Live Seventy Nine

Live Seventy Nine
Live album by Hawkwind
Released	21 July 1980
Recorded	8 December 1979
Venue	St. Albans City Hall, St. Albans, Hertfordshire
Genre	Space rock
Length	45:10 55:55
Label	Bronze
Producer	Hawkwind and Ashley Howe
Hawkwind chronology
PXR5 (1979) Live Seventy Nine (1980) Levitation (1980)
Singles from Live Seventy Nine
"Shot Down in the Night" Released: 27 June 1980

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic	[1]
The Encyclopedia of Popular Music	[2]

Live Seventy Nine is a 1980 live album by Hawkwind recorded on their Winter 1979 UK tour. It reached #15 on the UK album chart.

This is a reconstituted Hawkwind with Brock, Bainbridge and King emerging from the dissolved Hawklords, joined by lead guitarist Huw Lloyd-Langton who had played on the debut album Hawkwind and keyboardist Tim Blake who was a long-standing friend of the band and had played on Gong's Radio Gnome trilogy.

The new line-up debuted at the first Futurama Festival at Queens Hall, Leeds on 9 September,^[3] then completed a 25-date UK tour in November and December with support from Doll by Doll, despite not having a record deal nor any product to promote, and ended the year at London's Electric Ballroom on 28 and 29 December with support from The Psychedelic Furs. The shows included Blake's collaborator from his Crystal Machine shows, the light artist Patrice Warrener using LASERs. although the band would encounter resistance from council Health and Safety inspectors concerned at the potential harm the LASERs posed to the audience, Bainbridge even claiming to have locked one such official in a cupboard to prevent his intervention.^[4]

Originally the band "didn't think the Oxford gig was very good, but we listened to the mixing-desk tape and were really surprised. So we mixed the master tape and got a deal with Bronze. If we hadn't got that deal, we'd probably have split up - we couldn't have carried on on our own."^[5] Manager Douglas Smith secured a two-album deal with Bronze Records,^{[nb 1]} even if Gerry Bron confessed "I don't think we would have signed Hawkwind if it weren't for Motörhead, I can't say I was that interested... Once you run a record label and you're employing people, you have to make good commercial decisions - you can't turn away business, even if the business isn't what you particularly want to do".^[6]

The music is more energetic and aggressive than the previous albums released on Charisma Records and the album benefited from the rise in popularity of NWOBHM at the time. Malcolm Dome reviewed the album for Record Mirror positively, feeling it "should have been a total and utter success fit to rank among the best albums of the year", but "to package here only an extract [of the full show] serves only to do the band a disservice".^[7]

"Shot Down in the Night" had been written by Hawklords keyboardist Steve Swindells for single release, but he departed during the year to record a solo album. The single was backed by the non-album cut "Urban Guerrilla" and reached #59 on the UK singles chart. Swindells also released a studio version of this track as a single and on his Fresh Blood album which he recorded with King, Lloyd-Langton and Nic Potter. "Lighthouse" is from Tim Blake's solo album New Jerusalem. "Silver Machine" explodes one minute into the song and is suffixed with "Requiem". A studio version of the new track "Motorway City" was recorded on the following Levitation album.

No live tour was undertaken to promote the album, just two weekend appearances at the Lyceum Theatre, London on 13 and 20 July, with support from Inner City Unit (with a guest appearance from Lemmy), Androids of Mu, Out On Blue Six, Beatnix and Wah! Heat.^[8][9]

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