YOU’D BETTER BELIEVE IT
Hawkwind’s latest foray into the unknown is a reworking of their classics with orchestral arrangements… but will it sink or soar?
Dave Brock is sat at home at his Devon farm, wondering if Hawkwind’s latest creative diversion will be greeted as a stroke of maverick genius or a baffling wrong turn. Road To Utopia is a reworking of nine vintage Hawkwind numbers with various brassy and bucolic arrangements by noted friend of The Wombles, Katie Melua mentor and all-round pop polymath Mike Batt. Ever wondered what songs such as Quark, Strangeness And Charm or Psi Power would sound like with mariachi trumpets on them? No? Well, you’re about to find out anyway.
For some, the result might be sacrilegious. For others, though, it’ll be exactly the kind of unorthodox, slightly WTF move that makes you love Hawkwind all the more.
And the meeting of minds that spawned it all took place at that renowned celeb-spotting mecca, the US Embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square. On any given morning you can find all walks of life queuing up cheek-by-jowl at a highly un-rock’n’roll hour of the morning to attend their ‘interview’ for an American visa.
And during the hours you spend waiting, you never know who you’ll end up chatting to.
“I looked round, and there was
Mike Batt and Katie Melua queuing behind us,” Brock recalls.
This was back in 2007, Brock’s wife and Hawkwind manager Kris
Tait reminds him, but Batt and Brock stayed in touch, and an unlikely collaboration has now borne fruit. After Hawkwind began rearranging some of their back catalogue to play acoustic sets before their main shows, the idea of more adventurous arrangements began to develop. Batt came on board, and that was when Brock realised that he was signing up for an experience far removed from his usual studio practises.
“Mike’s worked with a lot of famous stars and he’s a clever guy,” the 77-year-old explains, “but it was a bit of a different experience for us working with him. We should have known because Kris said, ‘Did you know he did Eve Of Destruction with Lemmy [when Batt was conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in 1998] a few years back?’ Apparently Lemmy said, ‘I did my vocals and I thought that was it,’ and then Mike said, ‘Can you do ’em again?’” and Lemmy said, ‘Why? I’ve already done it!’ But Mike is a stickler for getting things right!”
This was a challenging concept for Hawkwind, not a band known for their adherence to military discipline or rigid song structures.
“It was like two extremes meeting,” Brock says. “We were working with musicians who have to have everything sight read, and that’s totally different from us because I can’t read music – never have. We all play by ear, whereas Mike writes it all down on a score. One time Magnus [Martin] was playing this lovely guitar bit at the beginning and Mike shouts, ‘Oh, come on! You’re two bars out!’ For fuck’s sake, we can be 10 bars out – if we’re into it, we just carry on!”
Nonetheless, the result is some pretty interesting reworkings of the Hawkwind back catalogue.
They take the insistent, apocalyptic drone of The Watcher as it’s often played on stage (which was already some way removed from the Lemmyfronted 1972 original) and introduce bluesy guitar to prowl and growl around the central bass groove, adding an extra sense of menace. It’s a touch that comes courtesy of a mutual friend of Batt and Brock, no less a star guest than Eric Clapton.
“We’ve known each other for years,” Brock explains. “When I used to go busking down Portobello Road, he had an apartment in Notting Hill Gate and I’d pop round for cups of tea. We got back in touch when someone from his management was asking the story of how we met for someone’s biography. I was already playing quite bluesy harmonica and guitar on that track, so we asked him and he said, ‘Yeah, I’d love to.’ If we can get someone like that on our record,” he laughs, “who knows what’s next?”
Soothing strings and woodwind seduce on We Took The Wrong Step Years Ago, despite the absence of the sonic swirl that surrounds it on 1971’s In Search Of Space. But as the song continues, the vocal begins to sound increasingly forlorn, as if smiling ruefully at the naïve idealism of the original.
“One time Magnus Martin was playing this lovely guitar bit at the beginning and Mike Batt shouts, ‘Oh, come on! You’re two bars out!’ For fuck’s sake, we can be 10 bars out – if we’re into it, we just carry on!”
“Yeah, when Mike got hold of that one he actually put a bit of [Vaughan Williams’] The Lark Ascending on it, I believe, and changed it into a bit of a classical piece, which is really nice…”
It makes you listen to a very familiar song in a slightly different way.
Similarly, Brock and Batt’s reworking of The Age Of The Micro Man (one of three numbers from Brock and Robert Calvert’s 1978 Hawklords side project) turns into a more fully realised version of the brief reverie we heard 40 years ago. It’s slowed down to funereal pace, and the epic piano and space rock undertow of the original are stripped back and replaced by mournful cello and whirring clocks. Later on, drowsy sax evokes the paranoid trippiness of Dark Side Of The Moon-era Pink Floyd.
The vocal sounds older and more resigned, which suits this tale of an ‘insect man who pushes buttons and takes back the can’. Then added to that is a new spoken-word monologue wherein an officious voice suggests “humanity needs to be… cleansed, I think”, adding an extra layer of sinister, mechanised dystopia to the whole affair.
“When we originally wrote it,”
Brock explains, “we had in mind this recurring scene in the Fritz Lang movie Metropolis, where they’re moving the clock hands round. We were going to do a whole show based around that story, and the theme of people going to work and doing the same old thing day after day. In the end, that inspired the new version of this song. I also got a mate of mine to play all this lovely jazz saxophone over it, but Mike was like, ‘I don’t like that, we can’t have that!’ [Laughs] So he only used a bit of it, which is a shame – but that’s life. Next time!”
