For a band that are still going strong into their half-century, it’s about time the wider world realised the musical influence Hawkwind has had on it. This book is well placed to promote that cause. 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. Since 1981, legendary Canterbury musicians Dave Stewart (Egg, Hatfield and the North, National Health) and Barbara Gaskin (Spirogyra) have built a reputation as one of the UK's most respected, intelligent and musically inventive Pop acts. The duo are now planning a summer concert featuring Beren Matthews on guitar. Thank you for having me! It’s Psychedelic! Baby Magazine has done a fantastic job of speaking to so many of the “forgotten” heroes of the music underground. Uncle Sam’s on Mars / The Iron Dream (live Ipswich 1977) 10 Quark, Strangeness And Charm (live Ipswich 1977)

Wilson is at work on remixing 1978’s 25 Years On which they released as Hawklords due to some legal issues. Typically perverse Calvert offers some unexpected lyrical content,including a long description of jumping out of a plane on Free Fall, and Aussie drug abuse in Flying Doctor – so a big departure from the sci-fi influenced work they’d been doing previously.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. I’ve always loved Hawkwind, but it was the strongly positive response to an early article I wrote for The Quietus about Space Ritual – which attempted to place the band in the cultural context of the “apocalyptic 70s” – that first made me think there was something more to write about them beyond the two perfectly decent biographies that were already out there. So it was a desire to pull all the socio-cultural threads together – the idea of the “underground”, the science fiction mythology, their influence on punk et cetera – that really got me started. In many ways, Hawkwind embody an alternative history of the 70s. I’m currently working with Strange Attractor on what I hope is going to be long-running project involving lots of writers as well as myself. I’m also continuing to review for Prog, Shindig! and Electronic Sound magazines. Joe Banks 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. Not bad for a band memorably described in one early Melody Maker headline as ‘The Joke Band That Made It’.

Your book focuses on Hawkwind. As one of the most innovative and culturally significant bands of the 1970s, what’s most unique about them? 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 Hawkwind offered a form of radical escapism and an alternative account of a strange new world for a generation of young people growing up on a planet that seemed to be teetering on the brink of destruction, under threat from economic meltdown, industrial unrest, and political polarization. While other commentators confidently asserted that the countercultural experiment of the 1960s was over, Hawkwind took the underground to the provinces and beyond. 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. In shamanic cultures, the rituals and ceremonies are ultimately about transformation – the ability of the shaman actually to become another being, to be possessed by another spirit. For Banks, this is a key aspect of what he calls Hawkwind’s radical escapism: they offered not just a counter-culture but a counter-reality to a paranoid and profoundly disillusioned decade. Reality you can rely on, to use one of their slogans from later in the decade. As the country lurched deeper and deeper into crisis – be it political, economic or environmental – and trust in authority bled away, the band’s millenarian rejectionism of corporate and societal norms seemed a positive model for action.

MIT Press began publishing journals in 1970 with the first volumes of Linguistic Inquiry and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Today we publish over 30 titles in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology. MIT Press Direct is a distinctive collection of influential MIT Press books curated for scholars and libraries worldwide. 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. Selected items are only available for delivery via the Royal Mail 48® service and other items are available for delivery using this service for a charge.

In fact, it’s hard to emphasise enough how much of an outsider band Hawkwind were, even in their heyday in the 1970s. Founded in Ladbroke Grove in the last gasp of the previous decade, they were routinely dismissed as hippy recidivists, a poor man’s Pink Floyd, riding on the rapidly disintegrating tailcoats of psychedelia and the counterculture. By 1979, Calvert had left the band again – for the last time – and while Banks goes on to discuss Hawkwind’s tour at the end of that year and their 1980 album Levitation, I’m not sure he shouldn’t have ended his book with the last of Calvert’s work to be released. Decades are an imprecise measure of anything and Hawkwind’s 1980s – a difficult and very different period for the band – began with Calvert’s departure. The four discs of live recordings from the period contain a great number of unheard (by me, anyway) gems, and all three albums have enough high quality outtakes with them to give each of them a greater resonance. In short, this is an exhaustive trawl for fans which also contains very little fat which could be trimmed – which is a remarkable balancing act. Along with the Pink Fairies, Hawkwind were certainly there at the start, playing free outdoor gigs in and around Ladbroke Grove, particularly under the Westway arches (as photographed on the fold-out sleeve of ‘In Search Of Space’). The Canvas City performances outside of the 1970 Isle of Wight festival were also crucial to Hawkwind’s identity as heroes of the underground, while the festival itself lit the touchpaper of the free festival movement when the fences came down on the final day. Hawkwind’s philosophy of just turning up and playing was certainly an inspiration, and even after becoming a big top 20 band, they went on to appear at many of the 70s’ key free festivals – Windsor, Watchfield, Stonehenge et cetera. As such, they were absolutely talismanic to the whole movement, and continued to be during the Peace Convoy years of the 80s and the outdoor rave scene of the 90s. “Hawkwind were responsible for bringing the good news of the counterculture to every corner of Britain in the early 70s”

Radical Escapism in the Age of Paranoia

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” The art of a great biographer is getting to the crux of the subject, warts and all, and with the new interviews, contemporary cuttings and critical analysis, this is one of the best books I have read that goes to such depth around a band, and there’s plenty to get your teeth into for both fans and non-fans. 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.