IN SEARCH OF HAWKWIND 

So in a fit of nostalgia for my old Ladbroke Grove stomping ground I spent rather more money than I anticipated picking up a first edition copy of Hawkwind’s “In Search Of Space” - complete with ‘flight log’ (this item being what made it more expensive as, in almost every 2nd hand copy that turns up, the ‘flight log’ is missing). Now over half a century old, this cultural artefact has such a strong flavour of its particular time and space and atmosphere, I figured it was time to give Hawkwind a reassessment. The cover is an elaborate visual production: a die cut fold out with photographs and lyrics and credits, an enigmatic aphorism on the back (“Technicians of spaceship Earth. This is your captain speaking. Your captain is dead”). The 24 page illustrated ‘flight log’ contains a multitude of pictures - space scenes, Stonehenge etc - and consists of the various ramblings of poet and author Robert Calvert on such subjects as time and space travel and the dormant period of cattle ticks - presented in the typeface favoured by International Times, the Underground newspaper. It is a curiously ornate and wordy document. I can imagine that few people read it all the way through. However, it is never less than thought provoking and at no time does it patronise its potential audience. It is an authentic piece of psychedelic sc-fi gobbledygook and, as such, deserves to be revisited and enjoyed. 

So what of the music? On one level, to anyone even remotely familiar with the psychedelic music of the late 60s and early 70s it could be described as generic. In other words, it’s a bunch of stoned freaks making a racket. While this is undoubtedly true, what interests me at this distance is what this racket actually consists of. What are the rhythms? The note choices? Where does it come from, this music? Side One throws us in at the deep end with a 16 minute THING titled “You Shouldn’t Do That”. It sets up a very percussive and anxious groove and soon enough admonitory voices are reciting the title over and over. You shouldn’t do that because they “cut your hair, you get no air, you’re getting aware…” The sound is very processed. Primitive synthesisers make swooshing noises (Hawkwind’s signature sound), the saxophone plays through a wah-wah pedal, the bass acts as drone and pulse, the drums are strangely undermixed, the guitars churn through fuzz and wah. Every so often the whole ensemble comes together to play a militaristic staccato riff. The atmosphere is paranoid and foreboding. The rhythm goes in and out of phase which acts as an audio trompe l’oeil, so the listener is not sure where the ‘one’ has gone. But by this time, if the music has been loud enough and there has existed enough room, the listener has danced themselves into a kind of whirling dervish state, certainly too far gone to notice where the rhythms have shifted. This music is community music. It has a function and it exists to provide a soundtrack to a lifestyle. 

Mick Farren once opined that it was rather a shame that Pink Floyd became the house band of the UK counterculture as their music was so cold and alienating. Syd Barrett may have twinkled very brightly for a very short time but even he was pre-occupied with space - the jolly madness of “Bike” notwithstanding. The first track on the first Pink Floyd album is “Astronomy Domine” and their theme tune (and therefore the theme tune of the nascent UK underground) was “Interstellar Overdrive”. The idea of space exploration must have been incredibly exciting in the late 60s, before the moon landing. Obviously a great many devotees were exploring inner space via psychedelic drugs so exploring outer space was the obvious corollary. Four years later, in 1971 when “In Search Of Space” came out, the audience for this kind of exploration had coalesced into a hardcore. The fashion followers had long since abandoned hippie as a look, weekend hippies had abandoned the ideals of the movement and returned to the open arms of capitalism, the teenage runaways who could go home to their parents had done so and many of the rest had cut their hair and got ‘proper jobs’, leaving their hippie dabbling behind and hoping there weren’t too many photographs. Those left were the true believers, those who had nowhere else to go, the anarchists, the full time squatters, the hippie proletariat who had burned all their boats in the ‘straight’ world and who habitually faced persecution from the police and complete non-comprehension and hostility from the general public. They scattered all over the UK in little pockets here and there but in London they centred around Ladbroke Grove. And Hawkwind lived there too, with them, right in the thick of it. Accessible and available, a people’s band - to a certain kind of people. They were not alone. Quintessence shared the audience and the location but where they had God, Hawkwind had space. Quintessence’s music is light and airy, full of good intentions and holy offerings, Hawkwind’s music is oppressive, dark, possessed of a grim determination to look The Void right in the black hole. It also contains a strange solipsism: “I am the master of this universe, the winds of time are blowing through me”. If space is infinite and we are infinitesimal, then perhaps the reverse is true? “We Took The Wrong Step Years Ago” as a title sums up the mood rather well. The rhythms are mostly four square on a robotic pulse but with enough syncopation to be danceable. There is no showing off in this music, no virtuosity, no flashy solos - which is interesting given that the early 70s were a time for flashy show off solos. It seems the music exists to serves the aspirations of its audience - to get as far out as possible in every sense. 

