Broadcast in November 1981, this long rambling interview clocks in at 31:46…thanks once again to Dave Law who provided me with the tape from which I transcribed it.
HB: “Yeah, well I joined first…in 1978, I joined, and I’ve known Dave and Bob -that’s Robert Calvert who’s now left, of course, to do his own thing- I’ve known them since 1976. And they used to live down where I live in the West Country, and Dave phoned me up one day to ask me did I fancy joining him in a band called the Sonic Assassins. So I said ‘Yes, why not’, sounds like a lot of fun, I thought. Get out…this band was just put together to play open-air gigs in the summer and just do the odd show now and then. That’s how I got in on it really.”
I vaguely remember the name, though I couldn’t tell you anything about them. I presume you kept a fairly low profile, did you?
HB: “Well yes, it was meant to be one of these…the idea behind it, we were going to just appear in places and play and no-one was going to know who it was. But, er…”
Did it work?!
HB: “Yes and no, but people got to hear about it, for some reason. But still, there we go. It was good fun.”
Well, Bob and Dave, who you mentioned just now, Dave Brock of course who’s still with the band, and Bob Calvert you mentioned – actually he’s been with them a couple of times, hasn’t he…
HB: “Yes, he had the title of ‘Resident Poet’ for a while, Resident Poet and ‘Swizzle Stick Operator’ I think…”
What’s he doing now because it was quite interesting, some of the stuff he was doing earlier on, Captain Lockheed and things like that…
HB: “Yes it was, he’s a very clever bloke, he thinks very hard and deeply about things. He gets carried away, obviously, like we all do. But I last saw him just after we played at the Hammersmith Odeon in London. He came on and actually performed ‘Sonic Attack’ with us on stage. And I had a long long chat with him afterwards. He’s got his own LP out at the moment, I think, called ‘Hype’ with a book to go with it. And I think he might be out on the road right now, actually, I know he’s out on the road this month some time.”
I heard that that was coming out, I haven't seen it yet, though, so maybe it will be coming in soon. There have been quite a lot of personnel changes in Hawkwind over the years, that’s one of the things that they’re best known for!
HB: “Known for, yeah. Well it changes, you know, as it’s often said, ‘A change is as good as a rest’, I think. I think once you…when, you know… Folks have gone off to do their own thing, folks have gone off to put their own bands together and been quite successful at it, you know, the one notable one being Lemmy, of course. That’s a very successful thing going for him. But it sort of creates a new change, it creates new ideas, it brings in breaths of fresh air, that kind of thing, into the band structure, even though the journey of the main idea still seems to carry on in the same line, it just brings in… It’s like a train which gathers more and more carriages as it goes along, you know.”
Interesting for a band that has had that many changes, you’re still identifiable as Hawkwind. If you put the album on and hadn’t been told that it was Hawkwind, the chances are you would probably hear who it was. And that’s sort of 1981, you could have said that in 1971 – so that’s ten years of music along a similar path, let’s put it that way. Obviously the handling and the treatment changes with changing techniques and everything else. Why is that? If so many people have left and come back and gone and everything else, why has that direction stayed similar?
HB: “Well I think it’s the driving force, you see. What the band has been well known for, for finding a specific niche if you like, in the rock world, and it’s a branch of ideas and artistic intent that not many bands seem to follow around the world, and Hawkwind do it very, very well I think. They’re attempting to define music for inner space and outer space and it started off, lots of bands doing it in the psychedelic era, but obviously commercial trends change and lots of bands fell to the wayside, but Hawkwind kept, you know, stuck to its guns, and I think this is… It’s proving now that the band’s been right, because each album, if you listen to it, is, you know, the songs seem different, the attack’s different, but as a rule, as you say, the actual intent behind it is the same. The idea, it still carries on that one path, although it develops as the years go on. I think you couldn’t say this one is the same as any other LP, unless of course you go back and say ‘Well, you know, they’re doing Sonic Attack’, a song which we’ve brought up to date, or a number that we decided would be good fun to do again. Even now, with all the Cold War going on between Russia and the rest of it, sound is one aspect of attack and defence that we don’t know anything about as a nation.”
