Hawkwind: Days Of The Underground

★★★★ Joe Banks STRANGE ATTRACTOR. £22 Space-rock’s sonic terrorists get their own multidimensional directory. If you were travelling from the future, into the radical past of Ladbroke Grove in the 1970s, you might require a gazetteer to navigate the musical and political underground. This appears to be the role that Joe Banks has adopted in his attempt to analyse and understand the strange, head-spinning history of this unique countercultural collective. Aware that he is telling a Rashomon-style tale with as many versions as members, he divides the book up into alternating sections: Chronology; Album; Essay; Interview. It may disappoint those looking for a standard soup-to-nuts biog but it works in its intended aim, to make sense of the chaos, pick out the numerous themes at work in the music and give all the surviving members a chance to tell their own version of the saga. All it needs now is a set of Top Trumps so we timetravellers can battle for the soul of the band all over again. Andrew Male