DAYS OF THE UNDERGROUND - THE STUDIO AND LIVE RECORDINGS 1977-1979

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For a start, they were musically unique – there may have been parallels with some of the contemporary stuff coming out of Germany, but they were completely out on their own in Britain. But it wasn’t just that they sounded different – they acted differently as well, in the way that they were fiercely opposed to the “star trip” and how the traditional music business worked. They toured the country relentlessly and built up a genuine bond with their audience, inviting them to become part of a shared mythology. Just like the Beatles, they were a “revolution in the head” for many people, something which persists to this day. Not bad for a band memorably described in one early Melody Maker headline as ‘The Joke Band That Made It’. What inspired you to write ‘Hawkwind: Days Of The Underground: Radical Escapism in the Age Of Paranoia’? In Days Of The Underground, Joe Banks repositions Hawkwind as one of the most innovative and culturally significant bands of the 1970s. Rejecting the accepted narrative that views the band as one long lysergic soap opera, he shows us just how revolutionary Hawkwind were and how enduring their legacy remains. Profusely illustrated with rare and previously unseen archival material, Days Of The Underground will rewire your perceptions of Hawkwind forever.

Joe Banks: I’ve been a serious music fan since the age of 13. After school and university, I worked in music shops, sang in a band and made my own music. This of course meant that I was effectively broke most of the time, so in my late 20s, I bit the bullet and got a “proper” job in PR, which I did as a full-time career until 2013. Since then, I’ve been looking after my daughters while freelancing in PR. Oh, and passing myself off as a music writer.The period between February 1977 and June 1979 saw the recording and release of this trio of classic albums, which saw Hawkwind adapt to the changing musical times and adopt a ‘new wave’ approach both on record and on stage. As if we don’t get enough Hawkwind in various forms from beneath the Cherry Red umbrella (including an upcoming new studio album at the end of April) here’s a collection that pushes the boat out. The period between 1977 and 1979 when Hawklords continued to fly the Hawkwind flag is safely gathered in with a set of live and studio material from the era. Steven Wilson’s been at it again, with new masters/remixes of Quark Strangeness & Charm, PXR5 plus the Hawklords’ 25 Years On, all of which get expanded into a swirl of surround sound in 5.1 on the Blurays. Warrior On The Edge Of Time’, again courtesy of my brother. Everything about it – from the fold-out sleeve to the driving, Mellotron-soaked music – seemed incredible, and different from those other bands.

The classic story of having an older brother with a large record collection! I started off playing his Slade singles, and ambiently soaking up the music from his bedroom – Pink Floyd, Queen, Deep Purple, Judas Priest… “They were musically unique” MIT Press Direct is a distinctive collection of influential MIT Press books curated for scholars and libraries worldwide. Calvert rejoined the band in 1976 and the three albums-worth of material they recorded in 1977–8 – Quark, Strangeness and Charm, 25 Years On (released under the Hawklords name) and PXR5 – are among the best and most consistent they made. It’s the only period for which Calvert wrote almost all the lyrics, and his conceptual concerns, at once both future-facing and urgently contemporary, are more lucid and direct than any of the band’s other songwriters. While the ritual space chants are long gone, and the music is more structured and conventional, the radicalism – the offer of an alternative, rejectionist understanding of reality – is still very much there. In particular, the dark satire of Pan Transcendental Industries – developed by Calvert, again in partnership with Barney Bubbles, for the 1978 Hawklords tour, and drawing on the thinking of architectural theorist Rem Koolhaas – offers a prescient metaphorical critique of global corporate hegemony that’s acutely alive to the essential absurdity of hegemonic ambition. The tour programme came in the form of a corporate brochure for PTI, a business engaged in the industrialisation of religion; proof of PTI’s success, Calvert writes, is the fact that angels have now exchanged their wings for car doors. A DELUXE 10 DISC (8 CD / 2 BLU RAY) LIMITED EDITION BOXED SET FEATURING ALL OF THE RECORDINGS MADE AND RELEASED BY HAWKWIND AND HAWKLORDS BETWEEN 1977 AND 1979 FEATURING ROBERT CALVERT. The MIT Press has been a leader in open access book publishing for over two decades, beginning in 1995 with the publication of William Mitchell’s City of Bits, which appeared simultaneously in print and in a dynamic, open web edition.Or to give it the full title, Days Of The Underground – The Studio & Live Recordings 1977-1979. Almost as huge as the 10 discs brimming with content! FEATURING NEW STEREO AND 5.1 SURROUND SOUND MIXES OF ‘QUARK, STRANGENESS AND CHARM’, ‘HAWKLORDS – 25 YEARS ON’ AND ‘P.X.R. 5’ BY STEVEN WILSON. With that out of the way, let’s move on to what we have got here. As one would expect, the Steve Wilson remixes of Quark, Strangeness and Charm, 25 Years On and PXR 5 are excellent, clear, sharp and with great instrument separation, but all the while they manage to maintain some of the original recorded feel and atmosphere.

