Pink Fairies – Covered in Pink (Cleopatra) – I shall quote directly from the press release for the single off this new album;
“Lemmy, the indefatigable leader of Motörhead, once warned that if his band moved in next door to you, your lawn would die. So it’s a good job that the band’s roots lay in the brick-and-concrete underworld of London’s Ladbroke Grove, a part of the same hard rock multiverse that also gave us Lemmy’s old bandmates in Hawkwind, his good friends in the Pink Fairies, and so many more. There were very few lawns to kill for miles around. Lemmy left us a decade ago – on December 28, 2015, to be precise. So it’s only fitting that, just ten days shy of the actual anniversary, the Fairies themselves deliver the ultimate tribute to our fallen hero, a gut-tearing reworking of Motörhead’s own original statement of intent; Motorhead!
Motorhead was written in Los Angeles during Hawkwind’s 1974 US tour, after Lemmy borrowed an Ovation guitar from the Electric Light Orchestra, and took it out on the balcony of the Hyatt Hotel at 7.30am. It became Lemmy’s final recording with Hawkwind before his firing in 1975 – of course he took the title for his own band, and swiftly rerecorded the song as well….”
Almost everyone involved in this new recording has fistfuls of Lemmy memories, including two special guests, the late Hawkwind saxophonist Nik Turner, who played alongside him for three epoch-making years; sci-fi author and poet Michael Moorcock, who regularly performed and recorded with the Hawks throughout that same period, and now brings his unmistakable vocal roar to the Fairies. Of the Fairies themselves, Paul Rudolph – having jammed multiple times with him in the legendary Pinkwind hybrid – actually replaced Lemmy in Hawkwind after a drug bust saw him peremptorily sacked from that band. And, a few years (and several more bass players) later, Alan Davey stepped into that same role, suddenly charged with playing the same tumultuous bass lines that his Hawkwind-loving younger self had grown up playing along with. Indeed, it was Lemmy’s bass solo on Hawkwind’s Time We Left This World Today that got Alan into playing bass in the first place. “It’s got lots of note bending, growling bass chords and a bass/guitar solo element about it. I had no interest in [playing] music till I heard that.”
Alan’s friendship with Lemmy grew from there; the pair would hang together, jam together… on one occasion, they almost recorded together, and would have if Lemmy hadn’t relocated to the United States on the eve of their studio date. It was Alan who brought Motorhead into the Pink Fairies’ most recent recording sessions, a tribute not only to his old friend, but also to the symbiotic relationship between the two groups. Original Motörhead guitarist Larry Wallis, had replaced Paul Rudolph in the Fairies in 1973; fellow co-founder drummer Lucas Fox was a Fairy across their last two albums. And Alan himself has been leading his own Motörhead tribute band, Ace of Spades, since the end of the last century, with Lemmy’s full support, of course.
“I ran into Lemmy at the Hawkestra gig,” Alan recalls. “He turned up at the rehearsal and immediately said to me, ‘What’s this Ace of Spades band ya doing, Al, and why ya doing it?’
“I replied, ‘Cause I love the songs and I love playing them.’
‘That’s good enough for me,’ said Lemmy. He gave me a hug and his blessing to carry on with it and use the name Ace of Spades.”
It’s odds-on that Lemmy would heartily approve of the Fairies’ take on the anthem, as well. A guttural roar that comes screaming out of the Fairies’ latest album, the all-covers Covered In Pink, it’s the ultimate collision between Motörhead’s unrelenting sonic attack, and the Fairies’ role in the birth of space rock, with Alan’s predatory bass, Paul’s wildfire guitar and One-Legged Pete’s avalanche drums, Turner’s untrammeled honking and Moorcock’s vocals… in fact, there’s no need to try and describe what happens next. Just listen and feel your mind melt….”
And Okay, I admit it, I got about thirty seconds into the opening track on the album before giving in and jumping to a cranked up to the max playing of track five and to find what is an excellent Michael Moorcock voiced version of Motorhead that feels closer to the original Hawkwind cut that Motörhead’s own later more aggressively striped down versions of the beautiful piece of music. And yes it it is a beautiful song, all version of it, be it Hawkwind or Motörhead, and yes, this is an excellent version, a version that has enough original colour to make it a more than worthy addition to the large pile of versions of Motorhead that already exist – I love them all; the messed Cockney Rejects version, the fizzing Primal Scream take on it, that Gorilla Biscuits thrash through it, all of them, the whole fourth day five day marathon of every one them.
You know our history here, Organ was originally launched at a Hawkwind gig, we’ve sold hundreds (thousands) of copies of Organ at Hawkwind (and Motörhead) gigs over the years, personally I reckon to have seen Motörhead well over a hundred times (mostly the classic Fast Eddie version) as well as taken in more than a few Pink Fairies gigs, mostly later 80s versions of the Fairies and their associates, that legendary Town and Country Club gig and such, I tell you all this so you know where we’re coming from…
Okay, excellent version of Motorhead aside, and it really is a good one, worth the admission price for Michael Moorcock alone (he does sound a little positively wired on it), let’s properly explore this album (that I must admit I thought had come out back in early 2024?).
