Hurry On Hawkwind – The Story of their Debut LP
Early daze memories with Dave Brock, Marion Lloyd Langton and Dick Taylor
This was a piece that I wrote for a Shindig! book-a-zine spacerock special that came out a few years ago, following a happy afternoon spent in the company of Dave Brock and Marion Lloyd Langton, kindly organised by Kris Brock, who, I hope and believe, enjoyed the chance to reminisce about the early days of Hawkwind and the recording of the eponymous debut LP. Later that week I enjoyed a phone call with the record’s producer, the legendary Dick Taylor of Pretty Things, and combined the two interviews for this feature. Shindig! kindly agreed that I might include it in an e-book anthology of my Hawkwind pieces that I’d planned but am unlikely to do now, but with the book-a-zine out of print, and having only lighted borrowed from the article for the paperback rewrite of my Hawkwind - Sonic Assassins book, I’ve reproduced the text here.
The Hawkwind canon might be a twisting and turning jamboree of different styles and textures but nothing in it stands out in quite such a distinct and distinctive manner as their eponymous 1970 debut album.
Book-ended by two sing-along busking numbers, including the stone-cold Hawkwind classic ‘Hurry On Sundown’, its startling centre is a dense and dirty electronic suite, arising out of their original live set, that at one and the same time is a continuous thread of sound and a collection of standalone pieces that complement each other. If as a part of their catalogue it’s often overlooked in favour of its spacerock descendants – Space Ritual, Warrior On The Edge Of Time or Quark, Strangeness & Charm – then no matter because as a record it deserves recognition purely on its own terms. Today it sounds as intriguing, absorbing and unique as it did back in 1970. To describe it as standing the test of time doesn’t nail it; it’s a record of its time and yet it’s a timeless document of that time.
From the start, Hawkwind comprised a disparate group of musicians. Dave Brock, Mick Slattery and John Harrison were already highly experienced musicians who’d variously cut singles and sessions and sat-in with notable blues players during the 1960s. Huw Lloyd-Langton, who through his different tenures with the band would become noted as their definitive lead guitarist, and original drummer Terry Ollis represented the youthful exuberance and enthusiasm that would be a counterpoint to their more experienced colleagues, while roadie-turned-saxophonist Nik Turner represented the visual anarchy of the band and alongside electronics ‘dabbler’ Dik Mik Davies arguably also provided a sort of experimentalist, almost avowed, non-musicianship. It was a chaotic ensemble, and the collision of its varying levels of ability and age meshed together to produce something quite brilliant.
Though originally playing as Group X, including their often-considered to be first gig,at All Saints Hall on 29th August 1969, they first entered the studio under the identity Hawkwind Zoo through the assistance of former Viscounts member Don Paul, who Brock had encountered while on a Buskers’ Tour of Britain, promoted by Paul and headlining his one-man-band protégé, Don Partridge. They cut their original version of ‘Hurry On Sundown’, another Brock song, ‘Kiss Of The Velvet Whip’, and a cover of Pink Floyd’s ‘Cymbaline’, a session which eventually partly saw life as a 7” release by Flicknife Records in the 1980s before being joined-up with the first Hawkwind LP as part of EMI’s 1996 re-masters of their portion of the Hawkwind catalogue.
Their eponymous first album though saw them settled as ‘Hawkwind’ [“Drop the ‘Zoo’,” manager Douglas Smith was apparently advised by John Peel] and signed to Liberty Records as part of Liberty’s association with Smith’s Clearwater Productions stable of artists. It was recorded between March and April 1970 at Trident Studios in London’s Soho area.
To capture the essence of this great album and of the characters who made it, we variously talked to Hawkwind’s leader across forty-four years, the Hawklord himself Dave Brock, Marion Lloyd-Langton, wife of their great and much-missed lead-guitarist Huw, and the album’s producer Dick Taylor, of Pretty Things fame.
