Primarily recorded at The Roundhouse on February 13th, 1972 and released as a single later that year, “Silver Machine” is a heavy space rock song by the band Hawkwind. The lyrics were inspired by How To Construct A Time Machine by Alfred Jarry and invited listeners to join the band in their “silver machine,” presumably a time machine. The song was written alongside NASA’s exploration of space and was a response to the space-age consumerist dreams. Robert Calvert said “They’d put a man on the moon and were planning to put parking lots and hamburger stalls and everything up there. I thought that it was about time to come up with a song that actually sent this all up, which was ‘Silver Machine’. ‘Silver Machine’ was just to say, I’ve got a silver bicycle, and nobody got it. I didn’t think they would. I thought that what they would think we were singing about some sort of cosmic space travel machine. I did actually have a silver racing bike when I was a boy. I’ve got one now, in fact.”
Looking back on this history, one could draw parallels between Hawkwind’s disillusionment with space colonization and Gizzard’s own weariness about the topic, as heard on Infest the Rats’ Nest and PetroDragonic Apocalypse.