I see and sense all this now but I rather looked down my nose at Hawkwind in my youth. I enjoyed “Silver Machine” when it was a hit but I never took it seriously. It was too lumpen, too plodding. Even then, I liked my rock’n’roll to swing and “Silver Machine” didn’t swing so much as lurch. Even so, I picked up an ex-juke box copy for 20p or so and found that I enjoyed the ‘B’ side more. “Seven By Seven” featured an immaculately enunciated recitation by Robert Calvert from which I learned the word ‘fortuitous’. It also had a comically dramatic guitar solo that went up and down the scale of A minor and which I figured out how to play on my cheap Les Paul copy. My friend Graham at school got the bug and started buying their albums. Up till then he’d been my source of Bowie and general Glam so this was quite a departure. He bought “Space Ritual” on cassette and we’d listen to it on our tiny mono battery operated cassette players. To me it all sounded the same, like a psychedelic washing machine, but he would go glassy eyed and talk about science fiction. He would put imaginary space landscapes cut out of sci-fi mags on the wall next to his pictures of Bowie and make me mix tapes of this stuff. (I should mention that Graham was very poor and earned all the money for this himself by working crappy jobs after school and at weekends.) He was my mate. I used to regale him with Yes and Curved Air and Caravan so we were about even. After I had got good enough on acoustic guitar to play through a few songs from start to finish, he and I would try our luck busking on Portobello Road. Graham would play cheap bongos and sit cross legged and I would sing Beatles songs and suchlike. “Silver Machine” was not in our repertoire. That would have been the summer of 1976. When we’d finished we would go and have tea at the Mountain Grill cafe and look for members of Hawkwind. Four years later, Graham and I found ourselves at the Stonehenge free festival, playing with our own psychedelic band, Treatment. Although I felt welcome and at home, I knew I was just a tourist amongst the TeePee people, the Tibetan Ukrainian Mountain Troupe, the Here and Now/Alternative TV hippie punks. These people were full time. And there were Hawkwind, of course. Playing a three hour set with all the hits - “Hurry On Sundown (“see what tomorrow brings. Well it may bring war…”), “Master Of The Universe” et al. For awhile there, it seemed like they were following me around. Every free festival I went to, there they were. Reliable, you might say. Then free festivals were outlawed in the most vicious way possible by the Thatcher administration (“The Battle of the Beanfield”) and I never saw Hawkwind again. 

For fans of the group, the history and development has been well documented. Anyone who wants to knows where to look. For me, listening to “In Search Of Space” now conjures up a very strong, intoxicating and specific atmosphere that I remember as being something that I very much wanted to join in with in my early adolescence (when it was already all but over). There’s something compelling about it. I realise now that the reasons I took Hawkwind for granted back then were actually their strengths. They were reliable. Their lack of instrumental prowess a kind of do-it-yourself, self-taught, pre-punk swipe at all the Rick Wakemans and the John McLaughlins. You don’t have to be able to play all those notes. Just tune up, tune in and go. If the music was uneasy it reflected uneasy times but still it reflected a community. In this, they were triumphant in a way that is quite inconceivable nowadays. Hardly surprising then that it evokes nostalgia.