8. Robert CalvertCaptain Lockheed & The Starfighters
Why are people so wary of a concept? What’s the problem? Give me the two minute single or give me the concept album. Again this is about the times, I think I hark back to, this lost times idea. I knew this album when I was a kid and I could recite, tediously, a lot of the spoken word bits and bobs. What album has got Calvert, Viv Stanshall, Lemmy, the rest of Hawkwind and Eno on it? At one point Nico was going to be on it, but she probably overdosed or something and didn’t get on. A record like this wouldn’t get made nowadays. It had huge ambition, and the absolute ambition to fail. Calvert is really interesting because he wanted to be a fighter pilot, but he couldn’t do that so he became a space poet. I don’t know if that goes on so much in rock & roll now. Unfortunately I caught a bit of the Glastonbury footage from this year, and now it seems like there’s a very precise path, you do this and do that and the main aim is to get on the main stage, and you have your Glastonbury Moment. Everything’s really positive. I’ve had this conversation with John Moore before sat in the pub, about the days of the Mary Chain… why is there not a band who says ‘Right, fuck you, you’re going to have a fucking awful time’? At what point in Robert Calvert’s life were his eyes on his career? I think we live in paltry times. That’s why I’d pick Captain Lockheed, more than because I listen to it all the time, because I don’t, because it’s basically six Hawkwind songs and a load of pissing around, which is very entertaining, but I like this record more for what it stands for: be a proper fucking artist, which Calvert most certainly was.
