Hawkwind

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?)

I've read the Elric books — first as a teenager, and then a few years ago; re-bought the whole DAW paperback series on eBay. They're okay. I didn't find anything especially "problematic" in them aside from incest among royalty, which...whatever. The prose is as overwrought as one might expect but each one is a fun enough way to kill an hour or two.

So many of the Elric stories feature the same scenario: he encounters an enemy, calls on supernatural aid which utterly vanquishes his foe, but kills one of his friends or allies at the same time. It's more like reading a book of myths than a dramatic novel.

Moorcock's prose is not great either, but many of the scenes and setups are interesting to recall when you're not actually reading his writing.

I feel Moorcock as editor has aged better than Moorcock as author? His run on New Worlds magazine is all-time and from a "heavy downer entropic SF" point of view feel very Hawkwind-adjacent. Also some amazing design in the original mags. Some of those paperback anthologies are well worth picking up IMO.

Moorcock churned them out by the yard in the 1960s (partly to finance New Worlds) - I find a lot of them tough going but some are fun - from memory The Black Corridor was a pretty good space-based bad trip novel.

I just downloaded a set of several of the novels in PDF form, and it just started out waxing poetical about Elric's ~milk-white hair~ and ~crimson eyes~, and this is such serious Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way shit I gotta laugh?

Will reading this RUIN Hawkwind for me?

I also wonder if there is a similar ~magic age~ at which one has to encounter Hawkwind for the first time

I have evangelised about Hawkwind forever but feel fairly sure I have never managed to get a single person into them. Maybe a track or two but not beyond that, so perhaps 13 really is the magic age to get into them?

I don't think reading Moorcock will ruin them for you.

Whhy does the namme of everyything in thiis bookk havve unneccessarry doubble letterrs?

I'm trying to think of how I first got into Hawkwind - I was a bit older than 13, but still very definitely in my teens. Maybe 17 or 18? There was this local punk rock dude that my girlfriend (and I, TBH) were kind of obsessed with - he played bass in the local noise rock band. Anyway, he loved Lemmy, and he kept raving about how great Hawkwind were - I think he played The Black Corridor for us? He used to recite the words all the time, for any occasion, and it just sounded like the most amazing thing I had ever heard.

So I had this idea in my head that Hawkwind were ~the coolest band in the galaxy~ already set in my head, before I ever heard an album by them.

I was 13, maybe 14 and a friend had bought "Warrior On The Edge Of Time" and hated it so gave it to me saying " you like weird stuff so might like this", which was odd as i don't think anything I was into at that point was at all weird.

But he was right and it was an epiphany. I can still remember listening for the first time to the part where "Assault and Battery" turns into "Golden Void" (which i always thought was a Mellotron but is actually Simon House's violin) and just knowing I was 1000% in.

Aw, that is such a good album! I'm kinda jealous you got to start with *that* one, at such a young age, because it is at this point probably my favourite of theirs? (When bands transition between two very distinct eras, I always find that the transition point albums are my favourites.)

I was looking for it all day yesterday and couldn't find my physical copy. (Maybe I lent it to someone; maybe I never had one and ripped it off a friend?)

Now of course I've got to listen to it on Spotify and try to find that point you describe - the general deep, intense, phaseiness of all of the sounds, how they mesh together in this cloud of wall-of-sound that is both unbelievably dense and absolutely lighter than air in the vaccuum of space...

Aw yeah, I just got there and listening for it carefully, I got shivers, man! There's a lifting, orchestral 'strings' sound, on top of the gurgling electronics sound, but also an incredibly strange almost shrieking horse-whinny sound (maybe it is Magnu of the Golden Mane?) that kicks in about 5:50 spirals up into the void - is that the thing you're talking about?

(It's so strange the way that I listen to this music with two minds at once - like, there is a sensible adult mind telling me that this stuff is completely and patently absurdly ridiculous, and then at the same time, there is some kind of childish wonder-mind that *always* wins out, and just thinks this is the most wondrous and awe-inspiring and magical thing I have ever heard?)

((There is this... vocal quality to The Wizard Blew His Horn that is *exactly* the same thing that I love about that Enigma record The Voice And The Snake we were all talking about the other week. It is totally ~Reading The Gospel In Church~ tone and it just does something to me, there should be incense and coloured lights and men in strange robes and everything is both fearful and amazing.))

