Let’s start with some heresy. As furious and phenomenal as Hawkwind’s UA Years were – with an unimpeachable run of albums that includes X In Search of Space, Doremi Fasol Latido, Hall of the Mountain Grill and the live classic Space Ritual – I find myself more frequently visiting the less fabled Cherry Red Years these days, a supernova of creativity at this latter end of a quite remarkable 55 year career (and counting). The Machine Stops in 2016 marked the start of a prolific, dynamic run where Dave Brock has seen out his seventies and headed boldly into his eighties taking the good ship Hawkwind to the very edges of the sonic frontier.
There Is No Space For Us is the third in what will surely become an unofficial trilogy of more synth-focused albums that also includes last year’s Stories from Time and Space and 2023’s The Future Never Waits. All three carry Wellsian titles and, more significantly, feature the talents of Welsh electronics guru Timothy “Thighpaulsandra” Lewis. The motorik urgency has been interrupted at times by passages of sonic abstraction and even white noise, especially on last year’s opus, drawing criticism from some sections of the fanbase who prefer their space rock to move more uniformly and methodically. Hawkwind may be in deep space right now, but they have listened. There Is No Space For Us is certainly more straightforward than its predecessors, though it’s no less creative for the exercise of reining in some of their more indulgent moments.
Perhaps the biggest surprise on this record are the Americana and Latin influences – with the title track incongruously embracing the western genre like Marty McFly in Back To The Future III. Another thing to note is that many of the songs feel like instrumentals that Brock merely drops in on as a kind of narrator, even though he’s singing at least a small contribution to most of the songs. On closer ‘A Long Way From Home’ he lands for just a few seconds at the very end in order to inform us that he’s a very long way from home, if we didn’t know already. ‘Space Continues (Lifeforms)’, meanwhile, feels so lucid that there’s no need to interject at all, with the music breaking from a flurry of tense arpeggios and oscillations into something more distinctly South American. ‘Co-Pilot’, too, has a Santana-like vibe, while ‘The Outer Region Of The Universe’ brings in an alacritous bossa nova beat that threatens at times to go the full Roni Size.
More straightforward is opener ‘There Is Still No Danger There’, which demonstrates how Hawkwind have managed to occupy a fairly unique Venn intersection where punk and prog crossover, though few punks would likely humour the sheer Ozrics-ness of the ostentatious, uber-noddly ‘Changes’. Not everyone will be happy, of course, but what a body of work and what an addition There Is No Space For Us is to it. All hail the Cherry Red Years.
