Dec 14

Hawkwind

HAWKWIND
 
 
Hawkwind  are an English rock band, one of the earliest space rock groups.  Their lyrics favour urban and science fiction themes.  Formed in November 1969, Hawkwind have gone through many incarnations and styles of music.  Dozens of musicians, dancers and writers have worked with the group since their inception.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
While in my 20’s (in the late 1970’s), I got to know three brothers in Raleigh; and the youngest of them was really into music.  Unlike the last time, when I was still in high school, I was a little more grown up; I still didn’t really take notes, but I would often buy records by some of these bands.  The bands that he introduced me to include the Pink Fairies and Hawkwind, still two of my all-time favorite groups; Styx; Be-Bop Deluxe; and Kraftwerk. 
 
(March 2010)
 
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Long before Andy Colquhoun joined up, the Deviants were one of the leading “underground rock” bands; their 1967 album Ptooff! is a classic in that little known genre.  The band sprang up in the British psychedelic melange that spawned Pink Floyd, Tomorrow, Hawkwind and several other like-minded bands; the epicenter for the scene was the UFO Club (pronounced “oo-foe” in an interview of Mick Farren at the club that is on one of their CD’s).
 
(August 2011)
 
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I told the story of seeing Queens of the Stone Age with my wife Peggy in my last post; but their third album in 2002, Songs for the Deaf is probably when I realized that something was really going on out there in the larger world:  rock music with a modern sound but with garage-rock roots.  The Queens had a rotating line-up of like-minded musicians and grew out an earlier band with similar sensibilities called Kyuss; while they didn’t sell a lot of albums, they were a pioneer of the stoner-rock scene of the 1990’s.  As the Allmusic article (by Eduardo Rivadavia) describes the band:  “[T]he signature sound [of] Kyuss [combined] the doom heaviness of Black Sabbath, the feedback fuzz of Blue Cheer, and the space rock of Hawkwind, infused with psychedelic flashes, massive grooves, and a surprising sensibility for punk rock, metal, and thrash.”  The connective tissue between the two bands is multi-instrumentalist Josh Homme, who also founded the popular Eagles of Death Metal. 
 
(January 2013)
 
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From my first exposure to his remarkable body of work back in the late 1970’s, Mick Farren became one of my very favorite rock musicians.  He has released solo albums, and he has been in a number of amazing rock bands also:  the Social Deviants, the Deviants, the Pink Fairies, and others.  Early on, Farren wrote lyrics for another of my long-time favorite bands, Hawkwind.  One of Farren’s long-time collaborators, Andy Colquhoun is a past UARA.  Mick Farren was also a prolific writer on a host of subjects and published numerous science-fiction novels.  The Allmusic entry on him by Chris True begins:  “To say that Mick Farren was a ‘jack of all trades’ is putting it mildly.”

 
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Allmusic states the musical and historical importance of Ptooff! well in their entry by Dave Thompson:  “Talk today about Britain’s psychedelic psyxties, and it’s the light whimsy of Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, the gentle introspection of the Village Green Kinks, Sgt. Pepper, and ‘My White Bicycle’ [by Tomorrow] which hog the headlines.  People have forgotten there was an underbelly as well, a seething mass of discontent and rancor which would eventually produce the likes of Hawkwind, the Pink Fairies, and the Edgar Broughton Band. . . .

 

“But the deranged psilocybic rewrite of ‘Gloria’ which opens the album, ‘I’m Coming Home’, still sets a frightening scene, a world in which Top 40 pop itself is horribly skewed, and the sound of the Deviants grinding out their misshapen R&B classics is the last sound you will hear.  Move on to ‘Garbage’, and though the Deviants’ debt to both period [Frank] Zappa and [the] Fugs is unmistakable, still there’s a purity to the paranoia.

 

“Ptooff! was conceived at a time when there genuinely was a generation gap, and hippies were a legitimate target for any right-wing bully boy with a policeman’s hat and a truncheon.  IT and Oz, the two underground magazines which did most to support the Deviants ([Mick] Farren wrote for both), were both publicly busted during the band’s lifespan, and that fear permeates this disc; fear, and vicious defiance.”

 

(March 2014/1)

 

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Sam Gopal formed a new line-up known simply as Sam Gopal that included as vocalist and guitarist Ian Willis, better known as Lemmy; this reorganized band released one album, Escalator in 1968.  Lemmy later played bass guitar for Hawkwind and, in 1975, founded the pounding British heavy metal band called Motörhead. 

 

(March 2014/2)

 

Last edited: April 7, 2021