Please consider supporting us by giving monthly PayPal donations and help keep PA fast-loading and ad-free forever. Yes, Robert Calvert was the eccentric vocalist with Hawkwind for some years, and this, a play with rock music, was his first solo album.

I’m too high to die” intones Calvert, and Rudolph proceeds to tear it up with yet again before the final crash.It was these severe structural modifications which rendered the jet unstable and difficult to control. variant ("G for Germany") kept crashing in flames in droves killing young German pilots in the process! A screeching electronic swirl crashes open the Hawkwind-styled “Ejection” with classic Calvert lyrics that rhyme every word with the title over repeated rhythms and omnipresent Simon King high-hat and piston-like fills. The sputtering of a trashed Luftwaffe plane starts up the album over Calvert’s brilliant portrayal of the West German Defence Minister as a raging psychopath who begins angrily berating his country’s air force power, which mutates into a vainglorious fantasy of a “reawakening of German air supremacy” as his raving overdubs into backward Strauss masking and into the first of four 1973-styled Hawkwind hard space rock thrash outs, “Aerospaceage Inferno. The Widow's Song" was included in the libretto and Calvert had hoped to record it with Nico singing.

The spoken word interludes reinforce the absurdity of the whole situation (featuring the loony Viv Stanshall) and inject a satirical wit missing from the more standard-based songs that are written from the perspective of the pilot, who, in the end must begrudgingly concede that “the radar screen’s projection/tells me I’m too late.It's a satirical concept album with both songs and spoken interludes based on the story of the poor quality of the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter planes. My own favorite tracks are the "Aerospace inferno" with nice pulsing rhythm and creation of moods, a really well rocking "Ejection" which was later also played by Hawkwind on stage, and definitely the end hymn "Catch a Falling Starfighter", which I found very touching conclusion.

In the seventies I purchased the vinyl single ejection by captain lockheed and the starfighters thinking this was a one off novelty single. It is nowhere to be found on the album, but turned up years later on a crap Hawkwind collection with Calvert femme-vocalising.With more tracks, most of Hawkwind, (including Dave Brock and Lemmy), along with Roxy Music's Brian Eno, Pink Fairies Twink et al as musicians, the god of hellfire, Arthur Brown singing one track, and the Bonzo Dog's Viv Stanshall as an actor / character within the dialogue, what more can a fan want? These songs do bear some stylistic similarities to the parent band (big, crunchy, guitar bombast; fluid sax lines; dense, rhythmic underpinnings) to the mothership. For an album made in the early 70's it does not sound in the least dated, with Eno and Hawkwind's Del Dettmar on synths a track like 'Gremlins' (which also has a superbly effective guest vocal from the 'God of Hell fire' - Arthur Brown) moves into proto techno territory. Robert Calvert, a longtime member and lyricist of space pioneers Hawkwind, crafted this record, inspired by the Lockheed bribery scandals.