Thanks to Dave Law who provided me with the tape from which I transcribed this.
DB: “Yes, actually, it is. It’s one of my favourite venues.”
How many times have you actually played here, do you know?
DB: “I don’t know, I couldn’t tell you that at all.”
It must be near a dozen I should think…
The band have been together – what, some fourteen years…or certainly, Hawkwind have been around fourteen years. What are the sort of high spots you remember during that time?
DB: “Well there have been lots. In the rock’n’roll business it’s sort of like a graph, you know, where it goes up and then down, and along for a nice patch. Other than that, I couldn’t really tell you the high spots. There have been lots of high spots, you know. I mean, there’s been loads of low spots…”
Early on you had a very big hit with ‘Silver Machine’. Has that been a bit of a bugbear for you?
DB: “No, no, no…”
Do you still enjoy playing it?
DB: “Well yeah, sometimes, I mean, we do different things… The thing is, actually, music is playing - a lot of bands forget this, I think. With music you have to play. You find a lot of record companies treat you like toothpaste, which…they regard you as product. And I think a lot of bands actually *work*, you know what I mean, rather than *play*. I mean, we’re pretty sort of irregular in what we do anyway.”
What about the personalities in the group over the years? Early on you had the dancer, Stacia, in Lemmy’s time with the group. How did you get involved with her?
DB: “Well, she just turned up one day and said ‘Can I dance?’ and we said ‘Yeah, if you like,’ and she took all her clothes off!” (laughs) “And that was it. You see, in the 70’s people didn’t seem, weren’t too bothered about taking their clothes off like they do now, for some reason, you know! But, er, then she said ‘Can I come and dance again’ and we said yeah, and she did it, and she then sort of worked with us. And then she got really well known, actually, she appeared in quite a few films too, you know. She started wearing exotic costumes and things like that. She’s married, she lives in Germany now with two kids, she’s got two kids. She married a drummer, an English drummer...”
What was the story behind Lemmy leaving the group?
DB: “Um, well, he got busted, actually, in Canada, for amphetamine sulphate which at the time was they thought was cocaine. And we had a gig in Toronto and he got busted at the Customs. We had to leave him there, he was arrested, and we had to sort of carry on and do this gig. We had to send for a replacement bass player ‘cause it was a huge place that we were playing in, in our heyday in America!” (laughs) “And actually, he was let out: they discovered it…you know, we got him out on bail, but he had to report back the next day, and the next day we were flying back into the USA, we were playing Detroit, I think it was. And that was the story about that. Read all about it in our biography, we’ve got a biography actually out now, which we sell at gigs, and was written by Kris Tait. She interviewed all the ex-members, wonderful stories: it’s like reading a continuous saga of the Furry Freak Brothers and their comic book, with all these wonderful adventures…”
It must have been a long job for her!
DB: “She spent about two years actually getting it together, I mean, it’s quite a lot to do. And she had loads and loads of newspaper cuttings and loads of conflicting stories, because everybody she asked told conflicting stories; the same stories, but their version, sort of thing. So she just wrote down exactly what they said, with all these wonderful stories, it’s really funny. I think it’s a great book, actually.”
Is that only available in the concert hall, though?
DB: “Yeah it is. Well, hopefully…we’re going to try to get a publisher to actually take it on, but you know what publishers are like: they want sort of ninety per cent and they only give, like ten, which is yet another con.”
There has been a flood of rock books over the years…
DB: “Yeah, but this is different, this is nothing like the average rock book, I’ll tell you that now. Because I’ve read loads, and they’re a load of crap, half of them, because they’re written by journalists, you see, and journalists only ever like to write about themselves, rather than write about the true character - which is true, you know? I mean, it’s like, I’ll do an interview for a paper, and I’ll quite often read…the journalist has written totally what *he* thinks, and in fact the guy… When she actually got all this book together, she took it to a journalist to write it for her, ghost write it, and he actually changed the whole book – the whole concept was changed to the way he thought it should be, you know. And I mean, it’s like, Huwie would say one thing and he would say ‘Well, Huw Lloyd-Langton…’ and he’d go off at this great tangent, and Huw was ‘I didn’t say that!’ So she had to completely rewrite it again, you know.”
How about your connection with Ginger Baker, by far the most famous musician the band has worked with – how did you get involved with him?
DB: “Um, well actually it was Huwie’s wife Marion, who was working as a publicist for Ginger’s band, and they’d split up… Ginger was looking for a gig, you know, and our drummer was going through a very bad time - taking bad drugs, actually, was his downfall…and he couldn’t play his drums, so we actually asked Ginger if he’d, you know, be a session man. This was the Levitation album. And he come along and did it. I mean, he’s a wonderful drummer - fantastic things he used to do. I mean, I was…everybody was quite in awe, you know, because, like, he was a big star. We don’t consider ourselves stars, you see, in this band!” (laughs)
I think rock fans were very surprised to see him team up with Hawkwind…
DB: “Well, it… I mean, you know, his style’s completely different, because, I mean, he’s not…I don’t think he’s a real rock drummer - he’s very, very good, I mean he’s a world class drummer…”
Now over the years you’ve more or less kept to the same sound -you personally, on your guitar- you’ve been accused of perhaps playing things very riff-happy. How do you react to that sort of criticism?
DB: “Don’t care…I don’t care. It doesn’t bother me – I mean, you know…it means nothing.” (chuckles)
You’re still producing the goods, so it doesn’t mean a lot…
DB: “Well, yeah…I mean, it’s the same as…I find that, I mean, Lemmy used to get criticised for playing his bass like a guitar, which he does. But it’s his style. If you can actually have a style, man, you know, that is very important – to actually have your own style of playing. And a lot of people forget that: they might accuse you, you know, of being slap-happy and riff-happy and playing three chords – that you’ve got a style and you keep it, you know, and that’s something that people always want.”
It’s done you no harm.
DB: “Well yeah, that’s true, you know.”
You’ve teamed up with Lemmy again recently, to record ‘Night Of The Hawks’.
DB: “Yeah”
Quite a surprise, that, actually.
DB: “Why’s that?”
Well, I thought he’d severed all links with the group.
DB: “Oh no, you’re joking…no. We see Lemmy quite often. Every time we’re in London we bump into him, you know. And I asked him if he’d actually, you know, do some gigs, because he was going to do this tour. But what actually happened was, you know they sacked their lead guitarist, and he was going to do this tour and went off to America, and come back again in January - ‘I give up’, he says, and well, you know… His manager used to be our old manager, and they got loads of guitarists for him to try out because he wants to get a Motorhead fan for a guitarist, you know. They’ve got two now, I think, playing with the band. And he simply couldn’t do it because he had to audition all these guitarists. But he’s going to do some gigs in London anyway, you know.”
So we could see him teaming up with you yet.
DB: “Yeah, I mean, we’ll probably do some more recording together, because, I mean, we haven’t played for a long time, and we just done it, just like that, really quick. I mean, very together, done the vocals together. I mean, that E.P., three tracks on that E.P. were recorded at home - my house, he came and stayed with us. We actually got an eight-track tape recorder and just sort of got a drum loop, you know, just got a bit of tape. Cut that together, and I put the guitar on, we put the bass down, put the keyboards, vocals… And we took it off to a 24-track and Huwie put his lead guitar down, and Huwie put his cymbal crashes on…” (laughs) “…and then we mixed it, you know, and that was that.”
Dave Brock of Hawkwind, and here’s one of the tracks he just mentioned, the current single ‘Night Of The Hawks’…
[‘Night Of The Hawks’ is played]
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