(1981 remake of ‘Sonic Attack’ is played)
HB: “…bring back Fu Manchu films, that’s what I say. That was his idea, wasn’t it, to take over the world by sound…”
Yes it was, wasn’t it…
HB: “…it’s quite a feasible thing and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of the governments of the day haven’t got quite a big thing going with that. But the thing is, we don’t know about it. And of course it’s a form of attack that you can’t really defend yourself against either, it’s a bit like a nuclear attack, you know, once it’s happened, that’s it.”
Do you think about things like that a lot?
HB: “I think about it every time your movement’s restricted, every time you get a parking ticket or every time you get told ‘you can’t stand there’ or every time you get told ‘you can’t wait here’, you can’t use that door or this door… You start thinking a bit more about just what it is you *can* do and what’s the reason for curbing people’s movements, what’s the reason behind it, and the only thing I can come up with is a political reason: you stop people moving about, you make it easier to manipulate them. I think more and more people are actually defying rules and regulations which has made it a very wary political situation over the whole world.”
Could it not be a lot simpler than that, though, could it not be a question of a lot of the things that you mentioned there as examples – your freedom to do those things would inhibit somebody else’s freedom to either be in the same place or do something at the same time. Parking tickets, for instance, quite often inhibit the right of somebody else to drive down the road because it’s blocked by traffic, parked all over it…
HB: “Yes, but it’s the aggression that goes behind it, isn’t it, it’s the…this is the one thing that stands out. We play aggressive music, it’s a sign of the times. Aggression’s always been there but it’s never been quite so poignant, it’s never been quite so much all over the place. Obviously for years you’ve had people saying ‘Oh well, there are rough areas in this place and rough areas in that place’, but it’s not like it has been now, or it certainly is more open, more out in the open, the tribes are forming. You see people walking down the street, and you can tell instantly what tribe they belong to by what they’re wearing, how they’re looking. You never see Mohican haircuts around England up until quite recently, you never used to see people openly…even in the flower power days, if people wore bells and kaftans and that, they used to get jeered at and shouted at. But now it’s all over the place, people are just dressing the way they want to dress, following the kind of lifestyle they want to follow, irrespective of what political regime is in power. And I think that’s where the clash is going to come, eventually.”
If you take that sort of individual freedom of action to its furthest extreme, you end up with complete anarchy, and you earlier on were describing your music as anarchic or the band as anarchic…
HB: “In a sense. Well of course I think we try and, not mirror, but we try and show just what feelings, what emotions are around. You take the song ‘Living On A Knife Edge’, for instance, off this album, it’s all about living on the edge in a town situation where you don’t quite know what’s going to happen next, you could have a bomb thrown through your door. You could get run over, you could get taken over by a police state at any minute. But unfortunately it’s a world we’re creating. This is what that song says, it’s a world we’re creating and we’ve got to hand this world on. So what state is it going to be in 20, 30 or 40 year’s time, if it’s like this now?
(‘Living On A Knife Edge’ is played)
Hawkwind, a track from the album ‘Sonic Attack’, that’s the new album from them, and the track was ‘Living On A Knife Edge’. Talking to Harvey Bainbridge from the band, bass guitarist and vocalist with the band, also synthesizers and keyboards; that’s quite an unusual combination, bass guitar and keyboards, isn’t it?
HB: “Well yes, it’s a bit difficult when you’ve only got two hands. No, it’s, er… What we found was, when we were rehearsing for this LP, we lost Martin the drummer, he went down with German Measles. So the three of us, me, Dave and Huw, had to start sort of putting stuff together on tape ourselves, we didn’t have a keyboard player sorted out, and we discussed the notion of getting another, of inviting another keyboard player in, and we thought ‘Well no, we don’t really need a keyboard player as such’, we need someone to operate synthesizers and put the odd little touch in here and there. But we don’t really need a full-blown keyboard player, let’s do it ourselves. With modern technology the way it is, you can actually set things up with footpedals, and all that kind of thing. And so we just decided to have a go at doing that, and this last tour proved that we can do it quite easily with no problem at all. So I think we’re going to stick as a four-piece band now, with just Dave and myself operating the synthesizers.”
That’s quite interesting, you mentioned the technology aspect of it, the fact that the instruments are available and in many ways as long as you’ve got either a musical knowledge or in some cases a technical knowledge of what you’re doing, they’re actually much easier to handle, aren’t they?
