In the NEARfest thread Mr. Toad asked the reasonable question "What do you all see in Hawkwind?"
To me Hawkwind is like a moving train, and if you jump onto the wrong car you can easily get a wrong impression. There's a wide variety of sounds with all the studio albums, live versions of studio albums, multiple live versions of different songs, different personnel, etc. What I can say is that I HATED Hawkwind at first! I started out at a bad place on the train - the studio album "The Chronicles of the Black Sword." It was their new album at the time and being a Michael Moorcock fan, I went for this, but it did NOT sound good to me. Several years later I found the album Live Chronicles which sounded much better to me.
It really just took several stabs at different albums, and eventually it clicked. There are still a lot of albums I've never heard, and overall I'm more familiar with later albums rather than the earlier ones - I've never even heard the first couple of albums.
Here are a few tracks I like a lot, but I suspect people will recommend a lot of different kinds of tracks.
Most of these tracks ends at an unfortunate point since they're from live albums, and they just picked weird stopping points before switching to the next track.:
Bookmarks