity the band’s 1970s records never had, and which some long-standing listeners have always held against it.

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The songs

The title track opens the record and sets its terms — guitar-led, propulsive, almost entirely wordless. ‘Who’s Gonna Win the War?’ is the closest thing here to a song and the track Bronze chose for the single, backed with ‘Nuclear Toy’. ‘Space Chase’ is the instrumental where the Blake-and-Lloyd-Langton pairing works best, synthesizer sequence underneath and lead guitar over the top. ‘Motorway City’ is the track that survived into the live set for decades afterwards, and the one most often used to argue that this album belongs with the band’s best.

Reception and legacy

It is the highest-charting Hawkwind studio album of the era and is regularly named by long-term listeners as the best of the band’s post-1970s records. The line-up did not survive it: Blake left during the following tour and was replaced by Keith Hale, and by 1981 both Baker and Hale had gone after their request to remove Bainbridge went unanswered. The band moved to RCA/Active and to a synthesizer-led sound for the three albums that followed.

The verdict

If you know Hawkwind only through the early-1970s run, Levitation is the album that proves the band had another good record in them. It is tighter, better produced and more melodic than anything around it, and the Baker sessions give it a swing that Hawkwind rarely had before or since. Not the place to start — but a long way from a footnote.

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