With an expanded edition of Hawkwind’s epochal self-titled debut album just released, Prog takes a look at the band’s first year, from playing blues in the back of pubs to forging a revolutionary space rock sound.
As would be the case throughout their career, Hawkwind were heading in a radically different direction from just about every other band in Britain as the 1970s dawned. In The Court Of The Crimson King had recently set the standard for bands of a progressive persuasion, while the first two Led Zeppelin albums had mapped out the hard rock road that many others would travel.
But for Hawkwind, the experimental imperative of the psychedelic era was still their guiding force, long after it had supposedly fallen out of fashion. From their origins as a community project based out of west London’s Ladbroke Grove, Hawkwind would rapidly mutate to become the key band of the countercultural underground, playing a sound that combined minimal riffs, hypnotic bass lines and pounding rhythms, psychedelia retooled for a new decade.
Their self-titled debut album was a milestone in their development as both an anti-establishment institution and an intuitively avant-garde jam band. From the very start, Dave Brock intended that the band was going to be different. He recalls that his previous group – the Famous Cure – had already nailed down one half of the equation, playing “freak-out music with long solos and weird noises, relentless drumming and bass thundering on.” But he was becoming interested in the possibilities of electronic music.
“I had a tape machine with a lot of old Stockhausen stuff on it,” he says. “We used to make tape loops, four or five feet long, running around the toilet door handle, and then we used to play on top of them.” “We” refers to him and Mick Slattery, also ex-Famous Cure and the new group’s lead guitarist. Next, a rhythm section was recruited: John Harrison on bass, who somewhat incongruously had previously played with the Joe Loss Orchestra, and Terry Ollis on drums, just 17 years old but very keen.
Rehearsals began in the summer of 1969, with extended improvisations around blues standards such as Howlin’ Wolf’s Spoonful. There were sporadic gigs, such as a show at Chiswick Town Hall and a private party at the famous Eel Pie Island Hotel, but Ollis recalls the nameless band mainly “playing in pubs, doing a couple of tracks at the end of somebody else’s gig, wherever we could, really.”
The band started to evolve into a more experimental unit with the addition of Nik Turner. Originally hired as their van driver, Turner became a member when it was discovered he had a rudimentary talent on the sax. He’d recently returned from Berlin, where he’d had a life-changing conversation with Tangerine Dream’s Edgar Froese. The late Turner recalled: “He said, ‘Look, you don’t have to be technical to express yourself. You’ve got to express yourself with what you’ve got and what you are.’ And I thought, ‘I’d like to do that in a rock band.’ Free-jazz in a rock’n’roll band – that’s how I saw Hawkwind when I started playing with them.”
The band’s fortunes changed almost overnight when they performed at Notting Hill’s All Saints Church Hall on August 29, 1969. The story is mythologised as the band – announced as ‘Group X’ – gatecrashing a gig headlined by High Tide and convincing Clearwater promoter Doug Smith to let them play a 15-minute slot. But Brock has more recently stated that their appearance was prearranged. What isn’t disputed is the impression they made on underground tastemaker John Peel, who happened to be in attendance.
Enjoying the band’s clangorous, propulsive improvisation based loosely around The Byrds’ Eight Miles High (or John Coltrane’s India, depending on who you speak to), Peel advised Smith to “get involved”, and it wasn’t long before the group – rechristened Hawkwind Zoo – became the latest addition to the Clearwater roster.
Now playing regularly around London, they went into EMI Studios in Abbey Road to record a demo. In contrast to the intense, sometimes chaotic music of their live shows, they decided to showcase their more melodic and accessible side to potential labels. Since the dissolution of the Famous Cure, Brock’s main source of income had been as a busker on the streets of Notting Hill and London’s West End, and the demo’s lead track was one of his kerbside numbers, a rousing folk-blues called Hurry On Sundown.
The other tracks reflected two of the band’s key influences: the rollicking Kiss Of The Velvet Whip was The Velvet Underground’s Venus In Furs via the Middle Earth club, while a faithful cover of Pink Floyd’s Cymbaline was a tip of the hat to the band’s most obvious forebears.
But it was as a live band that Hawkwind generated the most interest, particularly as Brock’s vision of playing rock music with electronics had been realised with the arrival of Richard Michael Davies, aka DikMik. Previously their roadie, he’d been given an ‘audio generator’ – actually an oscillator used for testing radio kits – which he experimented with via a Watkins Copicat echo unit and various pedals. The unearthly electronic howls, shrieks and whispers he wrangled from this basic set-up complemented the band’s brainstorming psychedelia perfectly.
We’re like a magnet with the power to repel or attract. We all realise this is a new level of communication
“That’s space rock, isn’t it?” says Brock. “Listen to what DikMik’s doing on his audio generator – he’s playing it like a theremin. What he was doing was quite innovative, though it’s always been glossed over.”