Statements like that suggest Brock relinquished creative control over this project to a greater degree than he usually would, and he admits he sometimes bowed to Batt’s superior experience as an arranger.
“We did the bulk of it remotely,” he says. “We’d have these very long phone calls where he’d sit at a piano and I’d sit with my guitar, and we’d play pieces to each other. ‘This is my arrangement, Dave, and the violin does this…’ he’d say, and play all the different parts on piano, and meanwhile I’d say, ‘I’ve got this part here – go on, Mike, put your fairy dust over this.’”
More often than not, it works.
Down Through The Night’s orchestral sweep at first creates an anxious, highly strung accompaniment to some tentative, scratchy acoustic footsteps. Then an ebullient brass section blasts out of the depths to lift the central riff, before some ringing guitar histrionics propel us into a maelstrom of heavy, cacophonous noise. It then disintegrates into the cosmos before a backdrop of what sound like Monty Python comedy clips. Curious.
And if some tracks divide opinion and don’t appeal to every Hawkwind friendly ear out there, you still have to hand it to the band for refusing to take the safe option.
“If you were an artist, you wouldn’t paint the same pictures with the same colours every time, would you? It’s the same with playing live. You have to keep changing or you become a tribute to yourself. We did a gig in Jodrell
Bank not so long ago with a Pink Floyd tribute band and apparently Floyd had given them the okay to use their original backing tracks – I couldn’t believe it! They played everything exactly the same as on the records and I thought, ‘What’s the point?’
Fair enough, play the same numbers, but not all the same every time. We always play everything different.
I don’t even listen to the originals any more – they’re different songs now.”
One thing that’s noticeable is that all the tracks on Road To Utopia are from the 1970s – is that the era of the band Brock is fondest of?
“Well, at that time I was writing a lot of stuff with Bob Calvert,” he says, “and between me and him we came up with some quite wonderful things together. He really brought something unique to the band, certainly lyrically.”
It’s just gone 30 years since Calvert, Hawkwind’s resident poet and allround agent provocateur, passed away, and meanwhile, another core member of the group, guitarist Huw Lloyd Langton, went to meet his Master of the Universe in 2012. What does Brock think they would make of this unusual creative detour?
“They’d love it! Seriously, they loved to do something a bit different like this. If only we could get some of those guys from back then playing this stuff – imagine Lemmy playing with Eric! Guess they’ll just have to form their band in the sky, won’t they?”
Brock speaks warmly of his ex-bandmates, with the notable exception of Nik Turner, whom he’s vowed never to reconcile with, due to his attempts to tout the Hawkwind name around America and, in Brock’s view, ‘ruin the band’s credibility’. He’s saying nothing further this time to suggest anything’s changed on that front. Either way, here we are, barely a year away from the 50th anniversary of Hawkwind’s formation, and the guitarist and now only part-time frontman is the last founder member remaining. But he’s not considering the final curtain any time soon…
“I’m always aghast when anybody suggests we’ll go beyond the next gig. Then Kris says, ‘Okay, next year we’re playing the blah blah festival in Sweden,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh for fuck’s
“if you were an artist, you wouldn’t paint the same pictures with the same colours every time, would you? it’s the same with playing live. You have to keep changing or you become a tribute to yourself.”
sake!’ But if I can hang on through, who knows how long we can go on for…”
It’s certainly no mean tenure, especially given the well-documented recreational habits the band have indulged in over the years. Does the head Hawk still dabble?
“Yeah, but the best way to think is that a little is better than too much. I have a vegan diet and that helps a lot. Meat is probably the worst thing considering the crap stuff they put into animals, and I don’t drink milk. So there you go – I hope that’s a lesson to you, young man! [Laughs]
“But seriously, I think you can take everything within reason. I don’t drink that much but I like a fine wine, and I like to smoke my odd bit of marijuana. I think Tim Leary did that actually before he died – he rolled a grass joint on his death bed, didn’t he? I’m thinking, ‘Well, that can’t be too bad!’”
The first priority for Brock and the boys now, though, is to get their act together for a string of autumn dates billed In Search Of Utopia: Infinity And Beyond, rolling out the new album live with Mike Batt and a full orchestra. More surprises, it seems, are in store.
“Mike’s written a score for it,” Brock reports, “but there are a couple of new tracks people haven’t heard, and Dibsy [Bassist/frontman Mr Dibs announced he was departing Hawkwind in August via Facebook after this interview took place.] is doing a couple of poems.
“There are going to be a few pieces that are really quite unusual, with the orchestra and Mike’s arrangements. And we’ll be playing some electronic stuff through that. There are parts that are pretty weird and experimental. I even wanted to get the audience to be the choral society, doing backing vocals. If we can make it all work, it could be pretty interesting.”
Nonetheless, it’s clear that the band remain outside their comfort zone.
“Oh yeah, I tell yer, we’re all viewing it with trepidation after the experience of making this record. But we’ll be good boys and knuckle down – Mike will be there with his stick, saying, ‘Look here, you’re one bar out!’”
Joking aside, though, there seems to be a genuine apprehension on Brock’s part regarding what the Hawkwind faithful will make of it all. But he does at least have some reassuring words for those who prefer their space rock the way it used to be.
“I dunno what response it’s gonna get, but I will tell you that the next album we do will be totally different to this – back to big, heavy, three chords.”
Until then, though, strap yourselves in for another long, strange trip.
Road To Utopia is out now via Cherry Red. See www.hawkwind.com for more.