The passing of time, coupled with any number of documentaries spread over BBC 4 and other arts channels, has served to obscure the fact of just how big the hippies still were as a subculture back in the shoulder-padded and mulleted 1980s. Lest we forget, this was as much a decade of protest, travellers and free festivals as the 1960s ever were, if not more so.

It’s against this backdrop that the Magic Mushroom Band came into being. Formed in the wilds of, um, the Home Counties, the band took their cues from the likes of Hawkwind, Gong and the Pink Fairies, as well as West Coast rock.

As evidenced by this 31-track, two-CD compilation, with material taken from the five albums the group released on Magick Eye Records, Magic Mushroom Band were never going to win any prizes for originality. Though played with a verve and enthusiasm that’s in all too short supply, Magic Mushroom Band were too in thrall of their forebears to be truly innovative.

Magic Eye and Wild Eyed And Electrick lean heavily on Dave Brock and co, while Love Resurrection tips a hat to La Düsseldorf. The years have not been kind.

Hawkwind’s discography is a vast ocean of sound and vision, and it can be a daunting task to figure out where to dive in. Like most classic rock bands, their best work was done somewhere in the early 70s, so any comparisons to their masterpiece, 1973’s Space Ritual, will only end in disappointment. But every era of Hawkwind offers some bit of cosmic truth, some spark of illumination that makes the often turbulent trip worthwhile, and this two-year blip is no exception.

In the very early 80s, Hawkwind found themselves helmet-deep in the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal movement, signed to an RCA offshoot, Active, that served as the label’s heavy-devy subsidiary. So what are God’s loneliest space-rockers supposed to do when surrounded by such leather-bound company? They assimilated, as best they could.

1981’s Sonic Attack is the middling result. The fact that it opens with a five-minute synth-noodling spoken-word piece strongly suggests that Brock and company don’t necessarily understand heavy metal’s core principles, but the album eventually settles into a decent prog-metal excursion, the highlight of which is probably Angels Of Death, a snarly rocker that sounds like Pink Floyd drunk on punk.

It’s a good fit for the band, which is why the follow-up, 1982’s Church Of Hawkwind, is such a head-scratcher. A fan non-favourite, Church is probably not what you’re looking for in a Hawkwind record. Forget metal, it’s not even rock: it’s a wispy, meandering synth album that sounds like something Tangerine Dream might knock off on a bored weekend.

Which brings us to the third and final instalment of the Active trilogy – Choose Your Masques. This one finds the band welcoming back songwriter/sax player Nik Turner, who rights the ship and sails it back into familiar space-prog waters. And to nail that message home, it includes a reworking of their classic Silver Machine. It’s a solid addition to the catalogue, anchored by the dazzling dystopia of the menacing title track and the stellar Waiting For Tomorrow, a near-perfect synthesis of synth-ronica and BÖC-esque sci-fi radio rock.

Esoteric offer all three albums in a spiffy 3D box set complete with original cover repros and a bonus poster. Why not?

Though hardly unused to such things, even for a band virtually defined by constant flux – breakups and defections, an eternal revolving door of personnel – the transition from the relatively stable zenith of Warrior On The Edge Of Time into the urbane and eccentric concerns of the Robert Calvert era was particularly pronounced. As Lemmy, Stacia and Nik Turner ejected from the mothership, Bob Calvert’s move from side-stage poet to centre-stage frontman propelled the band into territories uncharted before or since.

As sharp a left turn as was likely imaginable to your average Ladbroke Grove spacenik, 1976’s Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music (a visual and titular nod to the Amazing Stories sci-fi magazines of the 1930s onwards) jettisoned much of the band’s space drone and elongated meanderings into a far more pithy, chromium-edged proposition. Calvert’s cultural references, a blend of the lowbrow (Reefer Madness, the aforementioned title) and the highbrow (Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse’s meditation on spiritual crisis and psychoanalysis) added a strong literary dimension only flirted with previously.

Musically, any soft corners were cleanly lopped off, and a concision to the arrangements plus a boldness with instrumentation – a piano on the chorus of Reefer Madness, heaven forfend – steered the band into new-wave and near-pop waters.

This trajectory continued and was further honed on the following year’s celebration of quantum particles: Quark, Strangeness And Charm, an accurate enough description of the contents. The propulsive Teutonic two-step of Spirit Of The Age provides the missing link between Warrior’s Opa Loka and PXR5’s Uncle Sam’s On Mars, itself much indebted to the beat rhythms of Gil Scott-Heron’s Whitey On The Moon.

Renamed Hawklords for 1978’s 25 Years On (line-up shuffles, legalities, the usual), the addition of humour (Flying Doctor) is perhaps the only misstep on a markedly contemporary collection reflecting the mainstream of the day. It also boasts the most un-Hawkwind-like album cover of their career.

Though recorded just prior to 25 Years On, the final release of the quartet, 1979’s PXR5 is arguably the strongest of the four. Calvert’s bookish dystopian fixations – Isaac Asimov (Robot), JG Ballard (High Rise) – resurface, along with a gradual reintroduction of the bubbling, oscillating synths that would remain the band’s trademark, bridging the 70s to the 80s and signalling the end of a remarkable period.