Ramblings

Hawkwind’s first album, “Hawkwind” from 1970

“My brother helped organise a Hawkwind gig at Watford Grammar School (!) in the early 1970’s. After the gig he had to go and explain to the band that they didn’t have enough money to pay the full fee. He found them hanging out stark naked in the classroom doubling as the green room. Somehow he got out alive.”

Or so I asserted on the comments section of a blog post about Silver Machine. I hadn’t gone to this gig myself, for three reasons. Firstly, I was too young – just fifteen, when my brother Rob and his friends, two years ahead at school, organised the charity gig. Secondly, at school I went to precious few gigs, even when I reached the sixth form. Thirdly, it turned out the gig didn’t happen. At least, not the way we remembered it.

The blogger was suitably impressed.

“My brother helped organise a Hawkwind gig at Watford Grammar School… the greatest opening line to a story I’ve ever read. And it ends with being threatened by Dave Brock’s Junk”

But then I started to doubt it. Hawkwind? Really? At WBGS? Was I spreading a myth? Time for a fact check. Rob was obviously the person to ask first. Had my memory mangled his telling of the tale? Yes, partly.

“Yes I remember that! I vaguely recall some problem with the payment, but not the detail. What I remember clearly is seeing the band after the show in their dressing room, which I guess must have been a classroom. One of them – the drummer with long hair? – was sitting stark naked on a chair with a young women cutting his toenails, looking somewhat spaced out. Difficult sight to forget. Don’t think we realised at the time what a legend they were.”

My recollection had upgraded a naked drummer into a whole naked band, but the detail of that lucky girl doing the pedicure made up in flavour what the anecdote had lost in quantity. Rob can be forgiven for not realising what a legend Hawkwind were, because they weren’t really, yet – this gig took place over a year before Silver Machine stormed the charts in July 1972.

Rob offered to ask some school friends if they could remember any more details, and his friend Stuart “Stu” Reid was able to fill in some of the gaps after conferring with his friend Linda.

“The Hawkwind gig took place not at WBGS but at a private school in Bushey. The best we can remember was that it might have been an American school. It was 1970, and I’m guessing it was autumn because some idiot let off some fireworks during the evening. The gig was great until it was ended abruptly by one of the school’s staff literally pulling the plug on the band’s equipment. This was, I believe, the source of the financial embarrassment at the end: we had some door money to pay the fee but they were miffed and claimed a speaker had been damaged. I certainly recall having that awkward conversation with the band in their ‘dressing room ‘ and witnessing the girl giving the naked drummer a pedicure!! Seemed pretty rock’n’roll at the time……”

This was solid stuff. The story was coming together. It just needed a little help from that underused history resource, the local Facebook memories group. In response to my question many respondents remembered seeing Hawkwind in the Watford area in the early 1970s, but not at the Grammar School. One valuable contribution came from Jim Davis, a school friend of Stuart’s, who had also been involved in organising the gig.

“I don’t think Hawkwind played WBGS – the Headmaster objected to the idea of Hawkwind in the school hall, so my memory (although a bit vague now!) is that we relocated the gig to the American School near Bushey Hall Golf Club. I remember having to deal with a character called “Roadie Ray” before the gig as, in addition to power socket concerns, there were some “interesting” rider items that we schoolboys were expected to provide in the dressing room!”

Other comments confirmed that the gig did indeed take place in the American School in Bushey – officially London Central High School, and lamented that it predated the attachment of the dancer Stacia to the band. The venue was later celebrated as the site of the formation of the band America, who scored a huge worldwide hit with the Neil Young styled A Horse with No Name in 1971/2. Peter Neal recalls on Facebook (and in comments below) that they were also on the bill that night.

Mike Tearle pointed out that he was the DJ that night with his disco from Bushey, and that “The B and O Roadshow” supplied the lights for Hawkwind and the disco before and after. “I also doubt we got paid that night” he comments.

Memories streamed in of other Hawkwind gigs in the area. I found an impressive resource called Hawkwind Shows – An Almost Complete List – miraculous when you consider what this band’s fans must have done to their brains over the years – where I found the dates of their Watford gigs.

• 1st November 1969 – Watford Town Hall
• 17th April 1971 – Kingham Hall, Watford
• 11th September 1971 – Kingham Hall, Watford
• 12th February 1972 – Watford Technical College
• 13th March 1972 – Watford Town Hall
• 13th January 1975 – Watford Town Hall

Unfortunately as this List admits, it is no more than Almost Complete. Based on Stuart’s recollection of fireworks, I’m guessing the American school might have been, say, Friday 6th November 1970 – as that date is blank on the list. The gig list suggests the band around that date was Dave Brock (vocals, guitar), Terry Ollis (drums), Nik Turner (vocals, saxophone, flute), Dik Mik (“audio generator”) and Thomas Crimble (bass guitar). Lemmy didn’t join the band until the following year.

