3/5 Live Recording From July 29, 1989
  by David Lord (Clemons, Iowa United States)
For starters, here is the track listing. As is usual with Hawkwind, songs bleed into each other without definitive end or beginning. I have represented such bleeding with the / symbol.

1. Intro
2. /Brainstorm
3. /Down Through the Night
4. /Treadmill
5. /Time We Left This World Today
6. Hassan I Sahba
7. Assault and Battery
8. /The Golden Void
9. Back In The Box
10. Arrival in Utopia
11. /You Know You're Only Dreaming
12. /Damnation Alley
/Your Secret's Safe With Me (unlisted)
13. Needle Gun
14. Ejection
15. /Lost Chronicles

According to the Amazon description this is a 1 DVD set. I purchased this some months ago but it was a 2 CD set - kind of. The same audio track was on both DVDs but one DVD shows the band while the other DVD has psychedelic effects all over the top of the performance. In the concert footage the lack of crystal clear close-ups is partially due to the smoke machine at the beginning and occasionally throughout, the camerawork and what seems to be typical fuzzy 80s videotape. The fire batons were present but not a focus of the cameraman. The viewer may find it more interesting to watch the psychedelic version if it is available in this release.

As for the sound quality - which I consider more important than video quality for a music DVD - this is most likely a soundboard recording. There are a few audio only dropouts in 3 or 4 spots from the ageing audiotape, some of which are pretty noticeable, but there are not too many. While not what one would expect from a recording intended for official release it is better than most live Hawkwind releases. Tape hiss is audible, but not too bad at all. The bass, while a little low in the mix, sounds like it should and not as if it was taped in a barrel like on the recently released Minneapolis 1989 CD set. The guitars, keyboards and violin are all crisp and the band is pretty tight, making for a pretty enjoyable overall listening experience.

The small boost Hawkwind had gotten from its brief association with The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal seemed to have dissipated and the band was in the midst of line-up changes. To my mind, while Hawkwind toured extensively in the late 80s and early 90s, after Xenon Codex they began casting about musically for direction, only finding it again with Love In Space and their tongue-in-cheek embrace of ET abduction 'culture' in 1995.

This concert was given a year after the release of the aforementioned Xenon Codex, Hawkwind's most recent studio album. It had some great tracks including Sword Of The East and The War I survived but Hawkwind only chose to play one track from that album - Lost Chronicles. At least they chose this one as it closes out the performance and is the best track here. In a few months they would replace this track with the mediocre Heads from Xenon Codex for their Minneapolis concert.

This DVD does include what I believe is the first appearance of the very interesting Your Secret's Safe With Me, unnamed but threaded into the end of Damnation Alley. This version veers toward its ultimate reggae incarnation, as found on the Minneapolis 1989 CD set and elsewhere, but it is not quite there yet. Perhaps Simon House' psychedelia tinging violin over the top of it keeps it `spacebound' for the moment. The song will ultimately come to ground as an interesting precursor to Captain Rizz's Hawkwind In Your Area track that would appear almost a decade later on the In Your Area CD. The kinks are obviously still being worked out as the song just kind of ends without any finality. I prefer other versions of Needle Gun but Golden Void and Down Through The Night, from the early days, are pretty good here. Others will probably give this DVD a 4 (or 4½ if they could) but the song choice drops this to 3 stars for me.

Jerry Richards-guitar, who would become a full member of the band a number of years later, guests here, along with Bridget Wishart-vocals, who would end up staying on in the band until mid-1991 when she left, owing to an "it's me or her!" ultimatum from another band member.