Hawkwind

This one, to be precise. 1956 Conn 16M "Director" tenor. ;-)

I asked a certain ex Hawkwind sax player if he'd like to play on my last album. Got the e-mail here, yes, he'd love to, he said. I'd offered him six months free royalties.

Then I thought, Dave, what the hell are you doing ? This is not about money. I'd actually wanted to reach out to a larger audience by using his name, but then I thought, nope, this is totally wrong. 

So I did the sax bits myself. ;-)

Hi Tom, just think, at the time, the "underground scene" in the UK involves kids with dreadlocks, baggy jumpers and dogs on bits of string all pretending to anarchically wreck the system.

So Hawkwind brought an album out which would pander to their fantasies.

When you look at it like that, it all gets a bit "commercial" rather than "music / art", doesn't it ? Now, I'd have no problems with a band being commercial, but Hawkwind always sold themselves as some kind of Peoples Band, playing free gigs, supporting good causes, didn't they ? So it all becomes very hypocritical. 

Hawkwind will probably keep on going after Dave Brock kicks the bucket, because... it's a brand name. They just don't know when to stop, which really should have been around PXR5. The fans / fanatics hang on because nothing sounds exactly the same, and a proportion think they're "underground" in some kind of proto-terroristic (I refer you to Urban Guerilla Bob Calvert) anti- establishment, edge of music manner. The band are about as underground, musically innovative and anti-establishment as an old people's home. They are now propped up by those who are too stoned/lazy/hidebound to care. 

What a sad, but inevitable, end. 

https://brotherhoodofthemachine.bandcamp.com/album/trip-hazard

Hawkwind are often cited as being a highly influential band by UK musicians - especially John Lydon. They were also labelled as the "godfathers of punk", basically because of the energy they played with.

However. When you look at the discography, Hawkwind were *not* innovative. They merely reflected the tastes of the day - they actually were a commercial venture right from the start and a lot of the "anti-music" stuff is just propaganda. 

For example, the first album is a reflection of the psychedelic era. It then becomes more krautrock in nature... proper krautrock albums were difficult to find in the UK in the early 1970's (and most were better than Hawkwind's imitations.) By 1979 and the rise of Bloody Heavy Metal, the band were releasing shockingly bad albums such as "Live 79". They just followed trends. 

Part of the Hawkwind mythology is that they did a lot of drugs. I've been to Hawkwind conventions and yep, I can tell you now that they certainly did. However. The sad old stories about them being utterly out of their minds have been somewhat beefed up..... you can't play at all when you're that wasted. 

Mind you, listen to "Bring me the head of Yuri Gagarin" at some point. It's a bootleg which shows what Hawkwind were really like for a lot of early 70's gigs. Terrible. ;-)

However.

Hawkwind started out as a fantastic, novel and utterly different band. Then - after 1976 or so, they sold out and produced lazy, predictable, boring music. Now they're just Dave Brock's retirement fund.