'Hawkwind Space Rock... a new album'

Released on the 14th August 1970 with adverts trumpeting the above statement, Hawkwind's debut album is perhaps their most egalitarian sounding release; the one that feels most in line with the spirit of the age ..  

Bookended with two acoustic songs - 'Hurry on Sundown' & 'Mirror of Illusion' - that hark back to singer / guitarist Dave Brock's busking days, the former of which, a perennial Hawk fan favourite, opens the proceedings with a deceptively sunny demeanour before we are cast into an avant garde soundworld that only relents with the arrival of the lumpen album closer.

The sonic attack that makes up the majority of the album is a darkly discordant, mostly instrumental, jam sesssion that finds the band - Brock, Nik Turner (saxophone, vocals), Huw Lloyd Langton (lead guitar), John Harrison (bass), Terry Ollis (drums), Dik Mik (electronics) & Dick Taylor (guitar) - firing off each other in a manner honed over a year of gigging but still maybe slightly tentative; studio nerves perhaps?  What they are doing, though, is developing the sound, that, following a line-up reshuffle (Hawkwind's truly defining characteristic), would explode from the following year's 'In Search of Space',  the album that would perfectly encapsulate the truth of the statement at the top of this post.

It has it's champions but 'Hawkwind' has long been regarded, perhaps at best, as a curio within the bands catalogue, a tentative first step, but you know the cliché about adventures and first steps, and this one started a whole series of adventures that have lasted 55 years with no sign of stopping.

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Joe Banks
Strange Attractor Press

Fifty years on the English rock band Hawkwind continues to inspire devotion from fans around the world. Their influence reaches across the spectrum of alternative music, from psychedelia, prog, and punk, through industrial, electronica, and stoner rock. Hawkwind has been variously, if erroneously, positioned as the heir to both Pink Floyd and the Velvet Underground, and as Britain's answer to the Grateful Dead and Krautrock. They have defined a genre—space rock—while operating on a frequency that's uniquely their own.

I've been a Hawkwind fan since my teens - it's just occurred to me that I'm wearing a Space Ritual T-shirt as I write this review - and, like I suspect many other Hawkwind fan, have long grown inured to the sniggers and the jokes that are often aimed at a band that has followed its own singular path and who, I maintain, had they been German would be lauded as musical pioneers rather than laughed at as sci-fi obsessed hippies. So with that in mind you can perhaps imagine my joy at the arrival of this big, beautiful tome that sets out to re-evaluate and reposition the band at the centre of the innovative and revolutionary musical underground where they belong.

There have been a few Hawkwind biogs in the past the only one of which I've read - 'This is Hawkwind: Do Not Panic' by Kris Tait - was one I picked up at a Hawks gig back in the late 80s.  Tait is married to Dave Brock and has performed with (as a fire eater) and manages the band and her book was a slim but engaging volume that was repeatedly devoured by younger me desperate for more info on this venerable warhorse of a band in those halcyon pre-internet days.  Published some 36 years later Banks' book covers much of the same ground but in substantially greater detail.

As seems par for the course with any indirect Hawkwind product there seems to have been no actual participation by Brock which does leave a fairly large hole in the narrative. I do though get the feeling that it isn't something that Banks was overly bothered by and indeed is often quite brutal in his treatment of Brock's temperament and later his lyric writing.

Many of the other familiar faces - Michael Moorcock, Nik Turner, Terry Ollis, Stacia and more - contribute short interviews that dot the book and provide interesting titbits that colour the chronology. Further to these Banks also litters the book with occasional essays discussing the band in relation to things like their relevance to science fiction, their wide ranging influence and their own mythology.

It's a fascinating read with its focus entirely on the 70s heyday from formation to the release of Levitation at which point it comes to a jarring and abrupt halt.  It's a book that is intentionally written for (and by) the devotee.  Banks' eye for detail of the various takes, versions and releases makes for an obsessive's delight and crammed with previously unseen photos and ephemera - not to mention the size of the thing - it proved to be a complete joy.  Here's hoping we get a follow up.

Buy it here - UK / US.

