The psychedelic warlords' live masterpiece reissued... A recent Notes & Queries in The Guardian asked if any band had lasted as long as Hawkwind while having such little success. Hawkwind fans will have spotted the flaw in the question. Because of course there are no sales graphs or probability equations in space; merely spiral galaxies, golden voids and apocalyptic warnings. “Do not panic... small babies may be placed inside special cocoons and should be left if possible in shelters.” For Hawkwind, ‘success’ was getting the drugs over the border. All the same, there have been important years in Hawkwind’s history, and 1972 was one of them. “Silver Machine” was an unexpected monster hit that summer, and a strong studio album (Doremi Fasol Latido) followed in November. To promote it, Hawkwind unveiled a new live act that combined hypnotic space-rock with a Liquid Len lightshow, a sci-fi storyline and a trio of interpretive dancers, including the towering, topless Stacia. Hawkwind’s line-up – possibly their best ever – comprised Nik Turner (wah-wah sax and flute), Dave Brock (guitar, vocals), Lemmy (bass, vocals), the duo of Dik Mik and Del Dettmar (synthesisers and electronics), thunder-drummer Simon King and the remarkable Robert Calvert, whose chilling announcements were crucial to maintaining a red-alert atmosphere. “Do not panic,” he urged, like a cosmic Corporal Jones. “You have only a few seconds to escape. Use those seconds sensibly or you will inevitably die.” God help anyone who saw the show on bad acid. The double live album Space Ritual, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, was recorded at Liverpool Stadium and the Brixton Sundown in December 1972. Lasting a shade under two hours with bonus tracks, Space Ritual is relentless in its sci-fi metaphor and unflinching in its execution. As one thrilling riff gives way to another – with disembodied voices echoing from the stage – the primitive music induces trance-like pleasure while electronic whooshes create the feeling of unstoppable flight. Brock, Lemmy and King, a rhythm section with not an ounce of virtuosity between them, pilot the vessel like crazed joyriders. It sometimes sounds like Krautrock made by Brits. (Hawkwind, indeed, had links to Neu! and Amon Düül II.) There’s none of that quintessentially English approach to space travel that we find in The Moody Blues or the 1968–9 Floyd. Space Ritual informs us that we’re flying at bewildering speed with no realistic chance of returning home, tells us not to panic, tells us we’re going to die, and takes us on a juddering journey into the psychedelic unknown. As a Hawkwind song title would put it in 1977, we like to be frightened. An intergalactic proto-punk synth-boogie odyssey, Space Ritual is an album that relies on repetition, oscillation, gradual dropdown, accelerated build-up and sudden attack. That line-up of Hawkwind knew how to do a number of simple things well – with sensory overload its number one objective – and they could repeat the same chords for eight or nine minutes (“Born To Go”, “Space Is Deep”, “Orgone Accumulator”) until it was time to make a decision whether to play the song forever or let it shapeshift into something else. Dik Mik and Del Dettmar were brilliant at this, filling the auditorium with FX-saturated space-noise so that the performance could continue uninterrupted. The song would either mutate into a new riff or into a Calvert interlude, in which he ramped up the dread (“You will feel dizzy! You will feel the need to vomit!”) with the stentorian diction of Jeremy Brett delivering a nuclear warning. In a glorious passage that spanned side three of the original vinyl, the Canned Heat-style “Orgone Accumulator” (propelled by Lemmy’s bass chords) merges into “Upside Down” - a new Brock tune - then segues via Dik Mik and Dettmar into Calvert’s “10 Seconds Of Forever” and finally into a stunning “Brainstorm”. You can hear Space Ritual’s influence today on bands like Wooden Shjips and Endless Boogie. In Hawkwind’s 40-year flight log, it rightly remains a stageshow – and an album – of legend. David Cavanagh Q&A Nik Turner How did the Space Ritual come about?
 Robert Calvert wrote Silver Machine as part of the Space Ritual – and the success of that single enabled us to mount the Space Ritual. The concept was put together by Robert and (designer) Barney Bubbles: they incorporated the Pythagorean Music Of The Spheres, into the design of the stage, the colours, and how the equipment was painted up. It was a monstrous project, a labour of love. Could these shows be a bit hit and miss?
 I think so. We did about 28 shows and I think it’s quite likely it was quite up and down. Calvert was there and not there, because he was a manic depressive. Sometimes he was there and full of energy. Sometimes he was in a loony bin. Was there camaraderie at this stage?
