"We were totally conceived around that hippy ideal of free expression," says Nik Turner, one of the original members. "It wasn't about being technically superior as musicians, or wanting to be the next Beatles and make loads of money. It
Well, they certainly did that. Formed around the hazy aspirations of a 28-year-old busker from Middlesex called Dave Brock, the earliest line-up of what eventually became Hawkwind comprised of Brock on 12-string steel guitar, harmonica and vocals, Nik Turner, an old stoner pal of Brock's from his days in Holland, where they had both lived briefly, on saxophone, flute and vocals, and a bunch of "friends and left-overs" from his previous band, Doctor Brock's Famous Cure:
Mick Slattery on lead guitar, John Harrison on bass guitar, Terry OIlis on drums, and Dik Mik on 'audio generator' - a home-made device which issued the sonic swoops and strangled seagull cries which would become a trademark of the early Hawkwind sound.
";Up until then, everything I'd done had been mainly acoustic," says Brock now, the only original member to have survived every incarnation of Hawkwind, up to the present day. "But this whole new scene was exploding then - bands like Hendrix, Cream, the Floyd and Arthur Brown. And I started to think about trying to do something electric- I was starting to take LSD and I wanted the music to somehow reflect what that was like, too."
Two years after the Beatles had made public the arrival of LSD into pop music with the 'Sergeant Pepper' album, this was hardly a radical idea. Dylan may have begun the ball rolling with his 'surreal' lyrics to 'Blonde On Blonde', but soon there was Hendrix, Haight Ashbury, Flower Power, Easy Rider, the West Coast Sound, the Filmore East, the Grateful Dead...a great wave of lysergically-charged optimism that reached its giddy peak in 1969, the year Brock and the others first began playing together.
But if 1969 had begun as the year of Woodstock, it ended as the year of Altamont - the ill-fated end-of-decade festival in California organised by the Rolling Stones, which went disastrously wrong when a black youth was stabbed to death by Hell's Angels in front of the stage - and the age of optimism was now drawing rapidly to a close.
Arriving as they did halfway between the two events, history has tended to look back on Hawkwind as the runt of the psychedelic litter. But, in truth, Hawkwind represented much more than just an acid flashback to the Sixties. The drugs may have remained the same but the times they had-a-changed and Hawkwind was, in retrospect, a quintessentially Seventies proposition. They cared and they didn't care.
At first they couldn't think of a name for what they did so they called themselves Group X. Then Nik Turner laughingly suggested Hawkwind Zoo, based on an in-joke about flatulence, and that made them laugh so they used that instead. Then, when their first record company, United Artists, suggested shortening it merely to Hawkwind, that was OK, too.
As Turner observes: "We didn't care what they called us. It just didn't matter. Even though we'd done an album, none of us really considered what we were doing as a career. Dave was still out busking most days and I was driving a van. There was no 'image', that I could see. We were just doing what we were doing."
Produced by Pretty Things guitarist Dick Taylor and recorded as-live in the studio with the band essentially running through their live set, as you can hear from tracks like 'Hurry On Sundown' (the 1969 demo which is included here) and 'Paranoia (Part 2)', this earliest incarnation found Hawkwind at its simplest and most playful. As Brock explains: "We listed them on the sleeve all as separate songs, but really, it was just one long piece, like we did on stage."
Unlike original acid showmen like Hendrix, or even non-virtuosos like Pink Floyd, Hawkwind neither relied on 'songs' nor their ability to master their instruments to create an ambience. Intoxicating and free-form, the "vibe" was everything.
"I don't think any of us were particularly good musicians, but that wasn't really the point," says Turner, who had first been encouraged to play by "a bunch of Eric Dolphy freaks" he had met in Berlin in 1967. Spontaneity was the key. "We had a few basic chords and simple ideas we'd written that we could always return to," says Brock, "but in between that we would Just let things take off..."
Spontaneity and LSD. Acid, says Turner, "was the great facilitator." It wasn't a drug, it was "a sacrament." "I wouldn't say we were tripping all the time," smiles Brock, "but it's hard to remember times, especially in those early days, when we weren't. Even in the studio. Pushing buttons just to see what would happen..."
