slide sideways through Time

An interesting post from John Coulthart at feuilleton about Hawkwind, whose whole thing exists at that intersection of science fiction and music at Futuromania 's core.

"Hawkwind didn’t arrive as fully-fledged cosmic voyagers on their self-titled debut in 1970, it’s...  on their second album that the group myth takes flight, presenting the band as travellers through time and space, or “Sonic Assassins” as they were depicted shortly before the album’s release in Codename: “Hawkwind”, a two-page promotional comic strip created by Michael Moorcock and Jim Cawthorn. Many British bands were playing with space themes in 1971 but Hawkwind were the only group to adopt the trappings of science fiction as essential elements of their persona, elements that persisted from one album to the next. In Search Of Space is loosely spacey on the musical side—You Shouldn’t Do That is the earliest example of a future Hawkwind staple, the extended mantra-like groove over which synthesizers swoop and burble—but it’s the album package created by Barney Bubbles and (in the logbook) Robert Calvert that dispels the ambiguity of songs like Master Of The Universe and Adjust Me in a science-fiction scenario where the “space” referred to by the title is dimensional as well as cosmological, with the group’s flattened spacecraft embodied by the physical album. None of this is suggested by the music, you need to read the logbook as well, but the book and the die-cut record sleeve help to frame what would otherwise be a collection of disparate rock songs into a complex artistic statement."

The idea of Hawkwind is so exciting, isn't it? Underground band idealistically playing the free festivals all through the 1970s and beyond.... yet somehow also getting to #3 in the pop charts with "Silver Machine", Chuck Berry boogie blasted into the cosmic beyond...  families all across the nation seeing  the (slightly toned-down for public consumption - Stacia with clothes on!) film of them live onstage in a hall full of longhairs and Afghan coats *

Even the carrying on, and on, and on - like a British Grateful Dead, essentially unchanged in intent and philosophical outlook -  seems more impressive from this vantage point (more appealing than it would have seemed, say, in the 1980s - more on this in a minute). 

I suppose, though, I've always wanted to like Hawkwind more than I actually do. They are one of those groups about which it could be said, "they are ever off my turntable". I am not actually entirely sure I've listened to Space Ritual all the way through.... if I did (must have done surely?) I glazed out at some point in its live dubblenesss. And I even have  Ritual as a vinyl elpee gatefold reproduction-antique job blagged as a reward for participation...  in theory making the listening experience  so much more time-travel-to-1973 than just clicking 'play' at Tidal. 

What has been constantly (well, very often) on my "turntable" - or rather, computer screen - for years and years now is said film for "Silver Machine". It towers over everything else and the fact that it penetrated the mainstream makes it all the more monumental. **  

Part of the problem is exactly the thing that Coulthart mentions: "None of this is suggested by the music, you need to read the logbook as well". He adds later in the post: "The foundation of the Hawk-myth is to be found in the logbook, and in the Space Ritual tour two years later whose concert staging was planned by Barney Bubbles, and whose Bubbles-designed tour programme was a short SF story by Robert Calvert which elaborated upon Moorcock and Cawthorn’s comic-strip scenario."

But the music in itself and by itself doesn't quite transport you up into the cosmic ether in the way that say, the German groups of the same time do. 

Too much of it is as near to Status Quo as it is to Can. 

The relationship of the record artwork to the music is similar to Parliament-Funkadelic with their Pedro Bell comic strips and Overton Lloyd illustrations -  the similarity pertains also to each band's s.f. intergalactic fantasy mythos (groovy liberated guerrillas of space-time versus the repressed and repressive Blue Meanie overlords).... but the comparison also unfortunately stands in terms of the ratio of great tunes to formless blather (with Parliament-Funkadelic, averaging around 1-and-a-half to 2 per album). ***

(That Mythos is also similar to Gong's. And Jefferson Starship's Blows Against the Empire too I think. Post-1960s dreams of Revolution facing blockage from '70s reality and sliding sideways into fantasy - evasive inaction, you might call it). 

Not sure when I first heard "Silver Machine" - I doubt it was at the original time of it being a hit, when I was 9 - but I remembered that I had been intrigued enough by the idea of Hawkwind to review a CD 'best of' that EMI put out in 1990: Stasis: The UA Years 1971-1975. ****

The reference to Loop is me trying to tie Hawkwind into the current musical conversation, obviously... but one thing I remember is that Robert Hampson, in interviews, was absolutely adamant that Loop had nothing - nothing at all - to do with Hawkwind. 

Spacemen 3 said similar sort of things too.

The reason for that is easy to understand: unlike arcane Germans (or even better Swedish and Danish and Japanese longhairs) who were long gone and hard-to-find (some of this stuff you could only get as import compact discs from Japan, or as the original vinyl), unlike these oozing-cool obscurities... Hawkwind had never split up. They were very much still around, you would see their name in the concert advert section of the music papers, alongside names like Inner City Unit...  Hawkwind never stopped putting out records, never stopped gigging.... they could draw an increasingly bedraggled but diehard core audience deep into the 1980s.  So they were embarrassing. Unlike the Stooges or MC5, all the hippie associations wafted ripely off them.

