Incubus Lovechild - Live '25
Spacerock project still far from on the skids...!
It doesn’t take much to guess where the heart of this great one-man-band project is buried… Mark ‘Skid’ Edwards has its location emblazoned on his chest for the cover image… Hawkwind yesterday, today and tomorrow… Hawkwind forever.
Captured at the 2025 Sonic Rock Solstice, this live album is not just a great companion to Skid’s terrific Deadworld LP from a couple of years back, but a further broadening of his vivid sci-fi imagination. There are live versions of Deadworld tracks certainly: ‘Starchild’, ‘Graveyard on Mars’, ‘The Aliens Within’, and songs from the first Incubus Lovechild album, Time Terrorist, but this is much more. So it’s restless, like an entry in the Hawkwind canon would be, wanting to do more, expand things, try ideas, set an atmosphere, make something creative and distinct.
It opens with ‘Alien Lifeform’, establishing the mood, setting the tone, swoops and washes of synths, a manifesto for the concept that Skid wraps around his records, with electronically treated vocals and world-building lyrics, before the set dives off at a tangent “for the bikers out here… ‘Speedfreak’,” and off we go, pounding down the lonely highway, before we get all science-fictioned-up again at the ‘Graveyard on Mars’ which we’re told is even more lonely, in fact. It’s a purposeful rumination of a track, suggestive of that pulp SF view of the ancient desolation of the red planet.
‘The Keeper’ is a mid-set breather, spoken word and sound effects, leading into the doom-laden opening of ‘Starchild’ and the achingly forlorn lyrics of lying in stasis across the long centuries, waiting for a rebirth that may never materialise in all eternity.
After ‘Starchild’, Oz Hardwick appears, evocatively intoning his poetry across Skid’s extraterrestrial soundscapes, his spoken word introduction to ‘Dawn of Time’ - the start of everything, the first sunrise, first star rise, where infinite possibilities are only dreaming; only dreaming; only dreaming, while the music adopts an Alan Davey-style drifting sci-fi instrumental spaciousness that builds to a gorgeously expansive sonic exploration which perfectly underpins Oz’s beautifully enunciated words… only dreaming; only dreaming…
I love words; I wish I could capture them and convey them in a modicum of the way Oz Hardwick makes seem so effortless. Bob Calvert would have been an admirer. He stays on stage for Deadworld’s title track, a 15.42 opus with a richness of vision that draws the listener inwards, locks the attention, rapt and focused. And, of course, it works through the words, but it also works for the way the music locks in tandem, extemporizes and surrounds the poetry. It all makes sense together. You’ll only find the full version here.
Incubus Lovechild finishes Live ‘25 with his single ‘The Aliens Within’, full-on spacerock that once again wears that Hawkwind love so proudly. Skid is someone who is getting things done… creating his music, playing it live, setting up a label that puts out great records by others in the genre as well being a conduit for his own terrific stuff, and generally being a great advocate for this thing that we call spacerock. Full admiration.
Must download a copy ASAP.