Space rock pioneers Hawkwind, who formed around Dave Brock in the late 60s, pursued a ramshackle course round the cosmos as luminaries Lemmy, Nik Turner, Robert Calvert and Michael Moorcock came and went. By the mid 70s the band appeared to have imploded, as those who were there told Prog in 2011.
“People look back now and think of Hawkwind as this sort of hippie peace and love group. But it was never that,” says Lemmy, one of the band’s original self-styled ‘captains.’ “We weren’t looking for peaceful – we were looking for horrid. The spaceship was always broken down with us.”
Characterised too often throughout their career as the poor man’s Pink Floyd, derided for their dearth of recognisable hits and seeming inability to keep a steady line-up (changing almost album by album), history tends to overlook the contribution Hawkwind made to the story of rock in the early 70s – in particular what became known retrospectively as the Ladbroke Grove scene.
It was a loose conglomeration of groups that occupied the squats and crashpads situated in and around London’s Notting Hill Gate, with names like Quintessence, Heron, The Pink Fairies, Big Baby and others even more obscure.
They began as they were apparently meant to go on: by accident. Dave Brock, a busker from Feltham in Middlesex, was already 27 years old and married with a baby son when, in the autumn of 1968, the original line-up of Hawkwind first “started to sort of congeal around me.”
He would sit at home with a reel-to-reel and his battered old Harmony Stratotone guitar, “drop some acid and just plonk away with an echo-unit. That was the idea behind it all – sitting at home as you go off into your LSD trip, and thinking, ‘If only I could put this to music...’”
Joined by early members such as guitarist Mick Slattery (“the one who first spiked me with acid”) and drummer Terry Ollis (“a downers freak”), the most significant early member after Dave was 28-year-old sax and flautist Nik Turner.
“I was responsible, to a large degree, for getting people like [sleeve designer] Barney Bubbles involved in the band, and [vocalist] Robert Calvert,” he says. “I’d get the band doing as many benefits and things like that as I could.”
It was also Nik who helped recruit a 25-year-old miscreant named Michael Davis (aka Dik Mik); one of several “chemist robbers and speed dealers” who Nik knew from his days “selling psychedelic posters on Margate beach.”
Their first manager, Doug Smith, ran Clearwater, a Ladbroke Grove-based company he describes as “eleventh-hour management; very chaotic.” He recalls: “The only other company that was in touch with the new sort of psychedelic groups was Blackhill, who were managing the Floyd, and also later took an office in Notting Hill.”
Portobello Road was the focus, playing for free under the arches and along the green. “We did a lot of benefits,” says Dave. “And we used to give away copies of hippie bible Frendz, whose office was also in the Grove. We did things with the Hells Angels, White Panther Party, Urban Guerrillas, Greenpeace.”
Often they were accompanied by the Pink Fairies, and ‘Pink Wind’ gigs became a staple of the Saturday afternoon Portobello market scene. “They really complemented each other,” recalls fellow Ladbroke Grove alumni and member of The Deviants, Mick Farren.
“One was an incompetent guitar band and the other was an incompetent psychedelic band. Together they made this huge fucking noise together, and everyone was just extremely happy that the police hadn’t been called and we’d all been arrested.”
We were this sort of crazy people’s ideal of a band. I certainly think Michael Moorcock saw us like that
Nik Turner
When Hawkwind’s only live number, a 15-minute improvisational onslaught they dubbed The Sunshine Special, landed them a deal with United Artists (advance: £400), they made sure the subsequent album reflected their music accurately by spiking their engineers’ drinks with LSD. “We didn’t actually do songs,” says Dave. “It was free range music. A bit of avant-garde electronics and, er, chaos!”
It was the second album, 1971’s In Search Of Space, that brought them to the attention of the outside world. By now the band had shed Slattery and Ollis and acquired the captains: noted science fiction author and fellow Grove resident Michael Moorcock; Frendz artistic director and future sleeve designer Barney Bubbles; lighting wizard Jonathan Smeeton (aka Liquid Len); former Hendrix roadie and speed freak Lemmy; and not least, Stacia, the voluptuous 22-year-old space goddess who liked to dance naked on the stage.
“We were this sort of crazy people’s ideal of a band,” says Nik. “I certainly think Michael Moorcock saw us like that.”
