View From The Top

View From The Top

This interview with Stacia comes from a 1974 issue of Penthouse. But calm yourself, it is just an interview...thanks to Justin for digging it out and not getting the pages stuck together.

Long, tall Stacia - the six foot lady with the two-way sex life

What makes Hawkwind concerts rather different from those offered by the current crop of rock bands is the fact that they possess a 42-28-39 asset called Stacia. At the magic moment when the music really starts getting under your skin, Stacia makes her entrance - dancing, miming and generally interpreting the sounds in her own, very unique fashion; usually wearing little but greasepaint. With the above-mentioned statistics and standing six feet tall, Stacia is an impressive lady: as she so rightly says, "If I could get my waist down to 18 I'd have the same shape as Sabrina."

Though she is now an indispensable member of Hawkwind, her onstage gyrations started very informally. "I saw the band in Exeter," she recalls, "and got invited to a rehearsal. Then I went with them to a concert in Redruth. We were all bombed out of our heads and I asked if I could dance onstage. So we found some greasepaint, I made up and on I went." Stacia joined Hawkwind full time in 1971 but she insists that she has had no formal dance training. "I was kicked out of ballet school when I was 10 because I was too tall. Besides, if you enjoy expressing yourself, training schools can ruin whatever talent you may have." Her dancing used to be "strictly acid freak stuff" but now Stacia - no surname forthcoming, incidentally- is making it her business to establish a rapport with her audience. "In Newcastle I saw a boy who was obviously totally freaked out on acid. I slipped a

ring off my finger and gave it to him. Afterwards he told me it had really made him happy. I never rehearse, so if I can't get into the mood, then I just won't go on. Even if the band thought I'd danced badly, they wouldn't say so because the whole idea is spontaneity."

Stacia was 21 last December ("I'm still a kid"), and now lives in Earls Court with two men, two other girls, and two budgerigars. She is happily bisexual, which works out rather conveniently because her boyfriend is Arthur Kane, of the notorious New York Dolls rock band. "I adore getting drunk with him. It doesn’t matter if I never see him again; I'll always love him. I have his pictures on the budgie cage." As Kane is bisexual as well, he can have no hang-ups regarding Stacia's girlfriend, a German lady called Ingrid. As well as this interesting ménage, Stacia has countless other admirers. When Hawkwind appeared in Los Angeles, a 36-year-old man vowed that he would follow her to the ends of the earth, though the ladies who admire Stacia tend to be more interested in what she's really like underneath the greasepaint and exotica. She's defiantly opposed to Women's Lib: "I'd rather sit at home and let the men do all the work. They should make enough money to pay for a maid." On further consideration, that sounds extremely liberated.

In the course of our interview Stacia demolished several glasses of wine and we asked if she took a shot of Dutch Courage before she went on. "Of course, she admitted, "it calms my nerves. I'm not as over-confident as people think. I drink like two fishes, but I don't seem to get drunk. I can still be relatively together after a couple of hours boozing. I love Tequila: it gives you that terrific warm feeling, doesn't it?"

As she says herself, Stacia isn't as self-assured and daunting as her public image suggests. She wants to record a solo single without making a split with Hawkwind, but it was only under pressure that she confessed that she has actually written some songs herself. "I want to try everything" she affirmed, then added "You know, if I got an acting role, I'd take it...but it could only be in a horror movie. One guy in the States said I looked like Dracula's Aunt Trixie. We all invited him to dinner and he thought we were going to beat him up."