Rocking on the Edge of Time

Hands up all those who’ve heard of Hawkwind? OK, one … two… hey, you at the back! Have you got your hand up or is that a joint you’re waving around?

Now, I suspect that among those who have heard of Hawkwind, we can identify two camps: the poor sods who go “Cool, man! Love ’em!” and the even poorer sods who roll their eyes and hope like hell someone will change the subject. As is common knowledge among my musically inclined friends, I’m of the first persuasion (though not actually known for saying “Cool, man!” all that often). Still, I have something like 50 Hawkwind CDs in my collection and have listened to the band’s product since about 1971 when I bought their second album, In Search of Space, on the basis of the sci-fi design on the cover. Yes, Hawkwind played “Space Rock”! They practically invented it. It was spacey, loud and, while often as pretentious as the output of Yes and early Pink Floyd, much more working-class (or perhaps that should be under-class). I was (and still am, of course) thoroughly into science fiction, so buying that first album seemed like a good idea at the time. The good idea continued through Space Ritual, Doremi Fasol Latido, Hall Of The Mountain Grill, Warrior On the Edge of Time and assorted other albums with less space/fantasy-oriented covers.

As the years passed, so the band’s style changed (especially under the influence of the literate if troubled Bob Calvert), though there was always a raw, psychedelic quality to the music that stamped the albums with the unmistakable Hawkwind style. It probably came from guitarist/vocalist Dave Brock, pretty well the only consistent inhabitant of the sub-cosmic starship — and its self-appointed captain. They even had science fiction writer Michael Moorcock as a semi-official member for a while, with many of their songs inspired by his work, especially Warrior On the Edge of Time and Chronicles of the Black Sword.

Hawkwind’s numerous albums — studio and live — always grabbed me by the pineal gland (or whatever part of the brain it is that gives you a drug hit without ingestion of actual drugs), even when the rough-edged nature of much of their output was rougher than usual. Somewhere in the ’80s I lost track of them, however, and assumed — without any research whatsoever (no internet then, you see!) — that they’d ceased to be.

I remember the moment, sometime in the ’90s, when I dropped into a local secondhand CD store and stumbled upon Space Bandits, an album by Hawkwind from 1990. I was amazed and strangely excited. They were still alive and well (more or less)! I thought the album was cool, too — and, curious, searched the internet to see what they’d been doing all the while. At this point I discovered that not only hadn’t they stopped producing albums and touring, but that their output had been prodigious. OK, a lot of that prodigiousness proved to be unauthorised compilations or badly recorded live performances, but even so, the official catalogue was enough to keep me busy. Their most recent studio album, Take Me To Your Leader, came out in 2006, still exploring scifi themes.

Yet despite all the fanaticism that has resulted in my acquisition of a drawerful of Hawkwind CDs, I’ve never known much about the band. They came to Australia once, in 2000, and I saw them with fellow Hawkfan Bill Congreve (and, unbeknownst to me, anti-Hawkfan Rob-stalker Cat Sparks) at the Metro in Sydney. The set was… well, messy. A shame, but that’s the way it goes.

Right now, though, I know more about Hawkwind’s history than I ever have before, and this is why:

For the past few weeks I’ve been reading a massive tome called The Saga of Hawkwind by Carol Clerk — a book I excavated from a remainder store in Melbourne while attending the recent National SF convention. The book traces Hawkwind’s history, from their pre-Hawkwind Group X beginnings through to the 2004 line-up. It’s a fascinating read, as much a social history of English psychedelic culture as a biography of the band itself; an epic tale of rock ‘n’ roll, idealism, drug-induced chaos, Traveller culture, the free-festival movement, police persecution, infighting, friendships destroyed, formed and re-formed, adhoc decision-making, litigation, fractured realities, cross-purposes, rock ‘n’ roll poverty and sheer persistance.

Clerk depicts their history as a dense miasma of emotional turmoil as band members — and there have been an abundance of them over the years, in the form of drummers, bassplayers, vocalists, lyricists, guitarists, dancers, lighting artists and designers who have come and gone… and sometimes come and gone again and again — engaged in battering heads, idealisms and drug habits in an inspiring effort to create music out of chaos.

I recommend it to anyone interested in the band or in the British underground rock culture of the late ’60s and beyond.

Or at least one particularly spaced out aspect of it.