Higher than God’s hat

Andy Roberts finds that Hawkwind’ssongs were steeped in fortean themes

Hawkwind: Days of the Underground

Radical Escapism In The Age of Paranoia

Joe Banks

Strange Attractor Press 2020

Pb, 496pp, £22, ISBN 9781907222849

If there were ever a band who embodied the psychedelic British hippie underground it is Hawkwind. Often pigeonholed as “space rock”, but in reality much broader and deeper than that, their music and band philosophy grew out of the heady days of late-Sixties psychedelic and social experimentation and has been the soundtrack to hundreds of thousands of LSD trips ever since.

But peer beneath the driving rhythms, swirling electronics and Barney Bubbles’s psychedelic light shows and Hawkwind reveal themselves at heart to be a band steeped in fortean themes. The vasty deeps of outer space were their primary concern, but this was also a knowing metaphor for inner space, a destination requiring only a tab of acid and not an Apollo rocket! The subject matter of Hawkwind’s lyrics reflects their many fortean interests; early songs such as “Orgone Accumulator” hinting at knowledge of Wilhelm Reich, while other songs from the 1970s touch on space and time travel, ecological disaster, a prelapsarian utopia, telepathy, replicants, levitation, mind control, strange phenomena, altered states of consciousness and beyond. These themes were drawn together in Hawkwind’s 1972 Space Ritual album and tour which transcended space and time to create a physical and aural experience which took the percipient off planet and out of their heads. You were never the same again!

Between 1971 and 1986 Hawkwind intermittently collaborated with prolific fantasy writer Michael Moorcock who provided occasional vocals, lyrics, and inspiration. His fortean concept of the Multiverse and the Eternal Champion chimed with Hawkwind’s psychedelic vision, and Moorcock contributed to several albums including Space Ritual and Warrior at the Edge of Time on which he intoned prophetically over trippy ambient space rock. Always ahead of the game, in 1971 Hawkwind pre-figured society’s fears of impending ecological doom in their song “We Took The Wrong Step Years Ago”, with “Look around and see the warnings close at hand/Already weeds are writing their scriptures in the sand”. And they could be funny too. Listen to Quark, Strangeness and Charm’s lyrics about the problems Einstein had getting laid, for instance!

Above everything else, Hawkwind were the musical and lifestyle vanguard of a social movement, a somewhat blurred crusade of people at odds with modern society who yearned for more, for better, for different, for individual and collective freedoms and the right to get higher than God’s hat! Hawkwind gigged relentlessly throughout the 1970s, becoming the “house band” for hippies and freaks, often playing at free festivals held at ancient sites such as Stonehenge where they provided a soundtrack of British Tribal Music for the socially dispossessed and musically curious.

Joe Banks has done a fine job of capturing Hawkwind’s zeitgeist perfectly, and with its hugely informative text, numerous photographs, interviews, disc and filmographies and track-by-track dissection of their albums it can’t really be faulted. ★★★★★