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Eruditorum Press

Less the heroes of our stories than the villains of some other bastard’s

Space Ritual

Sensor Scan: Space Ritual

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There’s a certain set of expectations that are put in place when you put on a record with a title like Space Ritual. These are further heightened when you glance at album artwork like that, which has got to be one of the most gorgeously mind-warping bits of sleeve design I’ve ever seen. So suffice to say I guess I expected that whatever this album was going to sound like it simply had to be some kind of consciousness-elevating, perspective shifting head trip. What I experienced was not quite what I anticipated, but an experience Space Ritual certainly is.

Music is one of the hardest things for me to write about, and it aggravates me no end. Probably nothing resonates with me as powerfully as music does, but it evokes such a complex tapestry of emotions, moods and imagery for me I often find myself unable to translate my feelings into anything resembling coherent language. I’m no musicologist or music critic and maybe that has something to do with it, but either way, no place do I feel the torment of Avital Ronell’s ethereal phantom dictator than when I try to say something intelligent about music. I always end up feeling like the protagonist of William Shatner’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, haplessly and fruitlessly trying to describe enlightenment to someone who didn’t experience it firsthand. I’m also once again handicapped by the fact I’m writing about a group of artists I’m not especially familiar with and feel woefully underqualified to actually talk about.

But even so there are a fair amount of interesting things I was able to notice about Hawkwind’s Space Ritual even given my limited experience with the band that slot the album very nicely into the cultural zeitgeist of the early 1970s. Hawkwind, firstly, are a UK-based rock outfit who combine elements of Psychedelia, acid rock and prog rock and who are usually credited as the originators of space rock, which fuses all of these disparate sounds together through an interest in science fiction motifs. While this isn’t the kind of space rock I’m familiar with (which uses a lot more electronic instruments, distortion and overdubbing) it is quite an apt description of what Hawkwind sound like. With their heady themes and incredibly skilled guitar shredding, Hawkwind are also seen as the intermediate step between the Hippies of the Long 1960s and the Punks of the Long 1980s. They were also one of the most laudably workmanlike bands of their time, regularly doing one show every three days and once playing five consecutive nights for free outside, not at, the Isle of Wright Festival. Space Ritual itself isn’t an album in the traditional sense: It’s a double-disc live album chronicling a night from Hawkwind’s 1972-3 tour to support their Doremi Fasol Latido album. However, like so many great live albums, Space Ritual holds together perfectly on its own to the point it more than overshadows the records it’s ostensibly trying to support.

That Space Ritual is a recording of a concert is key to grasping its impact, as it really does feel like this kind of music is meant to be shared with a live audience.…

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“Don’t get any ambitious ideas,” says Castellan Spandrell to his prisoner.

“I just wanted to check it was the same staser,” says the Doctor, examing the weapon used to assassinate the President of the High Council of Time Lords. “You see that symbol at the end of the corridor?”

The Doctor indicates a huge Seal of Rassilon.

“What about it?” asks Spandrell.

“You try and hit it,” says the Doctor, handing Spandrell the staser.

“That’s the kind of vandalism we’re always running the Shabogans in for,” grumbles Spandrell.

Spandrell is, basically, the Chief of Police in the Time Lord Capitol.  As such, the Doctor is his prisoner, having been caught holding a rifle in a gallery near the spot where the President was gunned down.

We never see any Shabogans.   The reference is never explained.  It just seems to be part of a Gallifreyan policeman’s job to arrest people called ‘Shabogans’ for vandalism.  But let’s not pass over this too quickly.  There is regular crime here?  There are hooligans running around the corridors of the Capitol of the Time Lords of Gallifrey? 

Well, yes, of course.

The Time Lords are not just ‘aliens’.  They’re explicitly potrayed as the ruling class.  They have sycophantic TV presenters who interview them creepily (about process and personalities… just like Andrew Marr outside Number 10) when they congregate at elaborate government ceremonies.  They wear traditional robes and ornate, arcane bling at these state events.  They have the poshest of posh accents, like a great club of old Etonians and Oxbridge alumni… or like Oxbridge dons.  They have Academies and Colleges in the Capitol, populated by fussy, blithering, crusty old farts who reminisce about how many of these ceremones they’ve attended over the centuries.  They have Chancellors.  They have Cardinals and Chapters too.  One of them creates a nightmarescape for the Doctor which references Western colonialism (there is a khaki-wearing hunter who goes on safari and tracks the Doctor like big game) and the First World War.  They have a ‘Panopticon’, named after the surveillance-heavy prison designed by Jeremy Bentham, one of the founders of Liberalism.  They have a kind of police force, run by the Castellan, whose uniforms make them vaguely reminiscent of Swiss Guards.  They also have a President.  Their Presidents have names like kings or popes (Pandak III, for instance) and are chosen by a tiny electorate (just the other Time Lords, presumably) from a tiny pool of thoroughly respectable establishment types.  They also have a shadowy government organisation, complete with secret agents, called the CIA (Celestial Intervention Agency – yuk yuk).

Police.  Media commentators, edcuated at the same Academy as the other Time Lords, taught by the people they end up talking about on TV.  Great White Hunters.  Popes.  Kings.  Presidents.  Colleges.  Chapters.  Cardinals.  Chancellors.  The Time Lords are a concentrated synthesis of various Western power structures.  Oxbridge.  The Vatican.  Prisons.  Liberalism.  Conservatism.  The House of Lords.  The CIA.  Washington.

So, of course there are ‘Shabogans’.  There must be ‘Proles’ so that the rulers have someone to rule, so that the dirty jobs get done, so that the Time Toilets get cleaned.…

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