“Lemmy Gave Me Lice!”
Renée Berg, aka Miss Renée, remembers the magic of dancing with Hawkwind.
To build anticipation each night, every audience member received a joss stick and a free programme containing lyrics and the tongue-in-cheek Extract From The Saga Of Doremi Fasol Latido, wherein Hawkwind are depicted as spacelords returning to Earth to enforce peace. Before their entrance onstage, resident DJ Andy Dunkley would lead the audience in a countdown. But nothing could adequately prepare them for what was to come.
The band’s new backline of 2,500 watt stacks blew the PA in King’s
Lynn, which meant that at subsequent dates, including the following night at Dunstable’s Civic Hall, the band were forced to use only one of the stacks.
But that didn’t diminish the synapsefrazzling impact that the Space Ritual presentation had on the audience, judging by reports from this show.
With its distinctive ‘flying saucer’ roof, the Civic Hall had been the venue where the Silver Machine promo was shot, and given its relative proximity to
London, the Dunstable date was chosen to be press night for representatives from all the major music papers. The frustrating paucity of live Hawkwind films taken during the 1970s means that, other than a few photographs, their reviews remain the best depiction of just how amazing the Space Ritual shows sounded and looked, and how powerfully they affected the audience.
For Martin Hayman at Sounds, both sound and vision were overwhelming: “Spidery figures wield guitars and crash drums in the flickering half-light at the end of the hall, packed with a dense mass of people, a sort of freaks’ convention… The throbbing bass hits the base of the spine like a subliminal battering ram, the high frequencies from the synthesiser and the sax attack the front of the head, the flashing lights that frame one second the ancient mysterious shrine of Stonehenge, the next the Hawkwind insignia, disintegrate into sharp geometrical edges and shadows.”
“Igrew up in the San Francisco Bay area and I knew everybody in the local scene because I worked at [community promoter] the Family Dog. People started asking me to dance for them. So I approached Jerry Garcia and said, ‘Can I dance onstage with the Grateful Dead?’ And he said, ‘Sure, just don’t cross the lines of energy.’
“A friend had a free ticket to London, and I ended up busking under the flyover near Portobello Road. A guy who worked for a London paper saw me dancing and wrote an article, which somebody from United Artists read. I then got a telegram from Doug Smith about auditioning for Hawkwind. They saw me dancing for about three minutes and hired me on the spot. They were very surprised I had no idea who they were!
“I wasn’t choreographed, but there were times when I was meant to be off and onstage, and times where I would wear particular costumes. But the first gig we did, I did the entire set! I remember being incredibly nervous, I’d never done anything quite that organised. My favourite movement was doing circular back bends, balancing on one foot then slowly raising the other leg over my head.
“I enjoyed performing with Hawkwind, it was just magic. But to be perfectly honest, Stacia and I didn’t get along on that tour. We didn’t communicate well. She was heading towards being a punk rocker – she liked to keep a knife in her boot – while I was more of an airy fairy, hippie dippy sort of girl.
“I really hit it off with Nik Turner and Bob Calvert. Bob introduced me to Holst, and that just blew my freaking mind! We’d drive around in this Mercedes bus and The Planets would be playing, and it was just amazing to see England with that in the background. We’d get up early and jam in these big fields of heather – Nik would play his flute, Bob would improvise poetry and I would dance. My legs would get all scratched up!
“I also got head lice from Lemmy! He had really long hair and I leaned my head on his shoulder in the bus and got lice. I called my mother in the States and said, ‘What I want for Christmas is for you to go to the pharmacy and buy all the bottles of [American lice shampoo] A200 you can lay your hands on.’
So I got 40 bottles sent over and gave it to everybody!”
Nik Turner
For John Pidgeon at NME, “The audience reacted physically to each mood created onstage, [and] became part of the spectacle. Whenever the stage gave off electronic pulsations, the crowd became uneasy, restless, perturbed; when the characteristic heavy metal riffs started up, the sense of relief was physically manifest, the audience on their feet with tendril arms swaying above their heads. The lights were directed behind the band onto a screen where a montage of meteorological, astronomical, sonic and electronic images flashed, and in front onto the three dancers…
“The effect on the band, obscured between this sandwich of light, was to eliminate individuality in the same way as their music does. Solos do not remain in the mind, instead a combined force of the incredible.”
Martin Marriott at Disc contrasted Hawkwind’s performance with standard rock gigs: “Here was a band which had created a unique situation. No cries of, ‘Rock’n’roll’, no billiard cues flailing, just good feelings and peace signs… From the first twitterings and rumblings of the set, every person there was totally involved in the Ritual… By the end, 2,000 people were up on their feet, arms over heads, clapping. To say that the audience left satisfied would be this year’s understatement.”
It was a sentiment echoed by Record Mirror: “The group’s performance was nothing short of sensational… [When] the band left the stage, five minutes of solid stamping continued until Hawkwind returned and smashed the collective skull with a riotous version of Silver Machine merging into You Shouldn’t Do That, its insistent beat and breathless chant whipping 2,000 spaced-out lunatics into a final ecstasy of whirling and shouting.”
Despite being 50 years ago now, the memories of many fans who attended
L-R: SIMON KING, DAVE BROCK, LEMMY KILMISTER, ROBERT CALVERT, DEL DETTMAR, DANCERS STACIA AND MISS RENÉE, AND
NIK TURNER POSE FOR A PORTRAIT CIRCA 1973. the Space Ritual shows remain vivid. “I was fortunate to see the Space Ritual at Middlesbrough Town Hall,” recalls Grahame Lake. “This certainly wasn’t a bunch of acid-head hippies playing drippy post-60s rock. It was an aural and visual assault that left you blown away. The vacant looks on everyone’s faces as they left highlighted how exhausting and brutal these concerts were.” Pete Zabulis saw them in Derby: “I’d never seen anything like it before!” and Ian Whittaker speaks for many when he says, “The Blackburn gig set me off on a lifelong journey.”
Meanwhile, Adam Jones, who saw them in Newcastle, comments on the legendary volume of these shows:
“My ears have only just recovered – it certainly cleared the fog on the Tyne!”
Traversing the country inevitably led to occasional logistics issues. As John May recalls, “The tour bus broke down on the way from Leeds to Bristol, and we had to hire three taxis from Birmingham, travelling in a high-speed convoy to the Bristol gig, and arriving late, with the audience in a frenzy.
The front of the stage was so low that people were mobbing us!”
Doug Smith