Robert Calvert – Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters
Occasional Hawkwind frontman and co-writer of the band’s best known commercial hit, ‘Silver Machine’, Robert Calvert was an all-rounder of the 70s underground scene, knocking out poetry, musical plays and even a novel. He also found time to pursue a solo career, prior to his dying from a heart attack at the age of 43.
Released in 1974, Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters is a concept album based around the American Lockheed Starfighter F-104 aircraft, a modified version of which was sold abroad and proved to be hugely unreliable, claiming the lives of 115 pilots in Germany alone.
Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters is also a collection of cracking Hawkwind-style sonic excursions, threaded throughout by a satirical weave of Pythonesque spoken interludes.
It’s unsurprising that his debut solo effort sounds like a Hawkwind album, as Calvert roped in his sometime bandmates (of the ’74 incarnation) as guest musicians, along with other such luminaries of the Ladbroke Grove scene as Arthur Brown and Pink Fairies drummer, Twink. He also secured the talents of barmy Bonzo Dogger, Vivian Stanshall, and Jim Capaldi of Traffic to provide voices for the humorous skits.
The result is a triumph of progressive space-rock, laced with that early metal throb that characterises this particular era of Hawkwind’s ad infinitum career. Grinding bass excursions such as ‘The Right Stuff’ (also included as an eight minute extended freakout version in the bonus tracks), ‘Ejection’ and ‘The Aerospaceage Inferno’ could just as easily have been lifted from Hall of the Mountain Grill, released the same year. Only the aeronautical theme, in keeping with the album’s concept, and an absence of Dave Brock singing distinguishes them from vintage Hawkwind.
The always welcome Arthur Brown makes his presence felt on ‘The Song of the Gremlin (parts one and two)’, letting rip with the customary vocal histrionics he’d made his own and unleashing some Rocky Horror-style hamminess into the bargain.
All good stuff and a pleasant surprise, as I must admit I’d approached this album with a certain degree of trepidation, a niggling voice telling me to expect a hastily cobbled together mess. Just goes to show, even I can get it wrong…
… Albeit not very often.
If you’re a fan of Hawkwind, particularly the early to mid-70s sound, and you already own the 300,000 or so albums they’ve released in some form or another across the millennia, then Robert Calvert’s Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters is a must-hear.
The 2009 reissue of Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters is released by Atomhenge and available from Amazon.co.uk
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