THE FUTURE NEVER WAITS

Product Information

It was probably inevitable they’d finally do a tribute to British philosopher Aldous Huxley, who drifted off this mortal on an LSD trip, as they throw in some samples that give a real sense of a fellow traveller on the astral plane. This album took a little while to grow on me but by the time I saw it live I was in love with its humongous, over-egged pomposity!

Let’s just say this, okay: The Future Never Waits is Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition in Space, and it’s fucking marvelous.The Future Never Waits is likely my favorite Hawkwind studio work since the heights of Electric Teepee , The Business Trip and Space Bandits in the early 1990s; and I’d like to give it some time, but it’s wholly possible that I prefer it to any of those albums, largely because the whole second side of The Future Never Waits is a triumph of mesmeric spacerock that I would hold up against anything, and I mean anything, the band has ever done, live or in the studio. As any fan or follower would know, the band’s career has been a long journey of peaks and troughs, although in my opinion there have been far more peaks, but I accept that this is open to individual taste and opinions across their vast catalogue. The band have been described in many ways since their formation, as anything from hard-rock to progressive-rock to psychedelic-rock, but are regarded as one of the earliest bands to employ the genre, space-rock.

This section lists those Hawkwind albums, EPs and singles that have been compiled and released from previously unissued archive tapes, be it live, studio out-takes or demo material. The more traditional feel of Rama (The Prophecy) and USB1, with some lovely Brock soloing, could end up as live favourites.

Which, to certain extent, is just what they do, moving easily from ambient, space-noise-assisted soundscapes (the title track, which opens the album with over ten minutes of easy-on-the-ear Hawknoise) through more traditional, bare-bones proto punk ( The End, which, of course and unsurprisingly for such a singular band, comes near the start of the album), a spoken word sample on the death of Author Aldous Huxley to a sprawling, late night jazz odyssey ( They Are So Easily Distracted) in the space of the first four tracks.