HB: “It’s a bit like driving a car, I mean once you’ve worked out what things do, then it’s quite easy to do it. And the joy of electronic instruments is they can create sounds that you’ve thought of but haven’t quite, up until now, been able to get, you know, with instruments. So I think it’s just a question of time, really, just spending your time messing about with one, getting to know how sound is made up through a synthesizer. Then it’s easy. Anyone can do it.”
How important then, are the synthesizer sounds like the old Mellotron when Hawkwind first started, and the sort of instruments that were around then – how important are they to the music that you play, because it’s always been very preoccupied with spaces, and space…
HB: “Well, obviously when you are trying to get an image across, then you try and use a sound that gives that image in a nutshell, as it were. What we try and do is we try and imagine what it would be like in space, outward space as well as inward space, by using like, for example, the Mellotron, with a wash chord sound, you know, that big build-up of chords swooping away somewhere, then you give this impression of vastness. You give this impression of an open area, and you can just build up sounds then, on top of that, to colour that open area, if you like. Although we use the technology, I think Mike summed it up, and that was Mike Moorcock summed it up, by saying that we were the only band he knew that used modern technology, but used it in a brash way, just threw it all in, here, there, but not just everywhere, you know, we’re quite tasteful I think, with the way we throw things in! Certainly it’s, you know, we joke a lot with synthesizers, we joke, we don’t try and pretend that we’re concert pianists with it at all, because we’re not. We use sounds to be as effective as we can. We play sounds in the most effective place, and that’s as far as it goes, really.”
A sort of contemporary mood music in some ways, I think.
HB: “If you like…”
The effect you get if you sit and listen, especially with headphones, with some of your stuff, if you actually sit and listen you can get taken along with the music quite easily…
HB: “Oh yes, well that’s the joy of putting things onto disc, because you can spend a lot of time, once you’ve actually put it onto disc, then the hard work is getting it to sound right when you listen to it through your hi-fi, or in your headphones. We try and make a record interesting for people to listen to on headphones and we try and do things with the picture that they’re conjuring up in their heads. And the comments that we’ve had on this one and the one before that is that it’s a very interesting picture that comes, because things are constantly changing and moving. The word ‘psychedelic’ has been used quite a lot recently in connection with the last two albums, or certainly with this one. It was a pleasure, mixing this one, it was an absolute pleasure - it was so entertaining, because not one track is the same. We tried to really sort of piece the whole thing together so that you get an idea of it moving through a certain sort of pathway, and I think it comes out OK. It comes out OK.”
Well you mentioned there that, with one track being very different from another - and we can tell that from the two tracks we’ve already heard, but… In that case, where does the new material actually come from? I mean, the writing credits are on the album but there’s obviously more to it than just the name after the song, isn’t there?
HB: “Yeah, there’s usually, I mean, it depends…Actually ending up with a song or a number can turn out either to be the most easy thing in the world, something that just happened – you say ‘I’ve got this idea’ and you play it, and that’s it – no more needs to be done to it… Or else you get the other way, where it’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears, where you start off with an idea and you have to really drag it along for weeks and weeks until you get, you know…if people say ‘Well, don’t throw it out the window, that’s worth keeping’, you know. So you persevere and persevere, and it brings lots of heartache. So you can never say it’s one thing or the other, it always happens in different ways every time. It’s just very pleasant to have the end thing, finished at the end, you know – it’s quite rewarding to have it in a sleeve and finished – not half…yeah. Towards the end you get a bit…it’s a bit like being on the road, towards the end of a hectic mixing session, you’re working constantly for 12 hours, 14 hours, over the same thing sometimes, and your brain gets a bit addled. And your ears go a bit funny, you start to wonder whether you’re hearing things right, so you’ve got to take a break and go back. Usually though, you come back and just do it the next day and it’s completely wrong anyway, so you’ve got to go and do it again. It’s very hard work, but it’s good at the end, it’s worth it.”
Talking of hard work there, you do spend still quite a lot of time touring, don’t you?
HB: “Well it seems that’s, er…I don’t know if you knew about it, but we’ve just been on the road, folks! It wasn’t advertised very well, but there we go. We spend…it seems the last 2 or 3 years we’ve spent, ooh, three months on the road, two to three months on the road. And this year’s UK tour was a bit shorter than the last one, and the one before that, I think.”
Yes, you were actually here about three weeks ago, weren’t you?