There’s really no other record like this one, the unearthly, spacey electronica sandwiched between the more conventional busking numbers… how did that develop?
Dave Brock: John Harrison, who I must say was a founder member, and a lovely character, I met through my busking down the Tottenham Court Road, where I met Huw as well. John used to come to Putney where I lived, and with Mick Slattery, who I knew from Richmond, we were the original members, the founding members of Hawkwind. We used to do lots of weird psychedelic music, we had echo units and John would come around and plug his bass in through those echo units. We used to do a lot of weird stuff that was like musique concrete. When I worked at Larkin Studios, which was a cartoon studio, I used to do a lot of weird tape loops and make them go backwards, so we were doing a lot of experimental stuff and that was the start of the Hawkwind weirdness, playing our psychedelic rock numbers with the weirdness of the electronics using echo units. We put an advert in the paper for a drummer, and that was Terry Ollis; then Mick Slattery left and that was where Huw came in. But Mick played lead guitar on the original demo of ‘Hurry On Sundown’, on an old Fender guitar that he had at the time. Then there was Nik’s saxophone playing which was avant-garde, he couldn’t play it properly, but it was great, it added to what was going on, the lunacy of it all.
Mick Slattery told me that when he left, before the album sessions really got going, and Huw joined, he felt that was absolutely the right thing for the band and that Huw brought much more to Hawkwind than he could have done.
Dave: Huw was a wonderful lead guitarist with a style all his own, he was an individual musician. When you listen to lead guitarists, only the good ones have their own style, it’s quite hard to get and takes years of playing to pick up your runs. I mean, after all these years of playing I still can’t read music and don’t know a lot of the chords but I know what Huw had to do, as I have to do a bit of lead guitar myself now! I’ve learned some of these runs, but I never knew them back then! I was completely oblivious, just used to play, but Huw used to know all this stuff.
Marion Lloyd-Langton: It was his hobby… rock guitar was how he earned his living but aside from that his hobby was to get chord sequences from India – from all over, really – and just practise and practise. You can hear that on Levitation, you can hear a lot of Indian and Aeolian music. He taught himself to read music so that he could find all of these wonderful chord sequences from all over the world, all these different scales, really traditional things that were Indian, Japanese, or Chinese. He just loved it, as a challenge and as a hobby.
Dave: He had all these Middle Eastern runs; it’s like we’re saying about lead guitar runs and different note patterns working to these chords. As you go around the world you find that they’re all pretty similar but they’re different runs. You can use all these traditional runs in rock music.
Marion: Huw had done two years in Germany with Winston G, playing at the Army bases. He didn’t like it, because they were playing covers, mainly soul music, but Winston G was a great singer and though each year had a different line-up they were all really good musicians, lovely and solid. He really cut his teeth in Germany and as a lead guitarist was allowed to go off on tangents. When Dave asked him to come to an audition for Hawkwind, he was just, “Yes!”. I was living in a house in Westbourne Grove at the time, and in that house the mother was a journalist on Women’s Own, she used to write the Agony Aunt page. Huw used to come back from Germany and go to a café called La Gioconda [in Denmark Street], looking for work and seeing who he could meet. He was going there under the arches at Tottenham Court Road and ran into Dave who asked him to come to the audition. Now, back at home there was this young guitarist from Switzerland; I got home and Huw rang and said he’d got the job… but it turned out this guitarist had also gone for the audition and didn’t get it. I didn’t know he was going for the audition… but he knew that Huw was my boyfriend and he came steaming in, “God you did it deliberately, didn’t you! You found out about the audition! You sent Huw down there!” He’d told me he was going for an audition but not who and where and what, but he went back to Switzerland swearing that I was an absolute bitch, to say the least, and I’d ruined his life!
Dave: Huw didn’t have a guitar; he used to borrow one from Max Taylor, who was a director of Clearwater. He used to borrow his Cherry Red ES330, worth a fortune now, a lovely guitar, and used to play that all the time. I thought he was going to end up owning it!