The result was a spate of albums that would define forever a genre of rock music that was not just psychedelic in nature, but incontrovertibly underground. With albums like 'In Search Of Space' (1971) and 'Doremi Fasol Latido' (1972), Hawkwind's music charted the eclipse of psychedelia's Sixties ideals in favour of ever deeper and more dark explorations of the prevailing Seventies nightmare. If sometimes it sounded like they weren't making sense, then neither did the bombing of Vietnam nor the scandal of Watergate, and against a surface backdrop in which little was ever apparently what it seemed, tracks like 'Master Of The Universe' and 'Brainstorm' seemed perfectly apt expositions of the times. Haphazardly recorded; largely improvised. As Brock says, "determined to break every rule in the book."
The addition of key new members, both musical and otherwise, had seen to that, and by 1973 and their soon-to-be legendary 'Space Ritual' tour, a Hawkwind performance had become a full-on multimedia experience. Crucial to this development had been the arrival of new and ever-more outrageous characters into the band, and by the time Hawkwind enjoyed their one and only major hit single, 'Silver Machine' (No.2 in the UK charts in the summer of '72), the names Robert Calvert, Lemmy, Stacia, Liquid Len, Barney Bubbles and Michael Moorcock had all become part of Hawkwind folklore. If their next single, 'Urban Guerrilla', released in July 73, hadn't been banned by the BBC -recent IRA bombings of London making them flinch from lines like: 'I'm an UrbanGuerrilla / I make bombs in the cellar'- those names might have become even more famous. But then, as Turner says:
"Being famous was never what Hawkwind was about. We didn't even have what you'd call a proper frontman until Bob Calvert came along. And that was only by accident..."
A South African-born poet who suffered all his life from episodes of manic depression - and who Turner had met back in his days "selling joss sticks on Margate beach" - Robert Calvert was the troubled genius who helped conceptualise Hawkwind; his first contributions being to pen both the self-mythologising 'Hawkwind Log' included with 'In Search Of Space', and the lyrics to 'Silver Machine'.
For the extrovert Calvert, "the vibe" was not nearly enough and, with the invention of several onstage characters, he helped turn Hawkwind's rambling musical "happenings" into fully-fledged theatrical performances, as evinced on the sprawling, solid stone Calvert-classic, 'Orgone Accumulator' from the live 'Space Ritual' album.
Of course, most of what Calvert and Hawkwind were up to in those days had to be seen to be believed. What he wanted, he told Melody Maker, was for Hawkwind to be "a kind of meeting between intellectual thought and Marvel Comics."
"There would be Bob Calvert standing on one side of the stage dressed in World War I aviator goggles, riding boots and a flying helmet, and Nik Turner on the other side dressed as a frog," recalls Simon House, who joined the band in time for their 'Hall Of The Mountain Grill' album in 1974. "Visually, we looked like no-one else in the world."
They were aided in this task by former Frendz designer Barney Bubbles and onstage lighting man Liquid Len (real name: Jonathan Smeeton), both of whom had "just gravitated towards the band" in the days when they used to perform for free on the Portobello Road, in London's Ladbroke Grove, where most of the band and their ever-growing entourage of friends lived. Working together, the latter's "intergalactic" stage shows were designed with the former's hydroponically-charged album-sleeves in mind; combining sci-fi images with Eastern religious symbols, Weimar eagles, zodiac signs and anything else they could cram onto their acid-enflamed can-vas, all underpinned onstage by relentless strobes, eerie back-projections and, not least, the demi-clad, capriciously exotic figure of the wildly dancing Miss Stacia.
"Stacia just turned up at a gig in Exeter in 1971," Dave Brock recalls. "She said, 'Can I get up and dance when you play?' and we all said yes, of course. Then when she got up and started taking all her clothes off, we just sort of accepted it. It was the times," he smiles, "everybody used to take their clothes off in those days..."
"We always encouraged anybody who was there that had something they wanted to do to get up and do it," says Turner. "Whether that was dancing in the case of Stacia - who was a beautiful dancer and used to get into these outrageous costumes and make-up and really put a lot into her performances - or whether it was just getting up and reading a bit of poetry, it was all part of the trip, to me."
Another early beneficiary of this revolving cast of characters was the noted science-fiction and fantasy author, Michael Moorcock; another habitue of the early Seventies Ladbroke Grove scene who began attending Hawkwind's shows, reading his poetry while the band improvised around him.
Brock, a fan of Moorcock's novels, encouraged the author to contribute lyrics like the ones he provided for 'Sonic Attack'. Creator of such Hawkwind-friendly characters as Dorian Hawkmoon, EIric of Melnibone, Jerry Cornelius and many others, Moorcock's involvement with the band would be less intense but more lasting than almost anybody else's bar Brock himself.
