Hawkwind

very cool and so true. long may the hawkwind reappraisal continue!

his book is excellent too.

Reading the book right now. It's very good, but as with their discography, I'm having a difficult time caring about anything after Lemmy's kicked out.

Hmm, how do you feel about post-Morrison Doors?

i love, nay adore everything up until '79 so the book covering just the whole of the first decade is perfect for me.

fair enough not being into anything they did post lemmy but there is a lot of gold in the next three or four years.

I tried Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music earlier this evening and couldn't get into it at all. Most of the problem was Calvert's vocals — he sounds a lot like early Bryan Ferry, which is a Very Bad Thing.

ok, if you don't like calvert then no point listening to that era.

i can't hear any similarity to ferry at all. he is simply the greatest.

I guess this is the same Joe Banks who was behind the Disinformation project, given that the book's published by Strange Attractor who are into that kind of thing.

https://www.discogs.com/artist/34627-Disinformation

― funnel spider ESA (Matt #2), Saturday, 21 September 2019 19:57

No - and THANK GOD - it is not the same guy. A music journalist with the same name. Phew!

It's very good, but as with their discography, I'm having a difficult time caring about anything after Lemmy's kicked out.

― but also fuck you (unperson), Tuesday, 20 October 2020 00:35

Also, this is absolutely crazy talk - and speaking as someone who formerly didn't go beyond Warrior AND LEARNED THE ERROR OF MY WAYS - it really is worth pushing further and exploring. I ended up buying a really cheap compilation album of their latter period, which was super-helpful in learning to navigate the later era.

Stuff like PXR5 is easily as good as anything from their early years - the whole sci-fi trilogy of that plus Quark Strangeness and Charm and Astounding Sounds is utteraly classic.

Also, I was in a cemetery in West London where I found a grave which had the complete verse from "Lives of great men all remind us, we may make our lives sublime..." carved on it and I was so so super-excited to find the grave of a Hawkwind fan - only to discover it was never Hawkwind at all, it's from a quote by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow?

Chiz!

I ended up buying a really cheap compilation album of their latter period, which was super-helpful in learning to navigate the later era.

What compilation was that? Do you have specific compilations to recommend for their early period as well? I've tried to get into Hawkwind several times without success, still hoping/expecting them to click since they're something that I should love on paper.

shout-out to that Hawklords album that completed their 70s run, it's really fantastic and very new wave influenced, might be an easy "in" for that period of the band

Look, this is not a reccommendation, because it really was a super-cheap bargain basement cash-in that was £2.99 at HMV:

https://www.discogs.com/Hawkwind-Master-Of-The-Universe/release/1455113

There are like dozens of Hawkwind compilations! I just found a series on Spotify called Hawkwind Decades. The 70s one is good for the post-Lemmy era even though it starts with Motorhead (the song) which is Lemmy.

It might help if you describe *what* about them, you think might appeal to you? Like, do you want more 60s psych (the first S/T), more 70s sci-fi-synth (In Search Of Space), the more Krautrocky/Kosmische edge (Warrior At The Edge of Time), raw punky garage rock (Doremi Fasol Latido)?

Or, what did you try that didn't work? Like, for a lot of people, including myself, Space Ritual was the first thing I heard, and it was... just so much. Almost too much, as a double live album. But picking out the songs I really liked from that, was a good way to work out which of the early albums to investigate further.

sorry! I am so bad at reccommending specific things.

Amazing sleeve.

Astounding Sounds, Amazing Sleeve

this, different to the one mentioned above, Masters Of The Universe comp - https://www.discogs.com/Hawkwind-Masters-Of-The-Universe/master/28026

and Roadhawks - https://www.discogs.com/Hawkwind-Roadhawks/master/47791

are good entry points into early Hawkwind, up to '75.

I can still remember when i bought "Space Ritual" the guy in the record shop saying how jealous he was that I was going to be hearing it for the first time and what a treat I was in for. That's exactly how I feel about anyone listening to it for the first time now.

and Neil S, 100% agree, the Hawklords album is so good. in my Hawkwind top 5.