DikMik was pivotal to the growing perception of Hawkwind as an ‘electronic music group,’ with the extreme tonalities he produced sometimes having peculiar effects on the audience. “I was trying to turn people on, to blow their minds,” he said. “I understood what sound could actually do in terms of how ultrasonics affect the brain and subsonics affect the body. Especially if people were drunk down the front of the stage, you could use subsonics to make them physically sick if you wanted to – which I think I achieved a couple of times on purpose!”
Brock was also fascinated by the trance-inducing power of the music Hawkwind were now making, as he told Sounds at the time: “We’re like a magnet with the power to repel or attract. I think we can all sense the force and realise this is a new level of communication.”
(Image credit: United Artists/EMI)
Inevitably, the regular ingestion of hallucinogenic substances also played a significant role in shaping the early band’s sound. Turner – who at the time claimed to take LSD every day – told Music Now: “Our music is derived from all the trips we’ve ever had. In the music somewhere there’s horror, beauty, paranoia, ecstasy, even randiness; every sort of human mood. So like a trip, our music is difficult to relate to with words. You can’t really put us in a bag.”
Having signed to Liberty Records in January 1970, putting the Hawkwind sound into a bag was exactly what was attempted the following month in Trident Studios as they began recording their debut LP. Luckily they had a sympathetic producer in ex-Pretty Things guitarist Dick Taylor, who’d even played live with the band a few times as a temporary replacement for Mick Slattery when he’d hit the hippie trail to India.
The essential thing was that each song had its structure – even when they went into quite strange places, it was always ordered chaos
With talented teenager Huw Lloyd-Langton recruited as their new lead player, some of the band’s more ‘conventional’ songs were laid down relatively quickly. These included the two tracks that would bookend the album – Hurry On Sundown and the more acidic Mirror Of Illusion – plus a gutsy, driving version of You Know You’re Only Dreaming, which didn’t make the final cut (but appear on the expanded edition).
However, it became apparent that such an approach wasn’t going to work for the majority of their set, which was a mostly vocal-free suite of spiky riffs, clattering rhythms, fierce soloing and moody atmospherics. The solution was to simply set the band up in the studio and press record. Speaking to Melody Maker, Turner said: “We tried double tracking llaying down separate parts, but it was so sterile that we ended up just playing it live; doing two or three takes of each number and picking the best, with a little polish added here and there.”
Beginning with the spooky ambience of The Reason Is?, the suite progresses through the hard jamming Be Yourself and nightmarish Paranoia before climaxing with the crazed voyage into inner space of Seeing It As You Really Are. As Dick Taylor told Hawkwind biographer Ian Abrahams: “What was quite amazing was that each piece had such an individual character. When I heard them I thought, ‘How do they do all this?’ But the essential thing was that each song had its structure – even when they went into quite strange places, it was always ordered chaos.”
Released on August 14, 1970 in a garishly trippy gatefold sleeve, Hawkwind didn’t exactly set the charts on fire, but received positive reviews. Melody Maker called their electronic sound “interesting and exciting” and the album “tremendous,” while Music Now reckoned that “the whole thing is so beautifully integrated that the fact one title has ended and another begun ceases to matter.” John Peel even described it as “optimistic, uplifting music” in Disc And Music Echo.
But it was the band’s appearance at the Isle Of Wight Festival two weeks later that cemented their reputation as leading lights of the UK underground. Wildly oversubscribed, with 50,000 paying audience members augmented by another half-million hippies, heads and freaks camped outside the perimeter fence, Hawkwind played for free in front of and inside an inflatable tent called Canvas City; five days of lysergic jamming together with fellow travellers the Pink Fairies. Turner painted himself silver and wandered around the site, his picture turning up in many of the articles written by the national press about this new youth phenomenon.
We regarded ourselves as being on the other side, an anti-establishment band. That’s what we’ve always been
A few weeks later, Hawkwind’s first John Peel/BBC session was broadcast, that version of Hurry On Sundown featuring some fiery fretwork from Lloyd-Langton – alas, the young guitarist had already left the band after suffering an acid-induced meltdown at the Isle Of Wight. With the decision taken not to replace him, Hawkwind’s sound changed again, becoming darker and more spacey. This was evident in their second BBC session in November 1970, which yielded the astonishing improvisation We Do It and signposted the way to the future.
By striking against the tide, Hawkwind had created a unique role for themselves, both as sonic explorers and countercultural figureheads. As Brock sums up: “We were a people’s band. We used to regard ourselves as being on the other side, an anti-establishment band, and that’s what we’ve always been, really.”
The expanded edition of Hawkwind is on sale now.