Yes, around 5.50 is exactly the moment. Into the void with Magnu of the Golden Mane :-)

I have the two minds at once thing going on too. It is indeed absurdly ridiculous but also ecstatic, joyous, almost overwhelming, and yes, awe-inspiring and magical. I never tire of hearing it.

the last Hawkwind album I heard was "Amazing Sounds, Astounding Music". despite the title I did not find the sounds nor music all that great. "Kerb Crawler" is an excellent tune though

"Amazing Sounds, Astounding Music" is one of my favourites and I'm always perplexed as to why it gets so little love. Not even a bit of love for the mighty "Steppenwolf?"

Under skies heavy with snow
My eyes are convex lenses of ebony
Embedded in amber
I am a man-wolf
The fat bourgeois and his doppelganger
Are buried in their solid glare
Twin specimens of insect, set for display
I am a wolf-man

Of course it is "Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music"

idk...the grooves just feel so bare

I do love the lyrics to that tune of course

Hawkwind may not be a band for me

Haha, OMG those lyrics are beyond Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Calvert but alright, alright, Stirmonster I will give it a listen tonight!

Ha ha! To retread what was being discussed yesterday, it is the way those words SOUND / Calvert's phrasing that does it for me.

Hawkwind may not be a band for me

Not at all! "Astounding Sounds...." is much derided and many big time Hawkfans loathe it.

I think the bare grooves are what I love. It grooves in a way none of their other records do and i love the production.

it is worth noting that Dave Brock still to this day disowns it. He even apologised for it on the inside sleeve of their next album. He is wrong.

so then which later albums would you recommend

Post 1975 I'd recommend "Quark Strangeness & Charm", "PXR5" and the Hawklords album. Once we get past '79 apart from a few songs and "Church Of Hawkwind" (which i dig but is even more disliked by many Hawkfans than "Astounding Sounds"), I'm pretty much out.

Not even a bit of love for the mighty "Steppenwolf?"

Chiming in to say that this is one of my favorite Calvert tunes. Great lyrics, great performance.

Ha! It's really funny, how reading the lyrics on a page, I was convinced that was the worst song evah, but going back and listening to the tune - Robert Calvert's delivery, and how absolutely he embodies those ridiculous lyrics with complete intensity, combined with the atmosphere of the music (that violin!) - it's actually really moving?

Never judge a Hawkwind track by what it looks like on the page! Never!

Reading from Twitter that Nik Turner passed away yesterday :(

ah no! been going through a bit of a hawkwind phase of late too

Me too, totally hooked on 'We Took The Wrong Steps Years Ago', especially.

no!!! i hadn't heard. i had had a strange sense recently we'd lose an OG hawklord but i guess not so strange as they are getting on. really sad.

there are so many great NT tracks. this live D-Rider is just epic. his voice! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSmya2TR5wc

he was the heart of early hawkwind. the gentle out-there heart. last time i saw him with them was early 80s and he was on stage on rollerskates, with the craziest hair looking as if he was in the wrong band. the OG Acid Punk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkqCF3RUuJY

a sad lack of hawklove.

RIP Nik Turner - need to mention his band after Hawkwind - Inner City Unit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APTqKK2YV3s

Still reeling from the sad loss of my friend Nik Turner. I’ve known Nik for nearly 50 years. He was one of a kind. An inspiring and warm hearted human being, always game for musical adventures. With his departure this world is a lesser place, as his Spirit rides free. ♥️

— Steve Hillage (@stevehillage) November 12, 2022

i forgot how good this is (reminded by the hillage tweet).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63S4x_xBwDI

this one too, with Miquette Giraudy on vocals

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U05HunYjwM

hadn't heard either of those before, very cool

listening to 25 Years On by Hawklords right now, where have you been all my life you beautiful new wave/solo eno/space rock/berlin bowie concoction??

See also Hawkwind's "Quark, Strangeness and Charm"

so a local bar here does a "prog night" every week and I befriended enough people there to feel obligated to go to the first ever performance of a Hawkwind tribute act (I mean nearly the entire band goes to this). they played at 11 PM and did like 5 songs off Space Ritual to a very young and very very drunk crowd and it fucking KILLED. and they say Hawkwind just isn't cool anymore (disclaimer: only like three of us knew who Hawkwind were)

Cool

Hawkwind is always cool, it is "they" who are wrong

Imagine doing the Del/Dik Mik roles in a Hawkwind tribute act, what fun!

... and Stacia?