LOL, I've got that one, too. But that one is "Masters" and my mostly post-75 comp is "Master" (clearly, after Lemmy left, Hawkwind only had one Master)

I read a biography of Hawkwind years ago which was extremely entertaining - crazy music, crazy guys (and gal) - but, for the life of me, I can't remember the title. It wasn't the Carol Clerk one. (By the way, I was sad to discover recently that Carol Clerk died 10 years ago).

Ha ha @ Branwell with an N.

When I say 'biography', more a history.

Tom, was it the "Hawkwind Sonic Assassins" book?

No, I'm sure it had a Hawkwind-y title like "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun" or "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth" and it was from the late 70s or, maybe early 80s. Then again maybe I'd absorbed some acid from the pages or something and it was nothing like how I'm remembering it.

I was gonna recommend the box set This is Your Captain Speaking...Your Captain is Dead (everything from the debut through Hall, the Greasy Truckers and The 1999 Party live sets, and a disc of singles) as an intro, since it was cheap when I bought it on release back in 2015, but I just checked eBay and Discogs and it's going for...a lot.

I read it in the early 90s but it had the look of the 70s underground press about it.

Found it!

https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1264868312l/7667156.jpg

I'm sure it had a different cover though.

Ah, ok. My housemate in the early 90s had that though I think it had a red cover.

Re-reading the lasst few posts and i didn't know Carol Clerk had left us either. How sad.

"Lives of great men all remind us, we may make our lives sublime..."

When I was in my very early teens I stole this to use in an English essay confident my English teacher would never have encountered Hawkwind. They hadn't but they did know Longfellow. Thanfully they didn't know of Robert Calvert who I mercilessly stole from.

Hold on, did we live together in the early 90s?

(nervous LOL)

Haha, that would be hilarious if true...

Is there another Hawkwind thread, because I swear I've talked about all this before (though perhaps it was one of the UK Watercooler threads)...?

I keep feeling like I've read a book about Hawkwind, but I can't seem to find one when I check my bookshelves. But when I checked my Hawkwind CD collection, I realised what it was - all of those 70s albums have book-length liner notes! I don't know if that was something specific to the reissues - following on from the Guardian piece, their album design and artwork and liner notes were always superb, the self-mythologising was already at legendary levels.

People who have read Hawkwind books, which is the best one to try to find?

Anyway, the thing I really feel like we've talked about before - those post-Lemmy mid-70s sci-fi trilogy albums - my 'way into' them was suddenly understanding that Hawkwind were in many ways like an English Kraftwerk - they addressed so many of the same futuristic themes, but from a completely different angle? The Germans dreamed this wonderful, shiny, utopian future - and Hawkwind looked at that same future and saw all of the ways that robots, skyscrapers, modernity could very easily become a nightmare. And that's the world in which PXR5 and Quark Strangeness and Charm take place - Kraftwerk have this shiny, utopian, perfect Star Trek future, while Hawkwind were living in this 70s Doctor Who science fiction where there was all this amazing technology - but none of it worked?

hence you end up with these amazing tracks like Uncle Sam's On Mars, Robot Robot and High-Rise - which actually describe the world we now live in even better than Kraftwerk's Computer World.

Reason: there are 8 million Hawkwind threads on ILX and one of the reasons I know so bloody much about Hawkwind is that there was an entire documentary about them, which I apparently watched and at one point owned, but have no memory of left at this point?

Why Is Hawkwind The Greatest Band Ever?

Tom, Tom! Is that really you?!?!

:-)

Branwell with an N, i think you totaly nail that (once again). Those Calvert lyrics really do seem very prescient and the Kraftwerk analogy is something that would never have previously croseed my mind but feels spot on.

If the Calvert era Hawkwind had been a band that had only existed for the "Astounding Sounds", "Quark... and "PXR5" albums (and "Hawklords" too) i do feel Hawkwind and Calvert in particular would be regarded in a much more visionary light. I love this era just about as much as the up to 1975 era but it is such a different entity.

