Space Ritual
1973 live album by Hawkwind
Space Ritual (officially known as The Space Ritual Alive in Liverpool and London) is a 1973 live double album recorded in 1972 by UK rock band Hawkwind. It is their fourth album since their debut, Hawkwind, in 1970. It reached number 9 in the UK Albums Chart and briefly dented the Billboard Hot 200, peaking at number 179.
Background and recording
The album was recorded during the tour to promote their Doremi Fasol Latido album, which comprises the bulk of this set. In addition there are new tracks ("Born To Go", "Upside Down" and "Orgone Accumulator") and the songs are interspersed by electronic and spoken pieces, making this one continuous performance. Their recent hit single "Silver Machine" was excluded from the set, and only "Master of the Universe" remains from their first two albums.
The Space Ritual show attempted to create a full audio-visual experience, representing themes developed by Barney Bubbles and Robert Calvert entwining the fantasy of starfarers in suspended animation travelling through time and space with the concept of the music of the spheres. The performance featured dancers Stacia, Miss Renee and Tony Carrera, stage set by Bubbles, lightshow by Liquid Len and poetry recitations by Calvert. On entering the venue, audience members were given a programme (reproduced on the 1996 remaster CD) featuring a short sci-fi story by Bubbles setting the band in a Starfarers scenario returning to Earth.
The original release featured edits and overdubs, the sleeve notes explaining that "We had to cut a piece out of Brainstorm and Time We Left because they were too long", but the 1985 Space Ritual Volume 2 album contains the full unedited versions.
The public source identifies “Space Ritual” as 1973 live album by Hawkwind. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Space, Ritual and live.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q733359. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1973, 1972, 1970 and 1996.
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This entry incorporates text from “Space Ritual” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.