Marion: He didn’t have a guitar because the last gig Huw did in Germany with Winston G, Huw did a ‘Pete Townsend’ with his little Burns guitar, threw it on the stage and smashed it to pieces and then realised, “Now I haven’t got a guitar…”
Dick, how did you become involved with producing the album, and playing on occasion with the band?
Dick Taylor: It was after I’d decided to have a breather from the Pretty Things, and production appealed to me. I met Andrew Lauder [Head of A&R at Liberty Records], and I think it was Andrew who said why don’t I go and have a look at Hawkwind. I took a trip to Notting Hill – as I was living in Earls Court it wasn’t a long way – and saw them at the All Saints Hall. Now, at that time everyone was getting very musical and precious if you know what I mean, everyone was very skilful, but this was like seeing a psych version of the Pretty Things. There was a really good atmosphere and no one was knowing quite what they were doing but who cared because it sounded good. Terry Ollis was thumping away at the drums and he was brilliant and I thought, “Yeah, I like this a lot.” Then I met all the Clearwater lot, Doug Smith and Richard Thomas and talked to them, but I think it was Andrew who steered me in that direction. Andrew asked if I wanted to have a bash at recording them and I thought, why not?
Dave: We were the poor relations at Clearwater. Cochise, Skin Alley, High Tide, they all had their record deals and we were the, ah, loonies! Tim Blake was there, he was one of the roadies, running up and down the stairs! But it was a crazy place, Clearwater, full of freaks with Frendz newspaper and all the stuff that was going on in Notting Hill Gate. It was like a big parcel of freaks, all joining together, with this band being part of it, doing benefits to keep the [underground] newspapers going. I mean, there was a lot going on, not just Hawkwind, but around the periphery of us there was The Whole Earth Catalog, John Trux, all these weird characters. The Greasy Truckers came out of all of that, and Barney Bubbles and Phil Franks the photographer – all these characters were there. All of us sitting up late, smoking dope and fantasising about the stuff we were going to do and never getting around to it.
Did you have an opportunity to listen to the original Hawkwind Zoo demos?
Dick: I don’t think I heard the original demos; mostly I did everything from having listened to the band live, because I went to quite a few gigs, and actually did a few gigs with them as well. And of course I went to rehearsals and things like that – I built up a good relationship with everybody.
The key element of the album sessions must surely have been ‘Hurry On Sundown’ as the opening track, the eventually single and so on…
Dick: We started off with ‘Hurry On Sundown’ and that went very well, we recorded in a reasonably conventional manner, layering the tracks, getting a good rhythm track and so on. I took the liberty of doing a guitar solo on that.
Dave, did you ever think about keeping ‘Hurry On Sundown’ as a potential single for yourself?
Dave: Not really; I used to do quite a few busking songs of course, because I used to play down in the long subway between Kensington and the Royal Albert Hall; I used to practice down there a lot, just because of the echo. The band actually played a lot of these numbers, because they were jolly and uplifting but they would go into psychedelia because everybody could go off into something else and add their little bits of noise and weird stuff knowing that we’d all come back in at the end. One of those appeared on a Cherry Red release that has just come out [on the recent reissue of Warrior On The Edge Of Time], a good old busking song of mine!
Huw once told me that he’d taken a backseat on that track, awed by Dick Taylor’s presence.
Marion: Huw felt a bit intimidated initially, but Dick had such a lovely character that he made Huw feel really comfortable, which was a gift to be honest. Huw came back from the first session saying that Dick was a really nice bloke, easy to work with. Huw was nervous because of Dick’s experience with the Pretty Things, and because Dick was a great guitarist himself.
