LOVE IN SPACE

Hawkwind live albums don't really have a middle gear. Either they're horrible - terrible sound quality bootleg and might-as-well-be-bootleg crap tossed out onto the market for a cheap buck - or they're fantastic, regularly upstaging their studio albums, This was especially true in the 1990s; at the same time as a range of horrible bootlegs flooded the shelves and Hawkwind's studio albums were, at best, decent experiments in coping with a limited recording budget, they produced material like The Business Trip and Love In Space.

Love In Space is almost a sequel to The Business Trip; it's got the same balance of rocky and New Age electronic material, the same flow, the same production aesthetic. It also has Ron Tree adding a bit of energy as front man, and a track list with only a very, very few overlaps with The Business Trip. It neatly absorbs the alien conspiracy theory concept of their then-current studio album, Alien 4, into the wider substance of the Hawkwind canon, picking songs from other albums (and previewing Love In Space from Distant Horizons) to flesh out the concept.

In short, it's another masterwork, and one which goes particularly well with The Business Trip - making it handy that both live releases have been put out as part of the Emergency Broadcast Years boxed set at a decidedly generous price. Go for the Business Trip for a somewhat briefer journey, or embrace Love In Space if you want to go waaaay out there.