 The camaraderie only dissipated with the success. I even got on with Dave Brock at that time. I never aspired to success for Hawkwind, I just thought it was a wonderful thing playing in a band that turned people on and made people happy. INTERVIEW: JOHN ROBINSON

Here’s no mud in your ear! The Johnny Thunders gang’s epochal 1977 album restored (yet again), with demos, alternative mixes... and badges! Veterans of this campaign may well raise a weary eyebrow over that “definitive” claim. That L.A.M.F., the only album by Johnny Thunders’s swaggering, smacked-up post-New York Dolls outfit, The Heartbreakers, is one of New York punk’s defining artifacts (despite being recorded in Britain) is beyond dispute: twelve songs that put the guitarist’s abiding passions – Chuck Berry, the Stones, Phil Spector and Shadow Morton girl groups, glam, garage, trash and junk – in perfect, speedy collision. What’s equally undeniable, though, is that it has been victim to one of the most tortuous release histories in popular music. Feverishly anticipated, L.A.M.F. – inspired by graffiti New York gangs used to tag their turf, it stands, of course, for “Like A Motherfucker” - was met with widespread dismay in 1977, due to a mysterious sound fault that notoriously submerged the band’s switchblade style deep in murk. Attempts to rectify the sonic situation have been ongoing ever since, with the result the album has now been issued and reissued in a plethora of differently “restored” iterations. But trying to get back to the record the band intended has proven a thorny business. The first sleazoid supergroup of New York’s downtown scene, The Heartbreakers formed in April 1975, when Thunders and drummer Jerry Nolan acrimoniously quit The Dolls and hooked up with Richard Hell, who had left Television in similarly bitter circumstances the same week, and was developing a similarly heavy heroin habit. Recruiting louche and looming guitarist Walter Lure, the original Heartbreakers fused Hell’s wired poetic concerns with a simpler, rawer rock sound, led by Thunders’ swashbuckling guitar, but the volatile combination of ego and addiction saw Hell quitting after a year, replaced on bass by sometime gigolo Billy Rath. A more straightforwardly rock’n’roll proposition, Heartbreakers Mk II built a ferocious live reputation on the CBGBs circuit, but also had another reputation – for drugs, bad news and trouble – that meant no American record label would touch them. So when one-time Dolls manager Malcolm McLaren invited them to the UK to join the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy Tour, they were ready to try their luck in pastures new. Luck, though, was something the Heartbreakers never really had. Arriving just as Grundygate outraged the nation’s tabloids, they found the tour disintegrating as sixteen of nineteen gigs were cancelled, leaving the band stranded without wages over the winter of 1976. A string of hastily arranged London shows built another fervent following, however, and attracted Track Records, The Who’s label, with who they finally signed early in ’77 – blissfully unaware that Track was in financial disarray. Despite some junkie monkey business, and Track’s debatable choice of Thunderclap Newman vocalist Speedy Keen as producer, recording sessions for *L.A.M.F* passed off relatively smoothly. It was only when the band heard pressings of “Chinese Rocks,” the my-life-under-smack anthem written by an eternally disputed combination of Dee Dee Ramone, Hell and Thunders, selected as the ideal lead single, that the trouble began. Deeply unhappy with how the record sounded, the group launched into a protracted period of remixing all the songs. With Nolan in particular growing obsessed the mix was to blame, but unable to pinpoint the problem, the Heartbreakers spent months tinkering in an increasingly frantic cabin fever atmosphere. Eventually, they amassed over 250 mixes. It might have gone on forever, but Track ordered the record released in October ’77, to the fury of Nolan, who quit. Ironically, much later, it emerged the mix was never the problem: it was a persistent mastering flaw, as the tapes were transferred to vinyl. Taking a lead from rumours leaking from the studio, reviewers zeroed in on the album’s sound problems: “[The Heartbreakers] are mutilated beyond all dignity,” frothed Julie Burchill in the NME, “[producers] Speedy Keen and Daniel Secunda deserve at the very least to have their ears cut off.” In Sounds, Jon Savage was less savage, but flung the word that stuck: “the songs… sound muddy.” Confirming suspicions that the Heartbreakers were too messed up and sloppy to deal with, the response to the album hastened their demise. But the idea of restoring L.A.M.F. to its intended glory became a punk holy grail. When Track went under in 1978, Heartbreakers manager Leee Black Childers broke into the offices to liberate the tapes. The masters were missing, but those 250-odd remixes remained. The first major reconstruction came in 1982, when Thunders reworked the tapes as L.A.M.F. Revisited, hailed as the definitive version. In 1994, three years after Thunders’s death, there came another complete overhaul with L.A.M.F: The Lost ’77 Mixes, hailed