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The Road To Utopia, last year’s Mike Batt collaboration, wasn’t universally acclaimed among Hawkwind fans, despite some inventive treatments of old favourites.

This set of new songs should fare better. As the band crank up the trusty sonic swirl backdrop that accompanies every other Hawkwind song like a soothing breeze, the chords climb towards the sun on the wah-wah soaked 65 Million Years Ago, while Flesh Fondue’s cannibal-themed dystopia is engagingly daft and satisfyingly full-throttled in tempo.

The sozzled, jazzy sax skronk that accompanies the krauty title track is oddly entrancing, and The Road To… even wanders into graceful ambient instrumental territory, showing this is by no means a case of Brock and co serving up space rock comfort food to the faithful.

But at the same time, the final, nine-minute The Fantasy Of Faldum would be welcomed onto any Hawkwind album of the last 40 years. As the band’s half-century approaches, the search for space continues apace.

Johnny is a regular contributor to Prog and Classic Rock magazines, both online and in print. Johnny is a highly experienced and versatile music writer whose tastes range from prog and hard rock to R’n’B, funk, folk and blues. He has written about music professionally for 30 years, surviving the Britpop wars at the NME in the 90s (under the hard-to-shake teenage nickname Johnny Cigarettes) before branching out to newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent and magazines such as Uncut, Record Collector and, of course, Prog and Classic Rock.