One for the music historians. Where are the links between Hawkwind and The Cl...

Julian Bond - 2012-10-13 09:15:56+0000 - Updated: 2012-10-13 09:15:56+0000

One for the music historians. Where are the links between Hawkwind and The Clash? Hawkwind always had ties to the Westway end of Portobello road, Moorcock (with his house in the area), the Mountain Grill and so on. Motorhead was formed by Lemmy in Ladbroke Grove. Phil Taylor's girlfriend worked in Malcolm Maclaren's/Westwood's Sex in the Kings Road. Strummer lived in Ladbroke Grove. Mick Jones, Strummer knew and worked with Sex Pistols members. So really you have to think that in '74, '75 the Clash members must have known and to some extent been influenced by the older and previous generation of deviants.

Stef Kunzer - 2012-10-13 09:34:07+0000

Interesting connections there. Not sure I can hear the musical influences, but still... :-)

Tony Sidaway - 2012-10-13 10:37:30+0000

Interesting connections if you search. Apparently when Mick suggested that they record Junior Murvin's Police and Thieves on the first album, Joe's suggestion was to try to do it in the style of Hawkwind. Of course, the version they recorded sounds nothing like Hawkwind, but that's perhaps because that sound isn't easy to imitate.

Seán O'Nilbud - 2012-10-13 11:03:33+0000

Dancers at the end of time.

Julian Bond - 2012-10-13 15:01:08+0000 - Updated: 2012-10-15 07:27:01+0000

There's some kind of weird Hauntological Psychogeography thing going on here. Hawkwind and Moorcock definitely seemed to inhabit some kind of alternate reality with Jerry Cornelius. "The Hall of the Mountain Grill" is actually formica top tables in a greasy spoon. In '76 (I think) I saw Tim Blake at Stonehenge followed by Hawkwind with Robert Calvert in full leather flying helmet, jacket and goggles. "Standing on the runway, waiting for takeoff". Tim Blake had a spell on keyboards with Gong and I saw him and them in that incarnation in the Hammersmith Palais and at the not-Windsor festival at Woodstock Oxfordshire. A year earlier or so I worked with Phil Taylor as he made the transition from nu-jazz drummer in the style of AWB to nu-metal drummer with Motorhead. The story was that he met Lemmy while scoring some crystal amphetamine in Elgin Avenue! He was living in a squat in Battersea at the time and his girlfriend was properly rude. So even if I wasn't really part of the scene, I feel like I knew people who knew people who were.

And then there's the Moorcock-Hawkwind collaboration with Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters. "So you wanna fly starfighters, huh?"

Tony Sidaway - 2012-10-13 22:38:17+0000

Oh the closest I ever got was a pilgrimage to the roof garden of Derry and Toms.