Dave: Dick was a good bloke, the ideal character to come in on it all. The funny thing was that I’d played at The Roundhouse, when the Pretty Things were doing SF Sorrow; Pete Judd and me were on the same bill, I’ve got a little black and white flyer with the Pretty Things headlining and Dave Brock & Pete Judd in small letters at the bottom and then years later… well, probably only a year later… there he was producing an album with Hawkwind!
How important was it to have someone with that stature and experience at the helm?
Dave: He was the guiding light, he helped everybody out without telling people what to do or ordering them as it were. He helped us out with ideas and things, telling us if something wouldn’t work.
How did the sessions for the album develop? Presumably there were different techniques required for capturing the more electronic numbers?
Dick: ‘Hurry On Sundown’ just flew out really but when we started doing the rest of the album I got slightly bogged down in the sense that recording it, as you would, in the Abbey Road style, didn’t really cut it and I was scratching my head. Andrew said, “Why not record the whole band live, and if you can, bring in their PA and mic it up very carefully.” And that was how most of the rest of the album was recorded. We tweaked it a lot afterwards, but that was how it then transpired. We did one more track without doing that, possibly ‘Mirror of Illusion’. So that was how we did it; all the bits that went vaguely awry we sorted out and I must admit to being very pleased with what we did.
Dave: ‘Mirror Of Illusion’? I did that one on the John Peel show previously. That was an old busking song, a good old… “I’ve taken my LSD…” “Mirror of Illusion…”
Marion: I used to turn up after work and sit on the floor, there’d be the studio room and the recording part where whoever would have to go in and do their bits, and we’d sit there and chat into the early hours of the morning if the session ran on, and it just had a lovely family atmosphere; Dave would often turn up a little later, because he’d be out busking and then come in and do his bit. But it was quite exciting, being in a proper studio, doing an album for a professional label and it was like we were in a kind of a bubble. I mean, it was the first album Huw had ever recorded, so the fact that professional people were interested in you, were encouraging you, and you had a free rein... I think that’s what Huw loved about Hawkwind, not just with the first album but when he went back later, he was always given this free rein… within the structure, because rehearsals went on for months and then there were extensive tours, but Huw always loved it, from the day he joined, the day he went back, he always loved it, always loved and respected Dave.
There’s a real mixture of experience, youth, and probably it’s fair to say a particular ‘non-musician’ on the album in the form of Dik Mik. How did that shape the recordings?
Dick: Because of the way we ended up finishing recording it, the disparity between them didn’t matter. That was one of the great things, that it was this mish-mash of people, but when they were unleashed… Nik would go off into a completely other place, shall we say, but there was a kind of bedrock there. Terry did very well, he wasn’t the great session drummer or anything like that, but he was perfect for what they were doing at that time. That was what I was trying to do, represent them as they were, because they were a disparate bunch.
Marion: Huw always said it was more of a marriage than a marriage… you were married to the whole team, really. The thing with the first album was that there was just some wonderful musicianship.
Dave: Douglas sent us off to Five Lanes, in Altarnum, down in Cornwall, where he’d booked a cottage down a track where we had to practice, which is where we all took organic mescaline. John wouldn’t take any of this stuff but in the end we managed to spike him up in a cup of tea that he drank thinking it was alright. Then he was playing golf in his underpants! I was wandering naked along a stream where I found this little blue bottle that I’ve still got, a doctor’s poison bottle, but it was treasure! I had a magic staff and I found a magic bottle! [Laughs] This is what we were up to then! Douglas thought we were rehearsing but we were all out of it on organic mescaline! But these things got the band together, took us out of our London environment and out to the country.
Marion: But for me, it still has that family thing about it. When I lost Huw, in December 2012, Dave and his wife Kris were such a tremendous support to me. They arrived early the next morning and Kris remained with me for the next few weeks organising virtually everything for me including the funeral, reception, and dealing with the thousands of fans online leaving their respects. Kris did this despite her own huge workload, and afterwards took me home to stay with them for a while. No true friends could have done more. A huge thank you to both of them!