I revisited this recently which Calvert more or less improvises as he goes along - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2czMOK5QbA

Quite incredible. FWIW, the first line contains a homophobic slur but I feel this was him playing out a character and not representative of what Calvert was all about.

What you're both describing is interesting in theory, but not something I'm all that interested in actually listening to... What I'm drawn to in Lemmy-era Hawkwind is not just his massive bass lines, which were crucial, but also Del Dettmar's synths, which were uniquely assaultive in a way that was somewhere right in between Jon Lord and Martin Rev. They really were a sonic attack from 1971-74/75, and that, more than the lyrical themes or concepts, is what hits right for me. I want to be bulldozed over by the dirty-future (grimy spaceships piloted by bikers and mechanics) rock 'n' roll, and that side of Hawkwind has never been equaled - not even by bands like Monster Magnet who at times blatantly ape them (even covering "Brainstorm"). SF lyrics mixed with New Wave AOR music, on the other hand = Not For Me.

what about pre-Lemmy Hawkwind?

I don't really like the debut, except for "Seeing It As You Really Are" - I see it as almost like the first Funkadelic album, in that the concept is clearly coming into form but it's not 100% there yet. (Funkadelic were a hell of a lot closer on their debut than Hawkwind were on theirs, though.) In Search of Space is fantastic, of course.

That's a wonderful find, Stirmonster!

Yeah, I'm just not invested in the concept of ~Rock'n'Roll~ as you describe, unperson - in fact, I find it kind of mystifying and more than slightly offputting. On many bands where we disagree about where to get off the bus (I'm thinking of your feelings on Neubauten, too) - it seems we're drawn not by different stuff (like, I love the dirtiness of it) but the *meaning* of the stuff. Like... fuck rock'n'roll. Who cares about it! It's almost like a lot of these bands are doing ~fucking with rock'n'roll~ and what you're drawn to is the rock'n'roll, and what I'm drawn to is the *fucking* of it. (In my terminology, what I'd call the

queering

I guess I can completely recognise what it is that you love about that period of Hawkwind - the sonic *assault* of it. But for me, what's good about that stuff is the sonic *otherness* of what they do to it while assaulting it, rather than specifically the assault.

ugh, I thought I did an italic but it did a quote? weird.

For a long time I also stopped with Warrior on the Edge of Time, but I picked up one of those cheap clamshell sets with The Charisma Years 1976-1979 that convinced me to dig a little deeper. I'll admit that after we hit into the 1980s I've been a little more scattered in my listening, I only have 1985's The Chronicle of the Black Sword, 1988's The Xenon Codex and 2012's Onward.

I'm just not invested in the concept of ~Rock'n'Roll~ as you describe, unperson - in fact, I find it kind of mystifying and more than slightly offputting... we're drawn not by different stuff (like, I love the dirtiness of it) but the *meaning* of the stuff. Like... fuck rock'n'roll. Who cares about it!

But that's the thing. I'm not drawn to meaning (remember, I'm the guy who ignores lyrics 90% of the time). I'm drawn to sound. So for example, I love Discharge not for what they're saying but for the way Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing sounds — the beat, the disgusting guitar distortion, even the sound of the singer's voice although the actual words are value neutral. Same with Motörhead, same with Grand Funk Railroad, same with Cactus or Sir Lord Baltimore or whoever. Same with Neubauten, and with them it's even easier because I don't understand German.

I don't worry about the semiotics or the subtext, I just turn it up real loud in my headphones and bang my head and melt my brain. When people start talking about "rock 'n' roll" as though it has some spiritual meaning, to me that's marketing-speak, disguised as philosophy. I'm interested in guitars and drums as sound, in the Varèse-ian "music is organized sound" sense. How did this group of people choose these sounds, and why did they organize them in this way? I can recognize that they're in dialogue with previous sets of organized sound made by others, but I don't care. I care about what I'm listening to right then, because I could always be listening to something else.