Rob and Stuart were entitled to believe the pedicure they witnessed was a normal event in the life of a rock band. But a look at the history of the band gives us an opportunity to reinterpret this scene: the other band members may have seen the seeds of a problem in their drummer’s behaviour. At nineteen, Ollis was just a year older than the sixth formers who had organised the gig, but more than ten years younger than band founder and leader Dave Brock. In January 1971 Ollis got his kit off again – this time on stage – and the story made the national press.

Well they say there’s no such thing as bad publicity. According to the website of Hawkwind expert Steve Litchfield, during 1971 Ollis was getting so stoned that he kept falling off his drum stool. Later that year Lemmy happened to see his friend Simon King getting out of a taxi in London and offered to introduce him to the band, as a “proper drummer”.

Initially King was brought in to play alongside Ollis, but unsurprisingly this arrangement didn’t last long. The gig list shows them playing together for a single show, on 11th February 1972, after which King permanently replaced Ollis – some fifteen months after the American school gig.

Rob had brought home Hawkwind’s eponymous first album, but I wasn’t impressed at the time – I was travelling in the opposite direction, instead discovering classic 1950s rock’n’roll. But Hawkwind were a band like no other, inspiring fierce loyalty from fans for their distinctive space/progressive rock. The gig site shows no fewer than sixty different band members from 1969 to 2007, including Cream drummer Ginger Baker. The only constant has been Dave Brock, their founder, singer, songwriter and guitarist, still going today at 82.

Besides Brock, the only really high profile long term member has been Lemmy. He played a part in the success of Silver Machine, and tells the story in colourful terms:

(Co-writer) “Robert Calvert’s vocal was fucking hopeless. It sounded like Captain Kirk reading ‘Blowing in the Wind’. They tried everybody singing it except me. Then, as a last shot, Douglas (Smith, manager) said, ‘Try Lemmy’. And I did it in one take or two.”

Once the record broke in to the charts, an appearance on Top of the Pops was called for. But the band didn’t fancy miming in front of a studio audience who wouldn’t get it. The BBC were persuaded to record them performing live at Dunstable Civic Hall on 7 July 1972, and show the clip with the single version dubbed over it. It worked: the resulting video looked fresh and powerful against the usual low energy and embarrassing TotP fare, and still looks good today. It had driving rock, electronic wind effects, Stacia, even soap bubbles. What was not to like?

Lemmy was fired from Hawkwind in 1975 for – get this – being arrested on drug possession charges . This was a pragmatic decision, not a moral one – the band’s image wasn’t squeaky clean – but they feared his arrest in Canada would prevent the band from re-entering the USA, although he had been released without charge. Apparently the band didn’t mind letting him go, having anyway grown tired of his erratic behaviour. Another interpretation might be that Dave Brock didn’t want any serious rivals in the band.

Lemmy then founded a new band called “Bastard”. When his manager pointed out that a band with that name would never be invited on to Top of the Pops, he went for the metal umlaut, and Motörhead went on to great success, on the boundaries of heavy metal and punk.

So. I’ve learned than Hawkwind did not, in fact, play at Watford Grammar – probably because, as Jim Davis says, our Headmaster Mr L.K. Turner vetoed the idea. And I’ve learned that just one of the band was naked in the dressing room that night. And the awkward conversation was over damaged kit rather than simply cash. But yes, my brother had been involved in booking Hawkwind for a gig, and nudity was involved, so I’ll give my memory 5/10.

In May 2017 Rob came full circle with Hawkwind when we went to see his daughter Lindsay perform in a Poetry Slam, in what was then known as the Sackler Space at the Roundhouse in London’s Chalk Farm. Hawkwind happened to be playing the main Roundhouse venue that night. Our families gathered in an adjacent pub for what we had thought would be a quiet pre-event drink. Instead the place was heaving with loud, ageing rockers, resplendent in grizzled facial hair, denim, leather jackets, biker gear and ancient tour tee shirts. It would be nice to think that one or two, at least, had been there on that storied night at the American school, when the plug was pulled on Hawkwind.

Many thanks to Rob Edwards, Stuart Reid, Nigel Heritage, Jim Davis and Peter Neal