How much do you think Dik Mik was influenced by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and what Delia Derbyshire had done with things such as the Doctor Who theme?
Dave: I don’t think he was influenced by that, I just think he went down to Tottenham Court Road and visited all the old wireless shops and bought up old junk… these fantastic ship-to-shore radios that were off old Destroyers scrapped from the Second World War, huge grey transmitters with silver bars that if you tuned-in you got these weird noises coming through, and put that through an echo unit… that was the sort of stuff that Dik Mik was doing.
Marion: Of course what Dik Mik did was similar to DJs playing along with two record decks. Very similar - doing this and doing this…
Dave: A bit like you used to get on the card table in Oxford Street with the three thimbles! That was Dik Mik’s card table! An audio generator and an echo unit and off he’d go!
Dick: I think Dik Mik grabbed these things because he was a non-musician but on the other hand he had a good ear for making these noises. Whether he’d heard all that [BBC] stuff I don’t know, but the thing about Hawkwind was that they were like these psychedelic primitives, particularly Dik Mik.
Dave: I always found it annoying that Dik Mik and Del [Dettmar], although Del wasn’t on the first album, didn’t ever get the credit that they should have. Their input was fantastic. These guys influenced electronic music, basically. There was band in New York, Silver Apples, that did similar things with six audio generators and a drummer... making a noise and the drummer finding a timing. Now, I occasionally used to hear Dik Mik trying to play along with the melody with his audio generator [laughs]… Oh dear!
The promotion that accompanied the album leaned on the concept of spacerock, though that became more pronounced with the next LP and then the Space Ritual tour?
Dave: Music is an on-going art form; if it’s on-going then it’s interesting. Talking about spacerock, don’t forget there was a lot of German bands, Can or The Galactic Supermarket by the Cosmic Jokers who had very similar sounding stuff to Hawkwind if you listen to what they did. So when you start to talk about spacerock you can name quite a few bands who were well-known in their genre. The first Can album came out in 1969 and if you listen to what they were doing, they were a very similar band, their singer Malcolm Mooney chanting, and their riffs. We would get all these write-ups, “boring, one riff,” but that was the beginning of trance music, look back at these weird sounds with pounding rhythms and that’s where it comes from. I love all that stuff. Look at The Moody Blues, ‘In Search Of The Lost Chord’, they were quite a spacerock band in some ways, the wonderful colours that opened up into psychedelic pictures and the only time you saw what was going on was when you took your LSD and it would all be moving around! And all their stuff used to flow into one another, which was great and is what I try to do even now. I like to have things that flow. That first album is constant, it flows from one thing to another.
When you listen to the LP now, it’s very much about its structure isn’t it? Particularly the middle section? Despite Hawkwind’s reputation for free-flowing jams…
Marion: I think that’s the thing that’s often forgotten about Hawkwind, that right from the beginning there was a really solid structure to the fantastic music. Dave has always had this thing about structure, always.
Dave: Well, the middle section was a psychedelia thing with the band but you had to formulate a plan. We used to go off on tangents with lots of jamming but you’ve got to have a plan, a structure for a song, a chord sequence that brings you all back in.
Dick: Because there was so much random stuff, what was quite amazing was that each piece had such an individual character. You’d listen to so many psychedelic bands where after three songs you could say, “Okay, I know what they’re up to.” But with all the stuff on this album, you’d certainly know what track was going on. I don’t know quite how they achieved that to be really honest; when I heard them I thought, “how do they do all of this?” and even when I played with them [laughs] I wasn’t completely sure! But the essential thing was that each song had its structure, it might not have been a conventional structure, but it really did. So even when they went out into quite strange places, it was always quite ordered chaos. Dave is quite a serious character – I mean everyone was contributing a hell of a lot to it, but I think he had leadership qualities that helped. So when we were working in the studio, Dave and I were quite definite about what was going to go on, making sure it was disciplined enough within the chaos.