The last Pink Fairies album, Screwed Up was more that worthy of the band’s name. This version of the Pinks, like last time around, seems to mostly be original Fairy Paul Ruldolph and one time Hawkwind bass player Alan Davey (no sign of Lucas Fox this time around). The late Nik Turner is on here, so who knows when some of this was made? It is mostly covers; “some of the classic rock’s biggest monuments from American Woman to Mississippi Queen to Baby’s On Fire and Communication Breakdown plus a brand new version of their proto-punk hit Do It…” And of course Pink Fairies and Larry Wallis and the first version of Motörhead were a big part of West London proto-punk history, and by the way Motörhead’s next door neighbours in Kensal Green did have a back lawn back there when Motörhead and The Fairies were hanging out with The Damned and such as the London version of punk started to emerge as a thing. Shut up and review the album I hear you yell…
We do seem to have a ridiculous outbreak of covers albums landing at the moment – that Xiu-Xui one that’s out around about now, that just announced Dandy Warhols double album of covers (that you might have maybe expected a Hawkwind cover on, they have talked to us more than once about their love of the Hawks, alas no Dandy Warhols take on a Hawkwing classic), there’s that Damned covers album that’s out any moment and as good as pretty much all these covers that this version of Pink Fairies have recorded here for this album, I’m not sure about this outbreak of cover albums or indeed what the point of covering some of the things on this Pink Fairies album actually is? I mean they are more than decent versions, that is a really (really) good, if slightly less paranoid, slightly folky (in a space rock kind of way) version of Right To Decide (originally from Hawkwind’s 1992’s Electric Teepee album), that is worth recording, but do we really need most of these covers? Here’s the track listing…
Garden Of My Mind (originally by The Mickey Finn)
Rosalyn (originally by The Pretty Things)
Cracked Actor (originally by David Bowie)
Baby’s On Fire (originally by Brian Eno)
Motorhead (originally by Hawkwind/Motörhead) — featuring Nik Turner and Michael Moorcock
Communication Breakdown (originally by Led Zeppelin)
American Woman (originally by The Guess Who)
Right To Decide (originally by Hawkwind)
Milk And Alcohol (originally by Dr. Feelgood)
The Loco-Motion (originally by Little Eva/Grand Funk Railroad)
Mississippi Queen (originally by Mountain)
Do It — a brand-new version of the Pink Fairies’ own 1971 hit
Dum Dum Bala Bala Bow Row… Yeah!! — an original tune
Was Do It a hit as they claim on that list? It never made the charts, claiming is as a hit might just be stretching things a little? Milk and Alcohol makes more sense than most, the Feelgoods and the Fairies seemed to share a lot of common ground back there, once again it is a great full-bodied version while that version of Mountain’s Mississippi Queen is very much a low slung Pinkwind take on things and with this mostly being Alan Davey and Paul Rudolph, this is probably more a Pinkwind record than a Pink Fairies album.
Yeah, that new version of Do It is fun and well, Dum Dum Bala Bala Bow Row… Yeah!! is little more that a one minute bit of throwaway a filler at the end when we were kind of hoping for an actual new Pink Fairies song.
Back to the start of this new bag of sweeties then. Great version of Garden Of My Mind and the same can (almost) be said of the Pretty Things cover, not sure about the version of Bowie’s Cracked Actor (originally from ’73’s Aladdin Sane), it seems a little sledgehammer to crack that cracked actor’s walnut, it really isn’t that subtle. Meanwhile surely the only person who could ever do Roxy or Eno better than they did it themselves was the great Robert Calvert – the Fairies give Baby’s on Fire a decent enough shot here though. And then we’re back to that excellent version of Motorhead before an almost thuggish take on of Zeppelin’s Communication Breakdown that kind of sounds like it has Danny the Headhunter from Withnail and I on vocals (and no doubt wearing a hippy wig from Woolworths) and yeah, I know both Davey and Rudolph have been based in North America for a long time now and Rudolph was born in Canada so I guess their version of The Guess Who’s American Woman fits in? As someone just pointed out, The Guess Who were a Canadian band, I guess Paul and The Guess Who might have crossed paths.
I mean, this is a good album, these are mostly decent versions of mostly familiar old friends, and that version of Motorhead more than makes it all worthwhile, but really, bands just releasing cover version albums when surely they could be recording some new Pinkwind flavoured Pink Fairies songs? This will more than do for now though, yeah, this will do for now… (sw)
Cleopatra Records / Bandcamp / Vinyl / CD
Previously on these pages…
THE ORGAN 