Dave agrees: “I used to read all his books; so for him to say, ‘Is it all right to come and do some poetry?’ was like, ‘Fucking hell, what an honour!’”
But the most significant addition came with the arrival of a South African-born poet, writer, mimic, singer, actor, comedian and serial manic-depressive named Robert Calvert. He helped turn Hawkwind’s simple psychedelia into authentic rock theatre – whether in blackface and top hat, or stripped to the waist and wielding a broadsword, or dressed simply as Valentino in leather jodhpurs, he was always more of an orator than a singer.
We could never have been as big as the Floyd… Hawkwind was always on the other side of everything
Dave Brock
As Calvert explained at the time: “It all works up to a nice piece of spontaneous theatre. It’s great to be able to improvise something like that at the drop of a hat. Rock is a very theatrical thing, what with body language, gesture, movement, mime and the like.”
Or as Lemmy puts it now: “Hawkwind were dangerous, man. We used to give people epileptic fits. We used to lock all the doors in the hall. And we used to have the strobes pointed out at the crowd. Five strobes from the stage all slow, wocka-wocka-wocka. We used to fuck people up good, man.”
In the summer of 1972 they even had a hit single with Silver Machine, recorded live at the Greasy Truckers Party in the Roundhouse in February. “It just reverberated everywhere and we had a hit in virtually every country in the world,” says Doug. “Only you didn’t realise it until 25 years later.”
It was at this point that Hawkwind – had they not been Hawkwind – might have become as globally successful as Pink Floyd, Yes or Genesis. They certainly had the show, as evinced on their still superlative 1973 live double album, Space Ritual.
“We could never have been as big as the Floyd,” insists Dave Brock. “But it’s whether you’ve got a torpedo mechanism to bring it all down. Once you do that, you’re on the other side. And Hawkwind was always on the other side of everything.”
The band was split into the speed camp and the psychedelic camp. Me and Dik Mik were the untouchables because we liked speed
Lemmy
Calvert left in 1974, nominally to pursue a solo career – but, in reality, says Doug, “because he was fairly off the rails by this point. He’d ring up in a complete state, telling me he was Christ and pinned to a wall. I’d have to spend hours talking him down.”
Without Bob, the band recorded two of their most focused and direct albums yet, 1974’s Hall Of The Mountain Grill (after the café of the same name in Ladbroke Grove) and 75’s Warrior On The Edge Of Time. For Doug, it was “the magic band. They were the key to it all. And as soon as you took one of those elements away – which turned out to be Lemmy – you lost it all.”
In May 1975, en route to a Toronto show, Lemmy was busted on the Canadian border for possession of cocaine. He’s always claimed that the bust “was an excuse to get rid of me.” According to him: “The band was split into the speed camp and the psychedelic camp. Me and Dik Mik were the untouchables because we liked speed.”
Speed, Dave concurs, was regarded as “poor show – ‘irksome,’ as Bob used to call it.”
What we had in common was trying to take people on journeys with sounds
Dave Brock
Lemmy says the only reason the band put up the his bail money was because “they couldn’t get [Pink Fairies bassist] Paul Rudolph over quick enough to do the show. So I did the show, and at 4.30 in the morning I was fired.”
Whatever their reasons, dismissing the future Motorhead leader was the moment their luck began to run out. Their 1976 album Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music saw the return of Bob Calvert; but it was a lacklustre, directionless affair. When Dave then had Nik fired – in retaliation, he claims, for Nik’s own furtive attempts to oust the guitarist – the writing was on the wall.
But the influence Hawkwind had on groups everywhere who wish to make music ‘outside the box’ continues to this day. A fact both Brock and Turner acknowledge with some bafflement. “I never really saw us as part of the progressive rock scene,” says Dave. “I was always coming more from psychedelia. Looking back now, though, I see that what we had in common was trying to take people on journeys with sounds.”
“Progressive rock is such a difficult thing to pigeonhole,” adds Nik, “but there were definitely aspects of what we did back then that veered into progressive rock, for sure – and vice-versa.”
Brock chuckles: “Sometimes it was good and sometimes it was bad. I used to go and see Arthur Brown and it was the same. But you’d always go back again because it was always dice. I always found that interesting in lots of bands, the ones that were daring.”
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