Michael Moorcock & The Deep Fix — New Worlds Fair Album Trailer

The sci-fi legend's lost 1975 concept album, featuring half of Hawkwind, gets a long-overdue 50th Anniversary remaster

If you know Michael Moorcock only as the novelist behind Jerry Cornelius and Elric of Melniboné, you're missing one of the more improbable records in the Hawkwind orbit. New Worlds Fair, recorded in 1975 with a revolving cast of players drawn almost entirely from the Hawkwind mothership, was Moorcock's attempt to channel his dystopian fiction into a full-blown concept album. It was also, by most accounts, an album that United Artists had no idea how to sell. It arrived without promotion, vanished almost immediately, and spent the next five decades as a collector's item whispered about in the same breath as the rarest Hawkwind-adjacent artefacts.

The 50th Anniversary Edition on Think Like A Key Music (TLAK1227.2), remastered by Prof. Stoned, is the first time New Worlds Fair has received a release commensurate with what's actually on the tape. Watch the album trailer for a taste of what's been hiding in plain sight since 1975.

The Hawkwind All-Stars, Basically

The personnel reads like a Ladbroke Grove hall of fame. Simon House (violin, keyboards), Nik Turner (saxophone, flute), Dave Brock (guitar), Simon King (drums), Alan Powell (drums, percussion), and Snowy White (who would later join Thin Lizzy and Pink Floyd's touring band) all appear across the sessions. The Deep Fix was nominally Moorcock's own band, but the reality was more communal than that: these were musicians who orbited the same Portobello Road scene, sat in on each other's sessions as a matter of course, and treated genre boundaries as suggestions.

The result is a record that sounds nothing like a vanity project and everything like a lost Hawkwind side-quest: swirling, propulsive, occasionally menacing, shot through with the same space-rock energy but steered by Moorcock's literary sensibility into stranger, more narrative territory. There are dystopian vignettes, sardonic social commentary, and passages of genuine cosmic dread, all wrapped in arrangements that oscillate between grinding rock and eerie, atmospheric drift.

From Obscurity to Anniversary

The original 1975 pressing on United Artists was barely distributed. Moorcock, never one to lose sleep over the music industry's indifference, moved on. The album found its cult through second-hand bins and bootleg traders, its reputation growing in inverse proportion to its availability. For Hawkwind devotees and Moorcock completists, it became one of those records you had to hear but could never quite find.

The Prof. Stoned remaster brings new clarity to sessions that always deserved better than the muddy pressings that circulated for decades. New Worlds Fair is a document of a very specific moment in London's underground: the point where science fiction, space rock, and counterculture were still the same conversation.

Watch the album trailer here. New Worlds Fair: 50th Anniversary Edition is available now from Think Like A Key Music.