Disc 7 originally released in a different mix as Hawkwind As The Sonic Assassins (1977) and later appeared in more complete form on disc 2 of 25 Years On Whereas other bands used the emerging synthesiser technology as just another keyboard instrument, DikMik used an audio generator – at the time used by no other band in the world aside from New York’s Silver Apples – to create whole species of pure noise. Buffeting, whining and roaring on top of the pounding rhythms, it sounds like nothing so much as a pagan god of electricity thinking out loud to itself. Of course, you can’t discuss the band and the music without the characters that inhabited the band, and there’s plenty of quotes from contemporary interviews with Lemmy and Robert Calvert, both sadly no longer with us. With such huge personalities, the music that they made was big enough to include all of them. In lesser hands this could have been taking on too much, however in Banks’ skilled hands, he brings the story of Hawkwind to life, and most importantly through the interviews and the sociological and political essays he deftly describes and argues quite convincingly why Hawkwind could be considered one of the first UK punk bands. Your book focuses on Hawkwind. As one of the most innovative and culturally significant bands of the 1970s, what’s most unique about them?

Notes

This is a quite comprehensive set of this period in the band’s history, well presented with plenty to discover and enjoy. It also shows the band’s ability to successfully ride the rising punk wave and deliver a period covering what could be one of the highlights of their long career. This is a set that should attract the attention of fans, collectors and casual listeners alike. On one level, of course, it’s easy to view the over-arching conceit as no more than risible narcissism. But Calvert, I think, was aware of that and embraced it, bringing to it a theatrical sensibility and a profound sense that the search for any meanings beyond your own self, your inner space, was always ridiculous. You never quite know where the irony ends and the seriousness begins. The idea itself has a kind of ‘pataphysical absurdism: under Calvert’s direction, Hawkwind took a pulp aesthetic and pursued it with such single-mindedness that it became imbued with real meaning. He brought the existentialism to what Banks calls the band’s “existential protest music”. They now aimed, Calvert said, to “hypnotise the audience into exploring their own space”.

This mighty book by music writer Joe Banks covers what many people consider to be Hawkwind’s golden era (from the formation of the band in Ladbroke Grove in 1969, to 1980’s Levitation) and what a decade (and ride) it was aboard the Hawkwind Silver Machine.

That just leaves two Blurays, from which rises a previously unreleased film of the Hawklords Uxbridge Uni show in ’78 and a slightly bizarre appearance on the Marc Bolan TV show. A handful of promos and a nicely compiled (as usual – comes as standard I guess now as the expectation) booklet and assessment. A grand compilation, but we’d expect no less – compilers of the ‘light touch’ Genesis BBC Broadcasts take note…. Disc Seven has a live recording from the Sonic Assassins at the Queensway Hall, Barnstable on 23 rd December 1977. This concert has been remixed from the original master tapes, and a fine job has been done, the sound quality is good and clearly shows a band that are together, tight and have not lost any of their Hawkwind impetus in their performance of classic Hawkwind songs. Nearly a decade after the release of the acclaimed surround mix of Warrior on the Edge of Time, a limited edition 8 CD / 2 Blu ray boxed set from Hawkwind that showcases the band's tenure with Charisma Records in the late 1970s is released in March 2023. On this deluxe box set titled “Days of the Underground: The Studio & Live Recordings 1977-1979” fans will find the music that breaks new ground, producing a series of classic albums that adapted to the changing musical times with invention and flair. Specifically, the boxed set features three albums: “Quark, Strangeness and Charm,” “Hawklords: 25 Years On,” and “P.X.R. 5” each with immersive 5.1 surround sound and Stereo remixes by Steven Wilson. Established in 1962, the MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design. When Calvert was at his strongest he would channel his mania into the music, however as this book points out, it also came at a terrible cost to his mental health. An interview where Pamela Townley talks candidly about former husband Calvert’s mental health issues is both illuminating and moving.