Search - Hawkwind: Take Me to Your Leader on DVD

Good Music CD, DVD not worth the extra money

Edward Dupre | New Orleans, Louisiana | 01/04/2006

(3 out of 5 stars)

"I've been a Hawkwind fan for a long time and have most of their releases over the span of their long history. So needless to say, I was excited about the upcoming "Take Me To Your Leader" album. When I went online looking for it, I saw there was this Special Edition version which included an extra track and a DVD with live clips and interviews. I ordered it and recieved it right after X-Mas and excitedly opened it. Well, the music CD is pretty good, and this could possible be the BEST album cover ever on a Hawkwind release, although do we really need another version of "Spirit of the Age" ? The extra track "Paradox 2005" is also another version of an old Hawkwind song, but it's pretty good. There are jazzy elements, lots of cosmic space noise, awesome guitar riffs, funny and interesting sci-fi lyrics, typical Hawkwind stuff. The line up now is Brock, Davey and Chadwick, & a new keyboard player, with numerous guest stars which all execute excellent performances, especially Arthur Brown. The DVD for me was kind of a let down however. The video for the new version of "Spirit of the Age" was interesting, although there is so much psychedelic distortion and movement going on it kinda was overkill, but cool. The live clip of "Silver Machine'" with Lemmy playing and singing was awesome but the sound quality was pretty rough, as was the video quality, obviously fan shot. The next clip is "The Right to Decide" and not "The Right Stuff", it's okay too and the sound isn't that bad. The last two clips though are terrible!!!! It looks like it was shot using a very cheap video camera and the sound seems like it was recorded with a cassette player from the 1970's!! Credit to Hawkwind however, because they run a typographical disclaimer across the clips apologizing for the crappy sound quality. The clips appear to be from concerts for the "Take Me to Your Leader" live shows and at first I was going to cut them some slack because it may have been the only footage available........HOWEVER!!!!!.....When you go to the section with the interviews, which are pretty well done, each member's piece opens up with them playing LIVE from some "Take Me to Your Leader" shows.....and the video and SOUND clips of these parts are EXCELLENT!!!.....Phenomenal in fact......So they obviously have professional footage from these early "Leader" shows with GREAT sound and video, but they chose to include those horrid, bootleg quality clips instead.....I cannot even begin to figure that out!!!!......Perhaps they will release a professional quality shot and recorded DVD of this tour in the next year or something.....and if that's the case, SAVE your money and wait for THAT. The interviews like I said are informative and interesting, but they seem too long and I'd have rather have seen killer concert footage instead. So unless you're a total Hawkwind freak and MUST have limited editions, I would recommend getting just the CD. As for the CD again, overall it's reminiscent of the Electric Tepee/Business Trip era, which was pretty good. I wish they'd kept the new dudes from the last few albums though, especially the other guitarist, but I assume they had creative differences or something and left or were canned.....Hawkwind RULES though regardless!!!!!"