This is from the very splendid Classic Rock Presents Prog, or let’s just call it Prog for short, Oct 2009. Not only were Hawkwind cover stars (below), but a Hawkwind album supplied the byline for the mag itself and the cloth patch that came with it. And the general theme of Weird Prog is probably thanks to them.
We've all seen the movie: a post-apocalyptic nightscape where the only survivors are battle- weary, semi-mutant humanoids living off radioactive rats and sparkling yellow fart-pee. That to say, one fucked-up place to wake up the next morning, man. Yet this is where we found ourselves, signed-up as part of the doomed crew of the bad-ship Hawkwind, in that long, dark winter of 1979.
As Lemmy, long since departed from the group but still hovering on the edge of their dilated Ladbroke Grove vision -that is, still managed by the same people- would tell me. "People think of Hawkwind as this sort of hippie peace and love group. But it was never that. We weren't looking for peaceful, we were looking for horrid. The spaceship was always broken down with us."
Thought of even then as a sort of poor man's Pink Floyd, as band founder,
So much so that by the time I entered the picture, hired as the band's PR by manager Doug Smith for what was essentially their comeback tour after falling apart on the road in America in 1978, they didn't even have a record deal. Nevertheless, their first UK tour for two years was huge, taking in several nights at every Odeon, Playhouse and Apollo the ship skidded to a halt in.
They had also lost all their captains, as Brock called them: those oddball characters known less for their musicianship than the indelible impression they had made on Hawkwind audiences over the years. People like co-founder Nik Turner, the "musically naive" sax player who had previously been the keeper of the Hawkwind flame, insisting on the many free gigs they did, and magnet for most of the other captains, like his old cohort from Margate, Robert Calvert, the manic-depressive genius who helped conceptualise Hawkwind's "aural equivalent of an acid trip"; Barney Bubbles, whose lysergic images of aliens, space storms, Stonehenge and naked breasts had adorned all their early album sleeves and tour posters; writer Michael Moorcock, who would routinely turn up at Hawk-shows and read his dementedly futuristic poetry; Dik Mik (real name: Michael Davis) whose 'audio generator' - responsible for all those whooshing noises - was made, he claimed, from the parts of an old vacuum cleaner (actually a customised ring modulator); and Stacia, the 22-year-old statuesque beauty whose Amazonian-like figure would transfix audiences by dancing naked with the band, her vast, undulating hips and bouncing, battleship breasts daubed in Bubbles-esque designs.
And then there was Lemmy, the 25-year-old bassist with the Iron Cross dangling round his neck, whose ashtray voice had made its debut on Hawkwind's solitary hit single, Silver Machine, in 1972. The last of Brock's captains to arrive, and the first to be asked to leave ("for taking the wrong drugs") Lemmy was destined to be the one non-Hawkwind fans would remember best from those days.
Lemmy didn't actually play bass when he joined. He was just "one of Dik Mik's little drug-orientated loonies that he used to know," according to Turner. None of which mattered much anymore by the time I was press-ganged into becoming part of the troupe; not a captain, of course; more a cabin boy. But a very enthusiastic cabin boy, it has to be said.
I was 21 and all I knew about Hawkwind, at that point, was the same as most people my age knew: they had had the big hit, they had had a good enough follow-up {Urban Guerrilla) which should have been a hit but wasn't because the BBC banned it from their airwaves (commercial death back then). The rest was all double live albums and conceptual foot-shooting. I knew Lemmy had been in the group, but that had been before punk rock and Motorhead came along. And I knew about Stacia, of course. Let's face it, no one was likely to forget Stacia. But that was it. "Doesn't matter," said Doug. "Just jump in at the deep-end." So that's what I did.
Before the tour started, I arranged for a long day of phone interviews for them with the writers of pop columns in various regional newspapers. Unwilling to be prised from his Devonshire farm, Brock designated this task to the two least famous members of the group: bassist Harvey Bainbridge, an amiable, fuzzy-haired son-of-Dorset who looked like one of those absent-minded science teachers that allow their pupils to set fire to themselves with Bunsen burners; and guitarist Huw Lloyd-Langton, the Welsh-named Englishman who had played on Hawkwind's eponymously-titled debut album in 1969, then left after "finding Jesus," following a particularly "hectic" gig in Amsterdam. Now he was back. I wasn't sure if Jesus was still with him but he did seem very cheerful whenever we bumped auras.
I remember dutifully putting them on the phone to papers like the Altringham Evening News and the Bradford Echo, then sitting back, rolling joints as they did their best to drum up publicity for the forthcoming tour. It began well enough - "Yes, we're very committed to our fans" and "I've always loved Bristol audiences". By the end though I literally had to tear the phones from their hands as phrases such as "inter-dimensional reality" and "fucked-up on mushrooms" began to more freely circulate.
