Boy, this is freakish. Calvert was a longtime associate/member/songwriter/singer with Hawkwind, and his efforts with that band understandably get carried over to this, his first solo album. If it's not complete gibbering insanity wall to wall, it's close enough at points. He roped in all the usual Hawkwind suspects -- Dave Brock, Lemmy, Nik Turner, etc. -- and topped it off with folks like Arthur Brown and Brian Eno to boot. But the key figure would likely have to be Viv Stanshall of Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band fame, who helps create all these weird snippets of 'dialogues' interspersed between every track, done in a very Goon Show style brand of weirdness. Cryptic conversations about the amount of emergency drugs pilots have with them before going off on their war runs? Sure thing!

The music itself is, well, very Hawkwind-like -- this is the guy who wrote "Silver Machine," after all -- but with the right sort of delivery from what sounds like a variety of guest vocalists on each track (my copy is a dub of someone else's, so I'm not sure who is where). What I *do* know is that the hyperdramatic beginning of "The Song of the Gremlin, Pt. 1" sounds exactly like the type of stuff Ween would make such loving fun of years later, and believe me, I mean that as a compliment. ;-)

The whole thing seems to be a concept album about planes, flying, militarism and the like, so basically imagine if the cover from the new Primal Scream album was transported back in time and stuck on a record with more overt humor, just a little less pretension, but a similar set of targets. "Catch a Falling Starfighter," which ends things on a really disturbing note, almost says it all.

Originally released by United Artists in 1974, it's currently in print via Beat Goes On, and can be ordered via www.amazon.co.uk -- no American release is immediately apparent.

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