Nik Turner – The Final Frontier

Cleopatra

A lot of people were very surprised when the 73-year-old Hawkwind veteran Nik Turner blew our heads clean off with the single “Fallen Angel STS-51-L”, ahead of the release of his Space Gypsy album.

It was a Newtonian as all fuck, hurtling ride of a number. It had all of the giddy propulsion of classic space rock. Messy and noisy, but turn on a sixpence tight, and over the top of all of it a reverbed-out sax, giving off all of the most cosmic vibes. And it was at that moment that we realised that this was what had been missing from all the pretenders to the throne. Because in spite of what we had previously assumed, space rock is not just guitar music with some inept synthesizer on top; it’s more akin to free jazz.

When you think about space music, you might think about those posh boys Pink Floyd, you might think about Karlheinz Stockhausen and the Darmstadt space project, or you might think of Sun Ra. In fact, if you don’t think of Sun Ra, go away and educate yourself, and then come back here to read the rest of this review.

Because that was what Nik Turner was bringing to Hawkwind: actual squalls of preconscious skronk. All of the little boys who had come to Hawkwind late in the day, and had understood them as some sort of heavy metal band, were terrified of The Thunder Rider. Why doesn’t he sound mathematical and exact? Why doesn’t he make sense? What is he doing that for? And as this new album opens with its most obviously space rock monster, “Out of Control”, that’s what we are getting again. Those Druilletesque stelae that establish the territory, that tumbling obnoxious rhythm, and over the top of it something slides across the whole at a non-euclidean angle to the galactic plane.

Turner’s voice is still there too. He probably always had the best voice in the band, here noticeably aged, it has taken on all sorts of emotional timbres that aren’t available to younger astronauts. There’s also a vulnerability and a freedom from the fear to swim in frankly poetic waters that are the fruits of a mature artist. On “Interstellar Aliens” we hear this at best advantage. The instrumentation here augments the Mellotron (real or fake; who cares?) with Simon House’s violin, which brings us back — further back than Hawkwind — to the tonalities of High Tide.

Once again it’s the non-guitar-ish instrumentation that is notable here, or more specifically that the guitars don’t dominate the mix. Perhaps it is noteworthy that Jürgen Engler of Die Krupps takes both Moog and production duties on this album, so there is a very strong overall aesthetic in control of all aspects of the sound. And while a lot is made in the publicity materials about two ex-members of UK Subs playing in the drummer and guitarist roles in this band, it is probably more notable that both appear in recent incarnations of Brainticket. Because as we drift away from the opener, we find that there’s a lot in here that sounds more like Amon Düül II than Hawkwind. And while the instrumentation suggests 1970s psych, the playing so often transcends that limitation.

Turner isn’t unafraid to go all-out avant garde or drift out to the far limits of musicality, although inspecting the track lengths we find that these experiments have been kept within a tight rein. When we compare his international band, drawn from a broad church of European cosmic music, with the contemporary Hawkwind, Brock and Sons‘ last project was an “acoustic” trawl through past glories accompanied by half-boiled orchestrations by Mike Batt. The album cover depicts Hawkwind as cartoon cricketers in the sort of style that one might expect to find on the wall of a red-faced English boozer. It is as if Dave Brock is determined to turn the band in the Wetherspoons of the galaxy, and following his notorious admiration for Enoch Powell in a 2009 BBC Radio 2 interview, we might look forward to the Rivers of Blood UK tour following a no-deal Brexit. Unlike comparable squabbling psychonauts such as Faust, Brock was sufficiently unwilling to allow two Hawkwinds to exist — or even for the name to be used in any form by Turner — to take the whole sorry affair to court.

The four albums that Nik Turner has put out over the six years since “Fallen Angel STS-51-L” have been exemplary intelligent space rock. Not resting on his laurels, he has also put out an album of cosmic jazz featuring many fusion luminaries such as Billy Cobham and John Etheridge, as well as Steve Hillage, John Weinzierl and Rick Wakeman from the proggier ends of that constellation. As he approaches eighty, Nik Turner is at the height of his powers, but we can’t help but worry whether The Final Frontier of the album title might be a veiled recognition that The Thunder Rider will one day leave this mortal realm.

Let’s hope it does not come too soon.

-Iotar-