HW: Hawkwind Onward

[Carl Edlund Anderson]

On 07 Jun 2012, at 04:08 , Mike Holmes wrote:
> Open the whole of the 80's up for a poll of tracks to see which ones the fans would love to see done over.

Though I have to admit would be less interested in hearing the current band re-record stuff than in hearing completely new mixes/productions of the original recordings.  I mean, the current band already does lots of "covers" from other lineups -- live and on record -- so I'm not so into the idea of getting them to do more.  I do think that those other lineups had some good songs that, for various reasons, are not being done justice by the production they received.  Obviously this is all subjective, and one could well fall prey to the "George Lucas" phenomenon of "fixing" things that were actually fine as they were, with the end result of making them worse ... though, on the other hand, Star Wars would be fine if Han still shot first, whereas COTBS would be (at least subjectively) very arguably improved by remixing the drums (and, of course, other things -- but especially the drums!).

Of course this would make it harder for the other people who want to cover songs from that era. ;)  I'm pretty sure I could program and mix drums on my Mac that would stand a good chance of being less awful than the COTBS drum sound. :) But any half-decent engineer could remix COTBS to sound better than it does (by today's standards) as well.

_There's_ an idea!  Convince Dave to cough up the basic multi-tracks and let fans have a remix competition. :) Other bands have actually sometimes done things like that; NIN comes to mind, and people on Peter Gabriel's Real World label .... Not that I expect Dave would actually go for something like that ;) but it would be pretty cool in the alternate reality in which he did. :)

Cheers,
Carl

PS - That said, I've never been a particular fan of the production on the earlier BOC albums either. It always seemed a bit thin and lo-fi to me, though I have kinda gathered there was a trend for that at the time.  ST gets a bit better, but though I'm sure many accused AoF of seeming to slick and produced, it did finally achieve a fuller sound for the band. FoUO also sounds "right" for the band and music to me.  I still think "Imaginos" is largely amazing, although the "tape wear" or transfer through continual remixing and messing around as the project passed from Al to Sony/Sandy (it was Sony back then, no?) keeps it from sounding as awesome as it should. You can hear the intentions on the CD, though, and on the bootleg copies of Al's version.  If there were good copies of the original recordings, one could definitely turn that into the all-around blinder that it should be.

--
Carl Edlund Anderson
http://www.carlaz.com/