Like so many of the original Hawkwind 'captains', the beautiful Stacia just seemed to turn up out of the blue one day. "We were doing a gig in Exeter," Dave Brock recalled for me wistfully, "and she came and asked if she could dance, and we said yes, and then she took all her clothes off!" When Stacia also turned up the followuing night at a gig in Redruth and got up onstage and danced naked again, "We decided to keep her," shrugged Dave.
And had there ever been any, well, you know, romantic dalliances between Stacia and the band themselves, I asked Nik Turner years later. "Oh, more than one," he chortled. "Though not with me," he was quick to add. "You'd have to ask Lemmy..."
Unfortunately, Stacia had left the band by the time I came to work for them in 1979. However, she did turn up at the end-of-the-tour party in London. By then she was married with children and living in Hamburg with husband Roy Dyke, formerly of Ashton Gardner & Dyke, but she still looked...well, like Stacia - except with clothes on.
"I'd just like to say what a pleasure it is meeting you," I said while staring at her still absolutely magnificent breasts. "Thank you," she said. "Who are you?" It was the end of the tour, though, and I wasn't entirely sure any more. I made my excuses and stumbled off into the night.
A getting-to-know-you dinner was eventually arranged by a bohemian couple whose friends included Donovan. Tim liked it there, I was told, because he could converse in French with Dreen, the lady of the house. "What part of France is Tim from?" I asked her. "He was bom in Hammersmith, I think," she smiled sweetly. Mon dieu.
Even the worldly Brock had his 'artistic' side. A former busker from Feltham, in Middlesex, who was already 27 and married with a young son when, in the autumn of 1968, he had started the original line-up of Hawkwind, Brock looked like the sort of grumpy, lank-haired, ageing hippie you went to see for a five-quid deal when you didn't know anyone else who sold "stuff." Short, beanpole thin, and with dark, ominous-looking tattoos on his forearms, Dave always looked heavy. Whether stripped to the waist or draped in his Afghan, he emanated a different vibe, like he was holding just a little back, some cosmic joke only he would find funny.
One morning on the tour after a show in Edinburgh, I sidled up to him at the hotel reception desk where we were checking out and said, by way of a laugh, "The bins are round the back, mate." It was his fingerless leather gloves that put the image in my mind; that and the sawn-off denim waistcoat, three- day-old stubble and hook-shaped roll-your-own dangling from his whiskery gob.
He just looked at me. "You're fired," he said, then walked off, leaving me hanging, unsure whether he was joking or not. "Just get on the bus and don't say another word," advised the tour manager. "You'll soon find out if he meant it when he orders you off again somewhere in the middle of the motorway."
I did as I was told. Fortunately, I wasn't thrown off the bus but that was the end of me chitchatting to Dave for the rest of the tour. It would be 20 years before we spoke properly again, and by then, in my new-found guise as a journalist, I think he'd forgotten I existed. I'd certainly hoped so. My big pal in the band on that tour was drummer Simon King. After Dave, Simon had been in Hawkwind longer than anyone still left in it. Simon and I bonded in a way only two men with an unquenchable thirst for drugs of any description and at any time of the day or night can.
We both had our gimmicks. Mine was a repeat-prescription for some heavy-duty painkillers that a certain private doctor well-known to the rock biz back then had given me just before the start of the tour to relieve my 'toothache'. This meant that wherever we were on the road, I was only ever an open chemist's shop away from copping a load of synthetic 'pain relief with all the properties of non-synthetic morphine. What Simon brought to the table was an extraordinarily long little fingernail that he utilised to scoop- out large doses of white powder from the endless envelopes of the stuff he kept about his person, before drilling the talon-like appendage up your hooter where it would be liberally applied like a high-powered nasal-spray.
Between the two of us, it's fair to say there wasn't a night on that tour I didn't enjoy immensely, or can properly remember details of now. I do, however, recall the final night of the tour when a party was held for the band, to which it seemed every acid-casualty and long-haul hippie left in London -plus their old ladies- had been invited.
It was my one and only tour with Hawkwind and it had been, as advertised, a trip. The only regrets I have now are that I didn't know more about their actual music, something now rectified. Only a fool would overlook the contribution Hawkwind made to the story of rock, particularly in the 1970s; the handful of wonderfully evocative and original-sounding albums they made back then sounding still as far-out now as they did then, at the dawn of the space-rock age. Dismissed as the cosmic jokers of the psychedelic pack, what should always be borne in mind is that Hawkwind would not -could not- have had it any other way.
-Mick Wall
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