From the Edge of Space and Sanity

By the time Hawkwind entered Rockfield Studios in January 1978 to begin work on what would become PXR 5, they were a band both reborn and battle-scarred. Line-ups had shifted, friendships tested, and new galaxies of sound explored. Yet through the chaos, the spirit of adventure remained. “Three of our crew who were with us then did not survive,” Dave Brock later reflected. “Their life supports could not take the strain and so they died.”

That mixture of dark humour and grim truth defined PXR 5 - a record born from exhaustion, reinvention, and sheer creative force. The previous years had been turbulent even by Hawkwind’s standards. Lemmy’s infamous exit in 1975, Robert Calvert’s return, and the constant reshuffling of personnel had turned the group into a revolving constellation of musicians orbiting Brock’s singular vision. But the band’s restless energy still burned.

After the success of Quark, Strangeness & Charm, recorded the previous year, Calvert and Brock regrouped with bassist Adrian Shaw, drummer Simon King, and violinist Simon House to push their sonic experiments further. Calvert, whose theatrical intensity had begun to blur the line between performance and psychodrama, channelled his manic energy into songs that fused science fiction, satire, and social commentary. “Robot” and “High Rise” turned everyday drudgery and urban isolation into otherworldly allegories, while “Death Trap” caught the whiplash energy of the punk movement and fed it straight into Hawkwind’s space-age engine room.

But behind the studio doors, tension simmered. Calvert’s fragile mental health, already tested on tour, unravelled further during a string of European dates in 1977. He recovered enough to join Brock for an offshoot project with members of the Devon band Ark, performing as The Sonic Assassins at Barnstaple’s Queen Elizabeth Hall that December. The experience was chaotic, inspired, and exactly what Hawkwind needed. Their improvised track “Over the Top” captured Calvert at his most brilliant - raw, unfiltered, and reaching for transcendence through noise.

When the dust settled, the Sonic Assassins energy fed directly into PXR 5. The album became a patchwork of studio recordings and live performances, reworked and overdubbed at Rockfield with care and precision. The resulting collection - “Infinity,” “Uncle Sam’s on Mars,” “Jack of Shadows,” and the prophetic title track - bridged the gap between the dystopian wit of Quark and the heavier, stripped-down force of what was to come.

By the time the record finally surfaced in June 1979, Hawkwind had splintered again. Calvert was gone, Simon House had joined David Bowie, and the band briefly re-emerged as the Hawklords. PXR 5 thus became both an ending and a new beginning: the last transmission of one crew, the first pulse of another.

Even its release carried drama. The first 5,000 copies featured a notorious back sleeve depicting a dangerously wired plug and the warning “This wiring can seriously damage your health.” Tabloid outrage swiftly followed, forcing Charisma Records to cover or remove the image entirely. It was a fitting coda for a band that had always thrived on friction - between art and accident, chaos and control, the cosmic and the human.

Revisited now in this Remastered Vinyl Edition, PXR 5 feels like a time capsule from a volatile, visionary moment in British rock history. It’s the sound of Hawkwind refusing to fade, hurtling through turbulence toward reinvention - proof that even when the systems faltered, the mission never ended.

Extract taken from liner notes written by Mark Powell for the PXR 5 Remastered & Expanded CD Edition