HB: “Yes, which was, I think, a very good gig, and I hope you all enjoyed the light show up there. That was the joy about taking this tour around, that we had a very nice light show with slides and films, put together by a fellow called Jon Perrin, who was involved with the old liquid light show from Hawkwind in the very early days, with Liquid Len and his Lensmen. A fellow called Jonathon Smeeton put that together with the help of Jon Perrin and we sort of teamed up with Jon Perrin again, and he was all for the idea of doing this, so we started to put this lightshow together again. But unfortunately we had to compromise a bit on what we really wanted to do with it. We wanted to project out into the hall as well as just on the screens, on the side of the stage, so that the whole audience is part of the light show. That was the original idea. But as usual, you know, people put up their prices left right and centre, so you can’t afford some of the things [you want] to do, as it were.”
Was the tour fairly well received, though?
HB: “The tour was exceptionally well received when you consider that there was only the odd advert in the local press every so often. But I think people came along and thoroughly enjoyed themselves, I think they saw a band that was revitalised, really, after last year’s tour which went on and on and on and dragged out and dragged out. And this one was, well not ‘short and sharp’, but it was sharp, and certainly not short.”
Well you’ve not been terribly well received by the media, have you?
HB: “Oh, no. Well I don’t think we are being well received, present company excepted, of course. But I don’t know what it is. I think it goes back a long way, and I think they’re just very frightened of what may happen if they sell us to their readers, viewers, listeners, too much – you know? I suppose I can say it really, we’ve been banned from Radio Forth across the way over there, they won’t have us on there, for something that happened a few years ago, which I can’t really remember was that bad. But obviously it upset someone.”
They must have good memories, then…
HB: “Yes, a bit like elephants, they never forget, do they. No matter what it is you do, you know, we’re the only band doing this type of light show at the moment, this type of stage show, and there’s not a word spoken about it on London radio, or on the national, or even in the national press, where you get things… I noticed there was a, in one of the national papers, they review rock shows quite, just about every week now, and they reviewed all manner of people. And we hit London with this light show, shocked a lot of people, sold out Hammersmith Odeon two nights running, and not one mention anywhere. And I think the review came out in Sounds last week, and the concerts happened two weeks ago. And we sort of arrived and left, you know: nobody knew we were there, apart from the people that came along to see the show, and thoroughly enjoyed it, I may hasten to add. Certainly if you go by what they say afterwards, and they hang around, an awful lot of people hang around afterwards, and they either say they hated it or they enjoy it – and they even wait to say they hated it, you know. But nicely, so they don’t sort of throw things at you very often. Apart from bananas, any of the banana crowd listening! (It’s an in joke…) So it seems a shame that they don’t want to know, nobody really wants to know and it’s a pity because they’re missing out.”
It hasn’t really put the band off, though, has it…
HB: “No, far from it, it means we should try harder, actually. It’s helped it half the time, because you decide ‘Oh well, sod it, we’re going to do what we want to do anyway, let’s just do it’, and we’ve got quite a network through the Hawkfan magazine, which is run by a fellow called Brian Tawn, down in Wisbech in Cambridgeshire. So word gets about if anything’s happening through there. We played at the Glastonbury festival, Glastonbury Fayre, with 30,000 people there, and that was there for us. We played at Stonehenge the night before, for six or seven thousand people there. We played…we play these shows literally off the cuff and people arrive, you know, people arrive…”
What would you say to the criticisms that you sometimes hear, that you’re a band that appeals most of all to ageing hippies?
HB: “Aha, well they ought to come along and see the show then really, shouldn’t they? I know a lot of ageing hippies who think it goes at 100mph and should slow down a bit. But no, this isn’t…well, I dunno, I suppose it does…I mean, if an ageing hippy wants to get spaced out and come and watch the show, then he’s going to be entertained, ‘cause he’s got a good selection of good music and a good light show to watch, so he would enjoy it. If a young fellow wants to come along and see what all this so-called high energy rock and roll music is, with an interesting light show and a bit of a mind journey to it, then he’s going to be amazed, I think, because it’s something that they haven’t experienced before, with the 14 and 15 year olds - they missed it all at the end of the 1960’s…”
Has the sort of re-emergence of heavy metal and also just sort of heavy rock (as opposed to heavy metal) in recent years, since about ’78 or ’79, actually helped you?