Hawkwind touring extensively in 1982. Mind you, I can remember Tangerine Dream playing the Oxford Apollo - which is huge -  that same year. I did not attend, of course.

Hawkwind, touring the regions - Town Halls and Corn Halls a-go-go - extensively in 1988.  Now I wish I had gone but it would never have occurred to me.

(Funny thing is, though, if you take away the flute and the synth-bibbles, it really does sound quite close to Loop )

(The first - and possibly still only - group I can remember citing Hawkwind as an influence was World of Twist. And somehow that made WoT seem even cooler - all part of their retro-delic, plastique-fantastique, "camp sublime") 

Then in time that Kind of Thing became amenable to cool taste. (Julian Cope played his part, moving from the Krautrock and Japrock idolatry to rehabilitating the Groundhogs and others in the U.K.'s hairy-beardy Underground)

Over the years, I've heard Hawkwind's early classic run of studio albums... got some as CD-Rs in those days when you traded burns with fellow fiends, downloaded others...  and then maybe ten years ago or so, I bought this 3-CD Hawkwind thing, Parallel Universe, all stuff from the glory years, the UA / Liberty years...  this was around the same time I bought a similar 3-CD job for The Groundhogs and various other turned-on Ladbroke Grovers / hairy pink-fairy ish kind of things. 3-CD expansions of the original samplers put out back in the day by labels like United Artists and Vertigo and Charisma and Island, with outfits like Edgar Broughton Band and Man and Quintessence and Jade Warrior on them. 

But as regards that Parallel Universe 3-CD, not a lot of it has stuck with me.  "You Shouldn't Do That". A few others.

It all kind of blurs.

Rather like the ugly murky cover. 

For Carducci, that brown mushy murkiness - the cosmic mulligatawny swirl of it all - this is precisely what gives Hawkwind pride of place in his Rock and the Pop Narcotic pantheon of '70s Innovators.

But I think that "organic" laxness is what's lacking with Hawkwind - the stark articulation of the sound space so characteristic of English rock as it develops as studio artform as much as live praxis. ****

There's a line you can trace from The Sorrows "Take A Heart" and The Eyes's "When The Night Falls".., through Free, Sabbath, Led Zep... to The Groundhogs of "Cherry Red" and "You Had A Lesson". 

Riffs you can see as much as physically feel. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

* Filmed at Dunstable Civic Hall, I learn. Same town - and same venue, albeit renamed Queensway Hall - where I saw Killing Joke, for the second time, in 1983. Another example of Hertfordshire / Buckinghamshire long-hair culture. 

**  To borrow a formulation from Carducci, in reference to Steppenwolf.  Like "Born To Be Wild", "Silver Machine"  is so quintessential, so (in his words) "idiomorphic,"  as to throw the rest of the corpus severely into its shadow. It takes on a "all you need" stature. 

*** “… Doremi Fasol Latido, an altogether heavier set than previous albums. Conceptually “a collection of ritualistic space chants, battle hymns and stellar songs of praise as used by the family clan of Hawkwind on their epic journey to the fabled land of Thorasin” setting the band members as the heroes of a space fantasy saga wherein the Lords of the Hawk, having fought a losing battle for several years against the Bad Vibe squads in the age of the machine logic god Eye See Eye, departed from the planet, swearing to one day return to rid the world of evil, intending to seek help from the Great Mother and the Galactic Union.”--from the sleevenotes to Hawkwind’s Stasis: the UA Years 1971-75.

As I once wrote on Blissblog a cosmic aeon ago:

Hawkwind = the white Parliament-Funkadelic.

Barney Bubbles = the white Pedro Bell

Bad Vibe Squads = Sir Nose D'Voidofffunk

**** Actually now I think about it - I recall one of the Monitor crew, Chris Scott, was into Hawkwind. But I seem to only remember him playing me one of the offshoot releases: Captain Lockheed and the Star Fighters

I also just remembered Chrome were big fans of Hawkwind and that COUM/ Throbbing Gristle, if not influenced, certainly imagined early on trying to penetrate that scene, describing themselves in flyers as "psychedelic trash". Oh yes and another one, unlikely as it seems, A Certain Ratio claimed to have initially been influenced by Hawkwind before they discovered Da Funk.

*****

My considered assessment of strengths and weaknesses

Great to good: 

Simon King's drumming - and the sight of  him drumming.

The synths

The song and album titles

Stacia

Quite-good to middling.

The guitars

The bass (bit too much root-note meander .... very quiet and small in the mix)

The flute

Fair to Poor

Those washed-out vocals - like Francis Rossi if he'd kept on taking acid for years and years after "Pictures of Matchstick Men"... brain utterly blanched by bliss. 

The lyrics