One famous former face whose impact on the Hawkwind story far outweighed his relatively short tenure in the band was bassist and vocalist Ian 'Lemmy' Kilmister. Better known these days as the granite-faced leader of Motorhead, the band he named after the track he contributed to 1975's 'Warrior On The Edge Of Time' sessions.
Lemmy brought a tension to the band, not just with his ferociously rumbling bass, which he played "like a guitar", but with his personality and lifestyle. With his swastika neckchain, black leather jacket and 24-hour sunglasses, Lemmy was the speed freak biker-from-hell who had wandered into the hippy tent by mistake. Peace and love were never high on his list of priorities. Nor were mundane tasks like rehearsals or going to sleep at night.
"He was, and still remains, one of the all-time great rock'n'roll characters," Brock chuckles. "But he was a handful, to say the least."
The last straw came on tour in America in the summer of 75, when the errant bassist was busted on the Canadian border for possession of cocaine. Fortunately for Lemmy, the 'coke' was actually amphetamine sulphate, not yet illegal in Canada, and he escaped with just a fine. Too late, though, to save his job in Hawkwind, who had already flown in former Pink Fairies bassist, Paul Rudolph, to replace him.
As Lemmy says now, "I can't really complain because if I hadn't been fired from Hawkwind, I would never have got Motorhead together. But it did hurt, yeah..."
But people came and went in Hawkwind at such a rate that one rarely noticed their passing, and although Lemmy's abrupt departure caused more ripples than most, the next two Hawkwind albums, 'Astounding Sounds Amazing Music' (1976) and 'Quark, Strangeness And Charm' (1977) were amongst the most focused and together-sounding of the band's career.
Tracks like 'Kerb Crawler', the frenetic single from 'Astounding Sounds...', found the band stripped of much of their former hippy wizardry, with Calvert's sneering vocals and the guitars to the fore. While 'Steppenwolf' became another memorable addition to Calvert's gallery of manic stage personalities, stalking the stage in top hat and frock-coat and brandishing a walking stick, a leash dangling from his neck.
'Quark...' was even more stripped down. Gone was both Nik Turner and his madcap sax as Calvert and Brock led the band through some of the most stark and, yes, sometimes raving mad music they would ever make together. As the title track - a rare Top 20 entry when issued as a single - and the equally compelling 'Hassan-i-Sahba' and 'Spirit Of The Age' confirm, Hawkwind would never sound this dark or frantic. Then, with the album hovering in the charts and a rare TV appearance on the Marc Bolan Show behind them, just as things were looking up, in true Hawkwind style, the band began to cave-in. Calvert's mental health finally deteriorated so badly the band actually fled him, while on tour in France. Then, at the start of 1978, Simon House accepted an invitation to join David Bowie's band for a year-long world tour.
The band soldiered on through an already booked American tour but by the last show in San Francisco, Dave Brock was so disenchanted he actually sold his guitar. "That was it, as far as I was concerned," he says now with a faint smile. "It was all over."
Well, not quite. Within weeks of returning to England, Brock had formed the Hawklords. "Like Hawkwind but different," the Hawklords was Brock and Calvert's gallant but failed attempt to sneak their music past the new, hippy-hating punk audience. With the name change came another new line-up in bassist Harvey Bainbridge and drummer Martin Griffin (both formerly of Ark), along with keyboard player Steve Swindells. The Hawklords album '25 Years On' and single, 'Psi Power', followed, and a lengthy British tour at the end of 78 had been well-received. But the change of name had not convinced any-one that what they were listening to was not really Hawkwind-in-disguise and disenchantment set in once more. Calvert left the band for the last time early in 1979, followed by Swindells and Griffin, leaving just Brock and Bainbridge to soldier on.
In the lull, Charisma belatedly released the 'PXR 5' album and '25 Years' single. Suitably encouraged, by the end of 1979 Brock and Bainbridge had returned with a new, totally revamped line-up of Hawkwind, including former drummer Simon King and early guitarist Huw Lloyd Langton, along with ex-Gong synthesiser wizard Tim Blake. They played their 'comeback' show at the world's first Sci-fi Festival, 'Futurama', in Leeds, and the lengthy UK tour that followed proved enormously successful. You only have to listen to 'Shot Down In The Night', the single recorded live on that tour to hear a band bristling with renewed confidence. Confidence streaked with defiance. Qualities they would require in some abundance to survive the onset of the Eighties, a decade that simply didn't understand Hawkwind at all.