HB: “Well it hasn’t helped the British Steel Corporation, has it? I suppose it has, yes of course it has, because what’s happened is you get, heavy rock and roll gets more airplay now, on all radio shows. I mean, even six or seven years ago you wouldn’t have got many heavy rock bands being played in the afternoon on Radio 1.”
No, and you wouldn’t have got the singles in the charts, either…
HB: “Precisely, you know. So obviously it’s helped, and as I said earlier, there’s a whole new generation of people who haven’t, who weren’t around or were very, very young and didn’t know anything about rock music in the early 70’s when all this was really happening then. And of course it’s been commercialised very nicely over the last eight years, and now it’s sort of a force in its own way. It goes back to what I was saying about tribes again, it’s created its own kind of tribal set-up in the same way that punk music has, and soul music has, you know. And it’s taken…I suppose what, go back to the old heavy rock bands of the time like Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, really, go back to those days, you know - it was all the same then, and it’s just got more interesting now. What annoys me are the rock bands that don’t take it on any further, that are so overtly commercial that they’re just steaming in on, like, you know, mini Led Zeppelins or mini Deep Purples, you know – because they were doing all that way back in ’70, ’71, ‘68, ’69, and they stuck to their guns. But lots of other bands have just come on and literally taken over the image of them, you know, all pretending to be little Robert Plants or Jimmy Pages. And I find that rather sad. But nevertheless, what that’s done is help to establish it, you know, as being pop music in its own right…”
A curious thing I find, talking to sort of a lot of people from various bands and musical areas, is that quite often this subject of aggression and anarchy comes up. You can accept that the music is based along those lines, but I wonder how serious that is, or whether how much that goes into your everyday life – because the funny thing is, whether talking to you, or I was talking to Emerson Crocus [?] a little while ago, and Saxon as well, and Gillan, who is perhaps the biggest example of this, is that none of you strike me as aggressive people…and yet, all the talk of it…
HB: “You haven’t seen us angry yet, that’s the thing…you’ve probably got the nasty tempers, you see... When you sort of, well certainly on the road it’s much more so than when you’re at home, working. You live with emotions stretched to their extreme and I don’t know, I’ve seen people freak out and throw themselves to the ground because the telephone doesn’t work, you know, smash it…over and over again. The only reason is frustration, that’s all, it builds up and builds up. You get tired, you’ve got to travel a hundred and twenty miles in an hour, or something like that, you know. You’ve got some ridiculous journey to do, you’ve got to get there, you’ve got to do this that and the other, and suddenly things start going wrong. You can see it, it happens all the time, you can see people losing their tempers ever so fast, when normally, in the normal run of things you’d ignore it and just carry on. It starts to hang you up, and you start getting angry. So aggression does come out, just purely and simply by the speed at which you live, on something like that. And if you look at the speed at which we live now, all the way round the UK, even, the rest of the world too, it’s understandable that there’s a lot of aggression, because of just the extremes of the way people live. When you’re at home you don’t have to live at extremes, until someone breaks something or stands on your guitar, you know – then you lose your temper.”
“We’re quite easygoing folks overall, I think most musicians are, but they’re very temperamental. They have to be, otherwise they wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing, they have to cope with extremes all the time. And if you’re doing that, I think you manage to sort of get an inner balance going, because you can’t actually use all those extremes unless you are balanced anyway, to start with. Whether or not you remain balanced at the end of it is another thing!”
It sounds sort of like controlled schizophrenia to me…
HB: “Yes, come to Dr.Harvey! I mean, yes, I suppose it is controlled schizophrenia, that’s a very good term, yeah. It’s a very schizophrenic lifestyle, that’s for sure, in terms of having to be there one minute and not there the next, you know, that’s very strange.”
Well, we’ve heard ‘Coded Languages’ and ‘Living On A Knife Edge’ from the new album, can we just finish with one more, Harvey, for you to choose to take us out?
HB: “OK, I’ll choose Huwie’s song ‘Rocky Paths’. I think it’s a nice short, sharp song, it was written by Huw and his wife – and originally we thought this might have made a good commercial single, you know. But they don‘t play anything anyway so we decided not to bother in the end…but anyway, this is it. I think it’s quite an interesting song…”
OK, Harvey Bainbridge, thank you very much…
HB: “A pleasure!”
(‘Rocky Paths’ is played)
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