Hawkwind – Space Ritual

If anyone has a copy of just the 1st LP (Side 1/4), Please DM me. Mine is cracked and I'm looking to replace it.

My copy seems to have reacted with the tray plastic.
A thorough cleaning with a very light abrasive polish cleared it just fine, but it was shocking to find it in such a state after not touching for a while.

My french (1973) copy :
Label says side 1 —> is actually side 1
Label says side 4 —> is side 2
Label says side 3 —> is side 3
Label says side 2 —> is side 4

I can't believe that I have had an UK CD pressing in my inventory for over 4 years. What is wrong with you folk?!! Seriously, no one in over 4yrs saw this awesome album worth $15.55? Time and time again I've seen this in my inventory when pulling other orders and kept on thinking it was gonna leave soon. Well, tough on all of ya's , it's now disc 1 & 2 in my van's CD player ready for those long out of state early AM record show drives. This album is incredible...your loss.

Do you notice the labels in the Release Page pictures are printed with the incorrect tracks for each side,except Side 1?. If those are the tracks for those sides this would be exactly like the Auto-Coupled versions.

my copy is not auto coupled, it respect the previous running orde, looks like some dudes enjoyed mess it up!!

Bought a new, unplayed copy of this version in 2024. Disc one has something like disc rot on it, there are flakes in the tray and the whole cd appears to be deteriorating near the center. Sounds great aside from the regular skipping.... Disc two looks good.

Both the packaging and the vinyl itself are of good quality. However, please keep in mind that Hawkwind were never a band that cared much about elaborate recording techniques, making great use of stereophonic sound and so on – for a great deal of time this album is a massive wall of sound and while, for example, the bass guitar sounds really nice, Lemmy was never a virtuoso and he keeps on repeating the same melodic patterns all the time. Nevertheless, it's still a fun album to listen to and a nice thing to have on your shelf if you're into the space/stoner rock's history. It's a shame though that it does not include the original foldout insert.

A small whinge about the two-CD version of the 50th Anniversary release. In the track “Ten Seconds of Forever”, I notice that the lines: “In the third second of forever / I thought of rain against a window, I thought of the wind...” is very indistinct. I have had several versions of Space Ritual* and, to a greater or lesser degree, the second line here has always been blurred. Stephen W. Tayler’s remastering of this album is excellent but I had hoped that he could have patched up this error as he had access to both the Liverpool and Sunderland concerts (strangely, the track does not appear in recordings of the Brixton concert).

*I have had two separate versions of Space Ritual on CD before this one and also had the first vinyl release. I cannot if the flaw was on the vinyl, but assume it was.

My copy is Auto-Coupled w/ the Side designations mislabeled. I felt like

evgen_rainbow Aug 28, 2023
I broke my brain...