How much of that structure can be credited back to John Harrison’s bass playing? Because he seems musically to be pivotal in many ways?
Dave: John was a fantastic bass player, very underrated and never got the great credit that was due to him as a really solid player. You could go off and do whatever you liked but you knew he’d be there. A simple bass player who knew what he was up to. He’d played with the Joe Loss Band, so you had simple bass playing with Terry’s simple drumming and once you’d got that you could go off and do whatever you liked because those two would sit on it and you could come back onto the rhythm again.
Marion: Huw loved that because he could feed off him.
Dick: I knew John Harrison was a very good musician – I didn’t realise his background though. He was a quiet man, he never made much of a fuss, but he played so solidly and because there was a lot of random stuff going on around him, he would pull it all together really. I thought Huw was very good, I must say. I was very impressed with Huw. Again, when you threw everything into the mix there was this chaos – ordered chaos – going on.
How do you look back on that album now?
Dick: I love it; I’m really pleased that I was associated with it. They were just a brilliant bunch of people.
Marion: Huw always loved the first album, that one and Levitation.
Dave: It is one of my favourite ones because it was a momentous occasion, the first proper recordings any of us had ever done, that and because there is a lot of ad-libbing through it. It’s always been the most important. It’s got a little bit of magic; when I got the [recently-bestowed] Life Time Achievement award they played a little bit of ‘Hurry On Sundown’ and it wasn’t ‘old’ sounding, if you know what I mean, as some things can be…
Marion: I was at the Roundhouse recently, when they showed a film of Hawkwind from those days and I sat there and was so proud of Huw and Dave, ever so much the front man even then…
Dave: [Smiles] I wasn’t the front man!
Marion: I‘m sorry… you were! Prominent, that’s the word, prominent! Timeless, with John there and Nik, and Huw in the background; for me, seeing it was the most wonderful experience because I was there and I could tell you what Huw was wearing, his little stripy T-Shirt, his baggy sailor trousers…
Dave: His plimsolls!
Marion: His converse shoes! That sounds better. Well, we used to call them plimsolls…! Watching it now, I don’t mean this disrespectfully, but Genesis and Bowie… but Hawkwind shone! Bowie was so young, yet to really shoot through, Genesis were so young…
Dave: They went up and we went down! Well, we trickled along for a while, went up for a bit! When you look back at it years later it’s like a graph in a doctor’s surgery. “Oh, his heart’s racing… oh he’s gone down a little...” It’s about all the characters who’ve been involved over the years. In the original band, the unsung heroes were John Harrison, who never really got any credit, and Huw, because they were the guys pushing it along. With Turner, even though there’s all this stuff that he does, it looked good. It’s quite interesting when you have a lot of characters in the band. For a while it was me and Bob [Calvert], people give their bits to what you do and it helps you along the way. When I was working with Bob we’d have a month where we couldn’t get anything together, then it would be my time to be the captain, then he’d take over; that’s how we used to work. It’s quite hard by yourself.
Though there is a sense that perhaps Hawkwind is unfairly overlooked within the Hawkwind canon, it set the scene for what was to come, and defined what Hawkwind would be all about in many different ways. It presented the band as a joined-up concept with a clear sense of what they would be about and acted almost as a mission statement or a manifesto for their vision. “This is the beginning,” they state on the LP sleeve. “By now we will be past this album. We started out trying to freak people, now we are trying to levitate their minds, in a nice way, without acid.” Their stated aim was “a completely audio-visual thing … using a complex of electronics, lights and environmental experiences.”
They’ve lived up to that promise of a complete audio-visual thing, having to do so in a low-budget lo-fi do-it-yourself way at times it’s true, but that self-contained, outside of the mainstream, artistic ethos that the original mission statement suggests has been one that has held true through their existence, as though it has always remained a touchstone for their aspirations and ambitions.
Particular thanks to Kris Brock for her kind assistance with this feature.