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Featuring new member Simon House on synths and violin, and following the departure of Robert Calvert and electronic effects man Dik Mik, Hall Of The Mountain Grill feels like something of an interim album for Hawkwind. Despite their cosmic pretensions, they were wary of the commercial success they had enjoyed with 1973’s Space Ritual and pondering which direction to go in next.
The album was named after a restaurant in London’s Portabello Road in which the group used to convene, a self-effacing title at odds with the grandeur of the cover, depicting a derelict spaceship in the mists of an alien lagoon; in 1974 we were two years into the post-space age.
Tracks like The Psychedelic Warlords (Disappear In Smoke) are quintessential Hawkwind space rockers, guitars belching like rocket-engine smoke on the launchpads. Wind Of Change, however, is a departure into thick, spacey ambience, while Lost Johnny, sung and co-written by Lemmy, feels like it would (and indeed did) sit better in Motörhead’s repertoire. The compact and terse title track, by new member House, comprises a lengthy piano introduction enveloped in mists of synth before it quietly goes up in smoke.
Bonus tracks include It’s So Easy, released as a single in Germany in 1974, which reminds of the very late Beatles in their studio jamming, exhorting mode. There’s also live material from previously unreleased concerts, at the Edmonton Sundown, the Auditorium, Chicago and the Allen Theatre, Cleveland earlier in the year, mixed by Stephen W Tayler.
Calvert features, intoning America Poem over a suitably dystopian ambient swirl. Master Of The Universe, a diatribe about psychedelics exponent Timothy Leary, sees the group at their most propulsive, drums headlong, guitar sparks flying upward. Welcome To The Future tears the roof off in a 15-second burst of collective noise. Seven By Seven is arcing, epic, hanging high in the theatre rafters.
Finally, two Blu-ray discs, a surround-sound version of Hall Of The Mountain Grill and The 1999 Party recorded at the Allen Theatre, Cleveland, in March 1974, with surround-sound and stereo mixes by Tayler. All of this extra material enhances, rather than drowning out or overloading the reissue of the original album.
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