For a long time I was one of those "who cares about the lyrics, they're just a texture" person. But the more I dug into that, the more I realised that ignoring lyrics often meant ignoring context.(And since context is never neutral - ignoring the context of the art usually means erasing the context of the artists and inserting your own in its place, which can be an act of violence, depending on what their context *is*.) Neubauten were one of the bands that truly drove that point home for me, because learning German unlocked a side to the band I'd previously never had access to, and made me realise how much about their *music* I had simply missed and missed out on.

I'd love to live in a world where the context of the sounds and what they mean never mattered, to have that freedom to ~just not care~, but who I am means I never had that choice. To me, it seems a very thin and shallow engagement with art. But y'know, that's your option.

There's a ton of stuff in 70s Hawkwind where I do have to kind of hold my nose and go "the 70s were a different country" (and there are definitely places where the outright hideousness of stuff like Spirit of the Age is so blatant it just makes me laugh and I can actually enjoy it *because* it is so much what it is).

The funniest thing I just noticed in one of the booklets is a photo of Hawkwind playing with all of their amplifier speakers piled up in the shape of Stonehenge? And that made me laugh so hard, because I had just dug through a pile of other CDs to find it, and one of the CDs had been the KLF - who also had used that same image, of amplifier speakers piled up in the shape of Stonehenge. Even more of these threads between rave and hippies, ha ha ha.

ignoring the context of the art usually means erasing the context of the artists and inserting your own in its place, which can be an act of violence, depending on what their context *is*

This is where we're likely to start talking past each other. I'll just say this — when an artist uses sound as their chosen medium, that means they're interested in sound, too, otherwise they'd have written a poem or painted a painting or something. Artists are artists; they make art. The way they grew up, or what they see when they look in the mirror (which I'm guessing is what you mean by "their context"), doesn't matter to me very much, because tons of other people grew up around them, or see something similar when they look in the mirror, and those people didn't/don't become artists. Also, the context of, say, Anthony Braxton writing a piece for 100 tubas is "I wanted to write a piece for 100 tubas". He views this as an option open to him despite having grown up poor and black in Chicago, and who am I to argue? I just listen, and the context for me is "I wonder what this will sound like?"

I’m really into the subtext of caravans, travelers etc when it comes to hawkwind...

my entry point to hawkwind was the first disc of some double(triple?) disc best of.. had a rendering of a celestial body in eclipse on the front. started with “hurry on sundown” and went through all the classic early jamz.. ahhhh

What I mean, by the "context" of the artist, is...

Like, what I was saying above, about Hawkwind's late 70s sci-fi and robots stuff being like the dark, dirty inverse of Kraftwerk's sci-fi and robots material. A lot of artists have explored robot themes in their work, and yet the work is very different, and comes to very different conclusions - robots in Kraftwerk are different from the robots in Hawkwind, who are different yet again from the robots in afrofuturist-influenced music, whether that's Newcleus or Model 500 all the way down to Janelle Monae.

Why are the robots all so different, why does 'robot music' sound so different - and yet oddly similar - if it's trying to describe the same thing? Well, Kraftwerk were not just white and German, they came from the *class* which owned factories and programmed computers, and so of course, to them, robots are shiny and pristine and happy utopian ideal programmed just to serve you. African-American artists looked at robots and went, "holy shit, we *are* the robots" - and their work went off in that direction, exploring what it would be like to be the electronic slaves of a deeply unequal society, treated as if they weren't even human. So their robot music was quite different.

What was Hawkwind's context? Hawkwind were white and British, but specifically ~white working class~ - and they looked at robots and expressed the very contemporary fear "fuck me, robots are going to steal our jobs and steal our girls". And how white working class men, in Britain, dealt with those fears in the 70s, as they realised that the post-Windrush post-Empire immigration was not going away - informed a great deal of what music happened in Britain in the 70s and 80s.

That a whole bunch of white, european working-class dudes decided to double down on whiteness and maleness - to me the entire genre of hard rock and heavy metal through the 70s and 80s was a bunch of white dudes having lots of big angsty/angry feelings about their whiteness and maleness. While a whole bunch of *other* white working class dudes took the option of 'what if... solidarity with the not-white and not-male?' And you have all these other musical movements, of rejecting stereotypical maleness in favour of glam or synthpop or disco in musical styles that coded female or gay; or of rejecting whiteness in favour of Black music, of world music, of reggae or disco or house or rave.

