Out on my bike ride today, I found myself heading towards Minster-in-Thanet, and remembered that I'd read that Robert Calvert was buried in the cemetery there, so I popped in to pay my respects, and thought I'd listen to the only one of his solo albums I own.
I was introduced to this by a university friend, over 40 years ago, and was delighted to see it for a couple of quid in a charity shop a few years ago.
It's a darkly comic mixture of spoken word and song, based on the German Airforce's 1960s troubles with the Lockheed Starfighter, of which more than a quarter crashed. The spoken word sections are amusing, with much racial stereotyping which might not be considered appropriate half a century later, and drags old mates such as Vivian Stanshall, Jim Capaldi and Arthur Brown into action.
But does the music hold up? Well, it's essentially a Hawkwind album, with all the usual suspects and the addition of a young Brian Eno on electronics, and songs like Aerospaceage Inferno, Widowmaker and The Right Stuff (a Dave Brock song) all bear those Hawkwind trademarks, while The Song Of The Gremlin is far more operatic / theatrical, before the electronics kick in, with a sound much more characteristic of Hawkwind a couple of years later.
But the energy of the first act isn't carried into the second. Hero With A Wing drags, and Ejection plods. The Song Of The Gremlin is intense and theatrical, and the joke in Bier Garten still makes me smile "Want to buy a Starfighter? Buy an acre of ground and wait".
We end with the funereal Catch A Falling Starfighter, an amusing climax, but no more.
3* - some really good stuff in Act One, but Act Two relies on the narrative, rather than strong songs.
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