“Hawkwind’s Bob Calvert flying high with Captain Lockheed…while shooting down Marc Bolan.” This is from the 25/08/73 issue of Disc…
Despite the appearance and possible hit of Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters their inventor Bob Calvert remains primarily a poet.
"Albeit one of the most highly paid poets in the world," he admits.
Bob has been reading poetry with, and writing lyrics for Hawkwind for ages now, and before that was a poet in his own right and even went on television reading some of his sickly love verses. He has just surfaced very sanely from a nervous breakdown and is staunchly proud of his profession while just beginning to branch out as a playwright.
"It's all very well for Marc Bolan to call himself a poet. He's quite a quaint singer and writes fun lyrics; but to say he's a poet and to toss together a book of jottings that any self-respecting poet would throw out the window is a bit much."
Bob has had the idea of Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters for a long time, and the single is just a part of an album, which in turn is part of a big stage production. The album is currently being recorded with people like Hawkwind and ex-Roxy, Eno; it is called "Hero With A Wing" and .subtitled Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters.
The plot -which is the same for the stage production- is based on fact. In 1958, Franz Joseph Strauss, Chancellor of West Germany, reviewed the state of the airforce and announced that it was imperative to build up the somewhat pathetic ranks with Lockheed Starfighters. These were revolutionary machines - the first link between a piloted missile and fighter plane.
He wanted 700, the government said they could only afford 250, and the planes duly arrived. The German pilots weren't used to these new machines, which had been slightly modified to order, and a series of terrible crashes began. In all, 159 planes crashed and the whole business has been remarkably hushed up ever since.
The stage version will contain long narrative passages, and Viv Stanshall, Keith Moon and Arthur Brown will all, hopefully, take part.
Laconic
"Arthur is definitely the bloke to play the Gremlin - that's the mythological thing that pilots talk about jokingly as causing faults. And I think Eno would be wonderful as a lounging, laconic pilot."
For the first time Bob has written the music as well as the words. "I want it more musical than Hawkwind things. The single is very into the Germanic style of rock that Hawkwind are part of, where the melody tends to get subjugated by the solidity of the hypnotic beat. But I want to use melody as a way of conveying lyrics; two of my favourite song writers are Noel Coward and Cole Porter."
-Caroline Boucher
From Sounds, 27/04/74
Well, as everyone knows, craziness is contagious. It spread in ever-increasing circles of darkness, like ripples in a pond, around Hamlet, eventually submerging all and sundry in its fearful penumbra.
Some forms of dementia are more aggressive than others; their exponents tend to be lucid proselytizers. Such a man is Bob Calvert, who has quite a pressure building up behind his own personal obsessions with a particular brand of kamikaze heroism.
Most of those who patronise the music press will know by now that Bob Calvert is Captain Lockheed, the Hero With a Wing, the fantasy pilot of a self-destructing jetfighter, the German Starfighter, one of the most disastrous designs ever to have streaked across the heavens in the name of national defence.
The Starfighter story, which I shall not recount here other than to remind you that upwards of one hundred and sixty examples of the said craft have
Above all Calvert admires the autonomy of the hero, his aloofness. Hence the Hero With A Wing; hence his admiration for the German Expressionist playwright Bertolt Brecht, hence his admiration for Hamlet, and the need to reuse him in "The Rise And Fall Of Luigi Brilliantino", the project which follows "Captain Lockheed".
"Luigi Brilliantino" is set in Chicago or 1928-35 and traces the story of Luigi, who sets out from Sicily to avenge the murder of his father and his mother's remarriage with the murderer. Calvert says it has an Oedipus style twist at the end so you may be assured that his literary reference points are respectable. He has gone some way into writing words and dialogue for the presentation, which he calls "another black comedy".
The only musician he has definitely in mind for the music, which he dubs "swing rock" -rock music with a basis in the swing band sound of the Thirties- is ex-Pink Fairy Paul Rudolph. Although the subject matter is to be weighty, Bob insists that the treatment will have an element of parody which will make the music appropriate.
But the dividing line between theatre with music and musical theatre is fine: on the recorded "Captain Lockheed" I had a strong impression of a collection of songs linked with spoken parts rather than an integrated dramatic work. Whether the stage show, which will be considerably expanded, will give the same impression or will be more of a complete dramatic presentation remains to be seen.
Calvert admits that, according to his lights, he's doing things the wrong way round: as its name implies, a record is a permanent impression of a work which pre-exists its recording. "The main difference between the stage show and the album is that it's longer. But the album is a complete sound play in itself whereas the stage thing has lights and all the other things that the theatre can provide.
"The whole thing seems even more extraordinary to me now than when I first started this venture. I can see no reason why they continue to fly this plane.
"I find something fascinating about the arms dealer as a figure - I always had a sneaking admiration when I was a kid for the bad man in the Westerns who incited the Indians to attack the farmers and then supplied both sides with arms."
"I want to be a novelist one day but I haven't had the time to get down a protracted prose work yet... things have happened since I left Hawkwind. My whole approach to work is different from theirs. They're improvisers, but I meditate for a long time over something before I commit it.
But for all the machinations which exploit and degrade the hero in his jet-plane, his heroism is nonetheless presented as real and admirable in Lockheed (as no doubt it will be in "Luigi"): "One thing that has been missing from almost every form of fiction is the identifiable hero. In the serious work of fiction," he says, countering a suggestion that Bruce Lee was a very real popular hero, "the hero seems to have been lacking. I think the actions of a hero more or less sum up the ideals of his race. They are the expression of the ideals of his race.
"I'm not obsessed with Germany or Germans, though I admire Paul Klee and Bertolt Brecht very much. My observations cover quite a wide range of things. When I was a kid I was always much more interested to be a gangster than a cowboy, whom I thought was an oaf."
Doubtless, say I, jokingly, you prefer cricket to football. "Yes, I was coming to that," he said. "I've made a single called 'Howzat!' and the flip side is 'Cricket Reggae Cricket'. I always wanted to give cricket the same thing that football's been given."
-Martin Hayman
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