as… well, you get the idea. Personality crisis, indeed. Still preferred by many, Lost ’77 Mixes is included again here, but the centrepiece of this excellent 4-disc box is a carefully “de-muddied” new restoration of the original Track LP, created, in the absence of the masters, by running the 1977 vinyl through the latest mastering software. The results are, if not revelatory, at least deeply rewarding. This restoration doesn’t have the sheer (some might argue shrill) in-your-face attack of Lost ’77 Mixes, but L.A.M.F. is revealed to have a thicker, warmer sound that proves much easier to spend time with. The bad news for fans is, you need to hear this one. The worse news, though, is that L.A.M.F: Definitive Edition appears hot on the heels of *another* recent, highly significant, online restoration by the fans behind the whitetrashsoul blog, who discovered that various European pressings of the 1977 album were actually cut using different mixes again, and sound infinitely superior to the UK release. (I was sceptical, until I heard the aching “It’s Not Enough” unearthed from the French ’77 LP, and was gobsmacked by how its strumming bed of acoustic guitars chimed out like never before.) The painstaking whitetrashsoul compilation is worth investigating, and comparing against the other alternative mixes amassed for Disc 4 here. The danger is, you’ll be sucked into the endless maze of trying to assemble your own “ultimate” L.A.M.F from various sources. As you wade through several subtly different versions of “Baby Talk” trying to find The One, you may find your bleeding ears going cross-eyed, and sympathise with what The Heartbreakers endured. Still one thing remains unaltered throughout: this really is one motherfucker of an album. That’s definitive. EXTRAS: Alongside the restoration of the Track LP and The Lost ’77 Mixes, there’s a disc of early Heartbreakers demos, including four previously (officially) unreleased from the Richard Hell incarnation. The final disc offers more alternative mixes, including a “Born To Lose” that bizarrely buries Thunders’s guitar until it’s barely audible. There’s also a well-illustrated, 44-page booklet laying out the Heartbreakers’ saga, and four wee badges, to make you the envy of every punk in town. Damien Love Q&A WALTER LURE What’s your take on what happened with the sound? WL: Everybody blamed the mix. Jerry in particular. I didn’t think the mix was bad, because when we played it back in the studio, it sounded fine. For me it was something that had happened when it got transferred from tape to vinyl. It lost the edge, got this muffled sound. To me, that pointed to the mastering. But, anyway, the mix was being blamed. We tried everything. We went to various studios, Abbey Road, I don’t know how many mastering studios, and tried to redo it. And every time: it sounded great in the studio, but as soon as went onto vinyl, it sounded like it was underwater. Jerry kept insisting it was the mix, so they gave him a few weeks in the studio alone to work on it. And his stuff came out sounding worse than the original. By this point, it was October ‘77, and the record company said, “Listen: this has got to be released.” Because they were going to miss the Christmas rush, they’d lose sales, and we’d lose our contract. They’d spent a lot of money on it by then, with all this time, eight, nine months, in different studios, bouncing around trying to fix it. So, Johnny, Billy and me said, “Well, okay.” But Jerry said if it was going to come out like that, he was going to quit the band right there. And he did. And the record came out, and that was what we were stuck with. Leaving aside the sound problem, how was it recording? WL: Well, we knew the songs inside out, because we had been playing them live for two years. So that was no problem. Toward the end, the sessions got more and more wild, because Johnny and Jerry would show up five or six hours late, because they were running around London trying to find their next pile of abusive substances. It got a bit hectic, people showing up to find they’d missed the session by 12 hours, but nothing really bad. But it was getting to the point that, if we *had* done another record, it would have been complete madness, because Johnny was getting increasingly out of control. You were all sharing a house during that time, like some degenerate version of The Monkees… WL: When we first got over there, we were crashing around at Sebastian Conran’s parent’s house, that December around the Anarchy Tour. Then, once we got the record contract, we moved into Pimlico, and that’s where we lived during most of the recording. A small basement flat. Me and Jerry shared a room, Billy had a room, and Johnny had a room. It got pretty nutty. Up all night. All sorts of weird people popping in and out. There’d be dealers coming over, we’d let them crash, then people would be going through their clothes in the middle of the night, trying to find their stash. Nancy Spungen came over, because she’d gotten a guitar of Jerry’s out of the pawnshop – that’s the only reason he let her in the house. And twenty minutes after she showed up, he threw her out. That’s when she went on to meet Sid, and, well, another story happened. It wasn’t like *complete* mayhem. A couple of us OD’d from time to time, and the others would throw us into the bathtub to wake us up. But other than that, it was pretty run of the mill. INTERVIEW: DAMIEN LOVE