Where was Hawkwind, in this branching? They often appeared to be doing both at the same time - there was a doubling-down White Male Heavy Metal element to their music; and there was also a weirdly camp element (I mean, Robert Calvert doesn't *sound* anything at all like Bryan Ferry, but what they do have in common is that they were both AS CAMP AS A ROW OF TENTS, like, weirdly, I read the homophobic slur in Stirmonster's video as him acknowledging that yes, this skinny camp dude dressed like Lawrence of Arabia was playing with his own campness?) and also something that would totally blossom into tribal-earth-rave-traveller hippieness (and I have such mixed feelings about it as discussed on the Megadog thread, because so much of that stuff was at the same time, both a rejection of capital-W Whiteness, but also weirdly appropriative, like doing the wrong things for the right reasons, or vice versa?)

Like, I don't know which branch of context to put Hawkwind into, and that's part of what is so *GREAT* about them! They were so self-contradictory!

But this context both *influences* what they sound like; and at the same time gives a meaning to those sounds after the fact. This music doesn't float down on a cloud of sound from nowhere.

Yes, yes, yes! Really fascinatng insights.

Robert Calvert was indeed super camp, so intriguing that that slur was him perhaps playing with that. I wonder if Hawkwind's audience during the Calvert era thought he was "AS CAMP AS A ROW OF TENTS"? I have a feeling not, particularly as I must have read a thousand Youtube comments written by fans who had followed them through the 70s and have never seen it come up.

I also think Brock was perhaps a but adrift at this time so was happy to have Calvert steer the good ship Hawkwind. I'm forever thankful he was as when he was forced to take back control after Calvert's departure he took the ship on the wrong course, imo.

Interesting tidbit I didn't know about from the Encyclopedia of SF entry on the band (http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/hawkwind):

As if to reinforce, or perhaps slyly mock, these quasi-literary pretensions, this year also saw the publication of a novel. The Time of the Hawklords (1976) by Michael Butterworth (Moorcock is credited as "Producer/Director" for the book) fictionalizes a fantasy version of the band, who have access to a musical instrument that can end suffering.

It's not very good. There's a folow up called "Queens Of Deliria" which isn't great either. Not sure if the triology was ever finished.

https://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_sci_fi_trilogy_about_hawkwind

Yeah sounds better suited to the graphic novel format.
The one time I saw Hawkwind with Calvert (age 13, mind blown) he spent a lot of the set pretending to play golf with his mic stand. I think that might have been the gig he and Moorcock allegedly had a punch-up backstage due to one of them having an affair with the other's wife. Not very sci-fi really.

Anyway great insights from Branwell, looking forward to more!

Oh man I wrote a post about campness and whether or not camp is or isn't inherently big-tent queer and also about how Hawkwind involved wizards and Wizards! belong to the gays (and whether that's a recent coding based on recent cinematic depictions of wizards by gay actors?) but my computer ated it. Probably better that you guys were spared that!

I don't think I've ever knowingly read any Moorcock, is any of it worth pursuing? (I'm guessing it would be one of those things you had to start reading when you were a teenager.)

The one time I saw Hawkwind with Calvert (age 13, mind blown)

I am beyond jealous.

Sorry about your post Branwell!

I was quite into Moorcock as a teenager, particularly the Jerry Cornelius series, but not sure how it would be reading it now and imagine I won't ever re-investigtate.

Yeah, as a teenager I absolutely adored a ton of sci-fi and fantasy stuff that I would shudder to re-encounter as an adult, so I think it's best to leave him.

(I also wonder if there is a similar ~magic age~ at which one has to encounter Hawkwind for the first time, where they are able to capture that sense of wonder - like seeing them at 13 would have been amazing! But also, seeing them for the first time at 40, I felt transported to being about 13 again, so perhaps not?)