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The second Wyrd Britain mix and one that launches us into a slightly more psychedelic and experimental direction than the first. 

hope you enjoy.

The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band - You Done My Brain In - 00:00
Syd Barrett - Dark Globe - 01:39
John Cale - Thoughtless Kind - 03:36
Hawkwind - The Forge of Vulkan - 06:02
The British Space Group - The Last of Time - 08:52
Adrian Corker - Springtide V2 - 16:15
Kemper Norton - 821.914 - 18:54
Peter Christopherson - In My Head a Crystal Sphere of Heavy Fluid - 25:14
Fresh Maggots - Rosemary Hill - 30:50
Michael Cashmore - Snow No Longer - 34:21

By 1985 the links between British space rockers Hawkwind and author Michael Moorcock were very well established with collaborations between the two stretching back to the early 70s. Moorcock had supplied lyrics for and performed on stage with Hawkwind numerous times over the years, got them an appearance, albeit in the background, in the 'Jerry Cornelius' movie 'The Final Programme' and even contributed towards them being featured as the heroes of a novel (The Time of the Hawklords by Michael Butterworth).  It is then surprising that it took these two giants of the British psychedelic scene so long to fully commit to an album based around Moorcock's most beloved creation, Elric of Melnibone, but 1985s 'The Chronicle of the Black Sword' saw them finally take the plunge and create an album that was (almost) entirely based around Moorcock's series.



Buy it here -  The Chronicle Of The Black Sword

I have to admit to not being a huge fan of the album - it's OK but I find it all a little lacking in fire - it's what came next that hooked me.

In late 1985 the band headed out on the road in support of the album taking with them various dancers to 'act out' the Elric storyline and Moorcock himself to provide spoken word interludes.  They recorded two of the shows and released them as the album 'Live Chronicles' and as the 'Chronicle of the Black Sword' live video.

The album features the '...Black Sword' tracks but they've woven some classic Hawkwind songs such as 'Angels of Death' and 'Master of the Universe' into the narrative.  It is everything the studio album is not.  It's filled with lively, urgent performances of both the old and the new songs and the band seem on tip top form and fully committed.



Buy it here -  Live Chronicles

The video is the same but personally I've never been hugely enamoured with interpretive dance (or any sort of dance really) and so the guys and gals writhing around the band are something I find more than a little distracting.  Pair this with mid 80s video technology, dodgy post-production effects and Hawkwind's psychedelic light show in full force and you get a colourful but restless and slightly nauseating experience.  It does have it's charm though.


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Formed in 1969 and still very active today (in a number of incarnations) Hawkwind are and always have been a band that polarised opinion.  For some they are the quintessential underground band; the weirdest of the weirdos riding a psychedelicised riff as far into space as it can possibly take them.  For others they are the quintessential underground band; the weirdest of the weirdos riding a psychedelicised riff as far into space as it can possibly take them but for some reason those people think that's somehow a bad thing. 

They are the sci-fi fixated hippy space rockers who fused the power of the riff with the freedom of the jam, drenched it all in that new fangled electronic wibbling that suddenly became available towards the tail end of the 1960's and then filtered the whole thing through a cocktail of psychedelics.

Since they formed in Ladbroke Grove in London by Dave Brock, Mick Slattery, John Harrison, Terry Ollis, Nick Turner and Dik Mik the band have had a revolving door of members over the years.  Indeed so many different musicians have passed through the band that the list of Hawkwind members has it's own Wikipedia page - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hawkwind_band_members

Theirs is a singular story.  There has never been another band like them. Through their almost 50 year existence they have been embraced by hippies, metallers, punks, crusties and ravers whilst seemingly ignoring them all and continuing to tirelessly walk their own unique path.  They are the ultimate peoples band equally at home playing in a concert hall as they are playing in a Somerset field whilst the sun rises over them.

Here is a fabulous BBC documentary from 2007 called 'Hawkwind: Do Not Panic' that traces the history of the band and features interviews with all the main players with one crucial exception.



Missing from the doc - due to ongoing friction between various members - is Dave Brock the only original member of the band still in the line-up.  So, in order to provide some sort balance here's a long interview with him talking about the history of the group.



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If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain