![]() As she remembers, “I just said to Nik, ‘Can I get up and dance?’ And they made some silly remark like, ‘If you take your clothes off and paint your body’, something like that. She became a human lightning rod and focus for Hawkwind’s audio-visual onslaught after performing with them at a gig in Redruth, Cornwall. Yet the new addition to the band who made the greatest impact on stage was dancer Stacia Blake. His first reading with the band was Sonic Attack, a public information parody that would increasingly define Hawkwind’s musical philosophy. Moorcock, too, began to perform with them at free gigs held under the concrete arches of the Westway, the newly erected flyover that runs through Ladbroke Grove. Foremost of these was Robert Calvert, a friend of Turner’s from his hometown of Margate, who began to perform his space age poetry on stage with the band, and worked in the background with design genius Colin Fulcher, aka Barney Bubbles, on a fantastical sci-fi concept where the album became a two-dimensional spacecraft unmoored in time.Ĭalvert also introduced the band to Michael Moorcock, author and editor of ‘new wave’ science fiction magazine New Worlds, who memorably described Hawkwind as “barbarians with electronics”. It was also around this time that a number of important collaborators fell into Hawkwind’s orbit. Audibly, the months spent on the road had transformed the looser, trippier sound of before into a shockwave of concentrated, feral intensity. ![]() Prior to recording their second album, Hawkwind previewed some of their songs in a session for John Peel’s Top Gear show, broadcast in April 1971. We lived what we believed and practised what we preached.” Drugs were a major factor, of course, with saxophonist and frontman Nik Turner acquiring a large supply of liquid LSD, which he gave away to the audience: “I think it really compounded the band’s popularity, because people still come up to me and say, ‘Wow, that gig you did in 1971 changed my life!’ And I say, ‘You sure it wasn’t the acid?!’” ![]() “We were all out of our heads, and so was the audience! We really connected. “We used to pack out town halls, they just loved us,” says Ollis. This relentless touring schedule paid off, with the band building a significant fanbase around the country. ![]() We used to have our old yellow parcel van where we’d sit in our sleeping bags because we didn’t have a heater!” “That’s what brings a band together, constantly playing and travelling,” says Brock. In those days, anyone with long hair was a drug addict.”īut the siege mentality that Hawkwind developed also helped turn them into a tight-knit communal and musical unit. Every time we arrived back in the early hours in our van, we’d be stopped by the police in Notting Hill and searched. As band co-founder Dave Brock says, “Guys with long hair were always getting picked up, always being searched in the street. And the band got their first piece of national press when the Daily Mirror reported the fracas that ensued when teenage drummer Terry Ollis was caught playing naked at the Breaks Youth Centre in Hatfield.Ī potential confrontation with The Man was always around the corner and would shape the lyrical content of their forthcoming album. ![]() After a gig at Manchester University in January, the band were assaulted in their dressing room and required medical treatment, while at the Malvern Winter Gardens in March 1971, they were forcibly ejected from the venue after giving away free copies of underground magazine Frendz, ‘subversive literature’ in the eyes of the local authorities. Yet as heralds of the counterculture, playing the provinces was often a perilous enterprise. ![]()
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