In British pop history the feature film often marks the fatal moment of imperial overreach of a particular scene or band. From Magical Mystery Tour to The Great Rock And Roll Swindle or Absolute Beginners, be they grand follies, works of cynical exploitation or pretentious fiascos, they almost always mark the end of something. Is Peter Strickland’s remarkable Berberian Sound Studio, then, the epitaph of hauntology? From its Julian House poster and title sequence to Toby Jones’ sartorial symphony in tweed, the Box Hill chaffinches and Italian catacombs, its fetishistic celebration of analogue audio and its invocation of the occult power of the horror soundtrack, the film feels less like a moment of cultural dissipation than of culmination: the moment, the gesamtkunstwerk, the movement was always aspiring to. So it’s fitting that the soundtrack is provided by Broadcast. It’s arguable that the whole scene that has burgeoned over the last decade around the Ghost Box label, the wider fascination with that fleeting seventies conjunction of ancient Lovecraftian wyrd and utopian Radiophonic bliss - has been a long reckoning with the cultural nerve they touched. From humble mid-90s beginnings as Stereolab fellow travellers, Broadcast increasingly look like the key British group of the last 20 years. The appearance of “The Book Lovers” on the soundtrack of Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery notwithstanding, it’s a mystery the group weren’t commissioned to work on soundtracks sooner, such was their evident feel for the scores of Barry, Morricone, Luboš Fišer. For BSS Strickland commissioned the group to provide themes and moods for the unseen film within a film, Il Vortice Equestre. Whereas in the UK state-sponsored electronic music entered the pop nervous system via radio jingles or sci-fi like Quatermass or Doctor Who, in Italy the incursion happened via gialli, the genre of psychedelic horror movies pioneered by directors like Dario Argento. BSS explicity references La morte ha fatto l'uovo (Death Laid An Egg), Giulio Questi’s incredibly strange 1968 factory farming phantasmagoria, with an excoriating soundtrack courtesy of Bruno Maderna, co-founder of the RAI’s Studio di Phonologia in Milan. Broadcast’s soundtrack perhaps wisely doesn’t attempt to emulate or pastiche the fingernails-scratching-the-blackboard-of-your-mind of Maderna’s more extreme adventures in music concrete, amounting instead to a kind of refinement or abstraction of the phased wig-outs and harpsichord reveries of their greatest hits. Heard on its own, as that old ambient alibi - the soundtrack to an imaginary film - made concrete, it’s not an easy listen, not least because moments of eerie enchantment are swiftly followed by tracks consisting of a couple of minutes gibbering from a dangerously aroused goblin. It doubtless works best heard in the cinema or the home theatre, and especially in the context of Julian House’s beautifully lurid title sequence. But it’s uneasy listening also because of the grief many of us still feel for the loss of Trish Keenan, who died between the soundtrack’s commission and completion. Listening to her wordless vocals on “Teresa, Lark Of Ascension” or the mournful mellotron that laps around the birdsong and laughter of “Such Tender Things” feels almost unbearably poignant. The analogue traces of a woman’s voice, still reverberating in the ghost box of the recording studio: well, that’s the uncanny hauntology of phonography, right there. Stephen Troussé Q&A James Cargill How did you first meet Peter Strickland? The first contact was an email. He was writing the screenplay and he put the feelers out... Then me and Trish went to meet him in Reading and the relationship grew from there. I think he loved Broadcast. He knew we’d referenced a lot of the music he was referring to in the film. Were there any particular soundtracks that were touchstones for you? A lot of the Italian stuff, pre-Goblin, pre-Suspiria, the more mournful side of it, the romantic side of the giallo stuff. We tried a more heavy approach in the beginning, the more bombastic horror thing and it just wasn’t working. A lot of the time in Berberian, though the music we were composing was for the Equestrian Vortex film within a film, while you’re watching the film, you’re watching Gilderoy listening to that music. So it has to have a musical connection to him as well. So the more yearning and pastoral sound of the soundtrack felt right. Is soundtrack work something you’d like to do more of? The thing about Berberian was I really enjoyed working with Peter. Of course it was me and Trish who started it and now she’s not with us any more. So I don’t know about soundtrack work in general, but I’d definitely work with Peter again. Will there be more releases from Broadcast? Trish left quite a lot of songs so I just need to arrange them really. So there will be another Broadcast album yes. I’m not sure when it will be ready though. INTERVIEW: STEPHEN TROUSSÉ