Genre: Opinion/Argumentation

Search form Is there any love for Hawkwind? Submitted by tiggerlion on 14 November 2012 - 9:22pm We are all living in the 70s, after all! I confess, I loathed them at the time. A friend dragged me along to a gig in Liverpool. I wasn't keen even when he promised a stripper. They were all muddy noise and bad smells to me. The 'stripper' turned out to be the six foot two Stacia, whose breasts are not human. The sight of her in the weird lighting effects gave me nightmares for years. Some bloke got up and spoke some nonsense I couldn't quite catch. All in all, I was unimpressed. Still, my friend persevered and they grew on me. I found I could tolerate their lyrical gibberish. They were one of those groups in the early 70s that were neither prog nor rock nor jazz nor pop. Their grooves were colossal. There was a lot of parping & squawking. Yet, there was a group collective that was really very disciplined. My favourite album is In Search Of Space. The opener, You Shouldn't Do That is sixteen minutes that Sun Ra would be proud of. Master Of The Universe is earning them big money from the latest Ford car advert & good on them. We Took The Wrong Step Years Ago features the loudest acoustic guitar I've ever heard in my life. I positively enjoy listening to all six tracks. ... loving the Hawkwind for many years, especially the excerpt on the first Greasy Truckers album, just immense... and as Lando says, Space Ritual... Lemmy in Hawkwind is one of the two reasons that I started playing chords on me Rick4001 (Lemmy in Motorhead is the other...) We may have been at the same gig, although I'm sure they played there a number of times. I saw them in either 1973 or 74. I thought it was pretty awful. You sum up the musical content well. The much vaunted lightshow was pretty disappointing - perhaps it wasn't working properly that night - but it seemed to mostly a projection of planet Earth plus some strobe lighting. The visuals, including the album covers, were provided by Barney Bubbles. He got a lot better, especially when he worked for Stiff. The covers for This Years Model & Do It Yourself are great! He also directed videos for EC & Squeeze that were excellent. OOAA All throughout the gig I was somewhat perplexed by the sight of a - to my 15-year-old eyes at least - quite elderly couple sat in the front row. I couldn't imagine that they'd really enjoyed Sonic Attack very much. After the show I went up and asked them if they'd had a good time. "Oh yes," one of them replied, "we're Mr and Mrs Brock." Lets see; serious grooves, monster riffs, primitive synthesisers, naive '1st time on acid' adolescent sci-fi lyrics, blokes who look the person who sold you an underweight 1/8th, blobby psychedelic lights and proper epilepy-quality strobes, and a fanatical greebo / old-freak audience (anyone who likes to get out of it, really). What's not to like? Anyone who doesn't at least appreciate all of this has no heart, and, as Nigel Molesworth once said, I DISKARD THEM. And threw everything at it. Michael Moorcroft, Stacia & Bubbles. They got a proper krautrock bassist, they employed their roadie. The band founder members met whilst working fair grounds. They knew how to put on a show. They were more than a mere band, they were a travelling circus! Avoid the 1970 debut album, they hadn't really found their sound (or established their milieu, if you will) at that point. All you need are the second, third and fourth albums plus the magnificent Space Ritual double live set. There are some really great moments after 1974, but from that point on they basically repeated themselves, with ever diminishing returns. So it's part of the selfmythologising - there's lots of that in song titles and so on. Oh, and I'd get the debut as well - first 5 albums are the best run they ever had. Hall of the mountain grill is almost Pink Floyd in places. You can pick up the expanded editions for a few quid each. Personally I'm less keen on PXR5 and Quark Strangeness and Charm (although Hassan I Sabbah is a must have track) - the start of trend following as they tried to go New Wavey. Their metal period is probably their worst, although I do like "Live Chronicles". The triple Epoch Eclipse is a pretty good compilation - all the stuff you want, and some alternative takes make it worth while even if you go back and get the full albums later on. In Plymouth around the late 80s, as a callow youth. Walked into the Academy, and almost the first thing I saw was someone falling down the stairs. He got up to reveal a T shirt with the message "Say Yes To Drugs" and proceeded into the auditorium. You had to be well pickled to appreciate fully. Englands half-assed answer to The Grateful Dead or something. "Say yes to drugs", and apparently all your teeth fall out. And to the man that suggested that Stacias "norks" were "not a pretty sight" (never heard that word) - I have to report that this may very well be an error in your judgment.'Cause they always looked Ok to me. In fact as gimmicks go, they were considerably better than OK. I remember seeing a documentary where Lemmy claimed that Stacia, with whom he apparently shared a room on tour, used to pick "goggle eyed" boys from the audience. So you may have missed out there. Not least because under the present conditions, it would have made a very amusing trial. Right, so what you're saying is, it's perfectly acceptable for a full-grown woman to have sex with a sixteen year-old boy. And you imagine a "smile" on the face of the abused child after his harrowing ordeal - humiliatingly abducted in a public place, taken to a dingy backstage area, forced to strip naked and sexually service a woman old enough to be, at the very least, his mother's sister? Probably plied with narcotics? I find the whole thing odious and reprehensible, and consider your comment a belwether post for the sad decline of the Afterword blog, once a safe haven for pastry-fanciers and ukelele-botherers. Euro psychedelia was much better musically than the US's west coast version, IMHO. As noted before, barring a few bits where they wig-out properly, I find the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, (etc.) too much like generic bar bands, with insufficiently groove, jazz or gritty noodling for my tastes. Spirit were OK, mind, and Todd Rundgren's psychedelic phase was much more like it. You want hippie wierdness and proper evocations of the psychedelic experience, stick with Gong, Hawkwind, and their offshoots - and Todd's "A Wizard, A True Star". Stoned bluegrass music is most definitely isn't. Particularly their poppier moments....PXR5...Astounding Sounds etc.....the Hawklords album, half of which is ace, the other not....the live version of Shot down in the night taken from the Live 79 Tour (i think)...and this, from their mid-to-late period in 1992 I've only knowingly heard two Hawkwind songs in my life. One is the obvious one. The other is Night Of The Hawks. If my memory is not mistaking me, it actually got some airplay on Radio One when it was released as a single. It's pretty primitive stuff. I bloody love it! Been a bit of a fan but not seen them live. They topped the bill that night but had the misfortune of being preceded by a young upstart band from Essex who basically blew them away. Wilko skittering across the extended stage wings, Brilleaux at his growling best. After that, preparing myself for "sonic attack" by a load of prog lords didn't seem the best way to spend the rest of the night so repaired tentwards along with many others. too bad you didn't wait around to see them - maybe the weather was a factor. Actually I can't recall if it rained on the Friday. It fair bucketed down on Saturday night during Yes, but they were still amazing. Lou Reed didn't appear, though he was on the bill. Nor sadly did Richard & Linda Thompson. Wishbone Ash were the headliners on Sunday, but couldn't top the magnificent set by Robin Trower. under a copy of the Reading Evening Post about 4 oc'clock in the middle of Caravan and had the weirdest dream through Soft Machine and the Mahvo's. I do recall the Albertos redeeming the evening though. Those were the days when you bagged a spot and stayed there all day. Not like the nomadic musical grazing that is Glasto today.