Daydreams of Sunrise on a New World

Live ’25, Incubus Lovechild / Oz Hardwick (Incubus Lovechild)

It’s hard to talk about Incubus Lovechild without mentioning Hawkwind at least once, so I’ll get it over with. The association between the two runs deeper than front man Mark Sid Edwards’ penchant for Hawkwind t-shirts: IL bass player Niall Hone played for Hawkwind right into the 2020s. And as soon as I put on the first track of their latest album, Live ’25, I was transported back to 1981 and being woken up in my tent at Glastonbury by Hawkwind playing on the Pyramid Stage. Swirling synths, driving riffs over which anything could happen, tolling electronic bells.

Both bands have strong literary associations. Band-member Robert Calvert’s poetry figured large in Hawkwind’s work and New Wave SF writer Michael Moorcock was an occasional lyricist and spoken-word performer. Similarly, the words are a big part of what Incubus Lovechild do. Fortunately, on the Bandcamp page for Live ’25, there are links to the lyrics for each track, which really enhances one’s appreciation of what’s going on. The poet and IT-regular Oz Hardwick appears on two. I found the second, ‘Deadworld’, mesmerising: poetry spoken to music can be a hit and miss affair, but this is definitely a hit. It’s based on excerpts from Hardwick’s prose-poem Wolf Planet. The full poem, billed as ‘A Space Age Folktale’, runs to some 19 pages. It’s still available as a pamphlet and, listening to Oz reading from it here moved me to get a copy. It’s well worth a read. My impression, reading it for the first time, is of a world seen through the mirrors of a kaleidoscope, the elements of reality fractured and reassembled, but with a narrative thread running through it. Indeed, it’s a poem that resonates powerfully with the way things are. On the album, Oz presides over the music like a psychedelic, lycanthropic (you’ll have to read the book) David Attenborough. I couldn’t help imagining him crouching, Attenbrough-like over the creative whole as he intones: ‘Ahead of schedule, we are entering the realm of science fiction, strapping ourselves into reclining chairs, watching screens fill with a planet that looks something like the Earth we remember, but less detailed, less hospitable. Entering into the spirit of things, we adopt expressions of heroic concentration and end each sentence with Over. Who’d have thought that dystopia would be so mundane? Who’d have thought that parallel worlds would be stacked so tight that there’d be no room left to breathe?’

The second track, ‘Speedfreak’ seems, at first, a little out of place, with it’s theme of earth-based nihilistic joy-riding in the here-and-now. But, then, this is the very mundane dystopia that forces the joyrider into the fantasy, into those parallel worlds. The joy-rider is also perhaps the ‘Starchild’ (track 5): ‘Abandoned by the future / Rejected by the past I /  hold the threads of here and now / Entwined within my grasp’. And, as it says in Oz Hardwick’s  ‘Dawn on Time’ (track 6), we are ‘awake and dreaming ourselves into being’.

In ‘Graveyard on Mars’ vintage Cooper Clarke meets a psychedelic Ray Bradbury (and it’s a lot more spaced out and reflective than Gloom’s Gate’s doom metal take on the same title). The next track, ‘The Keeper’, is a piece of retro SF flash fiction. The keeper, a post-human being, envies the youth of its charges: a ship full humans (like the ‘starchild’ of the next track, perhaps) kept in stasis for a long space journey.

The final track, ‘The Aliens Within’,  deals with the idea that disguised, lizard-like aliens are living among us and rule the world. It works great in the surreal-metaphorical context of this album, but it’s a sobering thought to think there are those who actually believe it to be the case. Indeed, it’s interesting to speculate to what extent delusions and conspiracy theories are about a breakdown of the barrier we maintain in our minds between metaphor and reality.

Live ’25 is both a great listen and a great read. It resonates in all sort of ways with the lives we lead and the world we live in. Like other futuristic musical ventures – one thinks not only of space rock and Hawkwind, but of jazz and Sun Ra – it provides an escape from it all, while at the same time helping to make sense of it.

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Dominic Rivron

LINKS
Live ’25: https://incubuslovechild.bandcamp.com/album/live-25
Wolf Planet: https://www.hedgehogpress.co.uk/product/wolf-planet-oz-hardwick-print/

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