Whether they sensed it or not, they were in for a rough ride. Despite making some quality recordings like 'Choose Your Masques' (the 1982 album that also marked the brief return of Nik Turner), and even revisiting Mike Moorcock territory with 'The Chronicle Of The Black Sword' (1985), commercially, Hawkwind's only foothold in the Eighties was the then burgeoning heavy metal market, where they sat uncomfortably next to more uniform and up-to-date Eighties metallists like Iron Maiden.
"I've never thought of Hawkwind as a heavy metal band," says Brock. " think we just got lumped into that bag in the Eighties because those were the sorts of bands we were booked onto tours and festivals with. I suppose we shared some of the same audience."
The Nineties, however, has begun to see a reappraisal of Hawkwind's place in the scheme of things. In a decade where the 'alternative' has long since replaced the 'mainstream', Hawkwind have become that most sought after item of the new post-modern age - the real thing. Whether one knows their music or not, the time they came from and the ideas they represented can be detected across the spectrum of contemporary pop music. From the latest generation of 'stoner' rock bands like Monster Magnet, Queens Of The Stone Age and the now defunct Kyuss, who make no secret of the influence Hawkwind has played on them, to e-generation 'dance' acts like Orbital, Prodigy, or the Chemical Brothers, who may not be so familiar with the name but whose premise - that electronic music can become a conduit to other 'altered' states - is exactly the same as the original Hawkwind's.
By the same token, the Hawkwind of the Nineties - still fronted by Dave Brock and still as intent, as he says, on "making magic out of thin air" - has also embraced the 'new age' of technology. As you can see from latter-day Hawkwind tracks like 'Right To Decide' from 1992's 'Electric Tepee', or 'Love In Space' from the 1997 'Distant Horizons' collection, they may be ardent time travellers but Hawkwind are not marooned in the past, Dave Brock's guitar-synthesiser long since having replaced Dik Mik's antique audio generator.
Which brings the story full-circle to the 1999 remix of 'Silver Machine', which concludes this collection. The work of Scourge Of The Earth AKA KLF's Jimmy Cauty, the new, revamped 'Silver Machine' brings Hawkwind bang up-to-date with the Prodigy-generation. "My son, who is now 18, is in a techno outfit," says Simon House. "And he loves the new version, so I take that as a good sign..."
And if it's signs you're looking for - good, bad, or, as with everything they ever did, an unpredictable yet marvellously compelling mixture of the two - then the music of Hawkwind is a better place than most to start.
-Mick Wall
Many fans expected a "Hawkwind" album and
All the songs were written by Dave and none of them, with the exception of "Green Finned Demon" had been released before. "Green Finned Demon" was on the B-Side of "Night Of The Hawks" (FLEP 104) released six weeks earlier by Hawkwind.
It is a shame that Dave was not able, at the time, to do any live gigs to promote the album as it is still the best way to reach the fans, a fact proved later with the release of "The Agents Of Chaos" LP.
"The Agents Of Chaos" album was Dave Brock's second LP to be commercially released. All the songs were written by Dave and Crum, a firend of Dave's who had been writing with him for a few years. The record came out on the 4th of April 1988 and the catalogue number was SHARP 042 (SHARP 042 C for the cassette). The 11 tracks were: Hi-tec Cities / A Day / In The Office / Hades Deep / Words Of A Song - Heads / Nocturne / Wastelands Of Sleep / Empty Dreams / Into the Realms / Mountain In The Sky. The artwork was by Nick Wing. It went into the metal charts (do not ask why) at number 3 and in the Indie Charts at number 20, a much better performnce than his first album due to the fact that the band played some live dates throughout the UK. Although the Brock/Crum partnership wrote all the songs for this album, the idea behind The Agents Of Chaos is that many different people will be involved in live and studio work. For his first gigs, Dave used Tubilah Dog, along with Crum, as The Agents Of Chaos. The first date was on November 14th 1988 at the Kaleidoscope in Birmingham. On November 16th it was very surprising to see the Electric Ballroom nearly full for the first London date.
This CD is a compilation of both albums. We felt that the songs were strong enough for a CD and 2 albums at the normal CD price is a good offer. We hope to do many more of these "double" CD's. So keep in touch!
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