Interview (Melody Maker 12/08/1972)

[M Holmes]

MELODY MAKER  August 12, 1972     (page 29)


HAWKWIND  - the joke that made it

by Andrew Means

It was a rather hot and sticky trek across country, and the one thing
that kept the stragglers shuffling was the narrowing proximity of music.
Over the next hill, round the next bend the army of the new age had
gathered, half a million strong.

The Isle of Wight was being graced with some of the greatest names in
rock.   Backstage the superstars were standing on each other's feet,
front stage the people were suffering from an overdose of adoration.

And outside the wire fences some minor league band from London had the
arrogance to play a free set for people who couldn't, or wouldn't or
didn't choose to pay the festival fee.

It was Hawkwind's first major assault.   Word spread about this bizarre
travelling circus that played outside the gates or in the street, that
blocked up pavements and made noise where byelaws said noise wasn't
meant to be.

It was a joke.   Hawkwind - the people's band.   It would never pay the
rent, and it would never reach the vast majority of normal, well
adjusted people's people who naturally wanted their entertainment dotted
with sequins.

Hawkwind grew.   Nothing could stop them.   The myth developed.
There's a Hawkwind cult now that is almost as vital to their [gags] as
the music.   No matter which part of the country they play in the
audience is basically the same.   Every gig is a stage for local
fantasies.   Bottled up extrovert tendencies explode into fancy dress
and painted faces as if some messiah had given the sign.

It's a precarious position for a group to be in.   Hordes of dedicated
teenagers regard them as the revolution personified, and with "Silver
Machine" slicing through the chart some of them must be ticking off the
days to the take over with increasing impatience.    So much is implied
by Hawkwind that if you think of them as just a rock band you're
deceiving yourself.   The regimented peace signs flashed from the
audience imply more than that, and so does sax and flute player, Nik
Turner's preference for ambiguous music.   You can suggest everything
and say nothing.   If you do it carefully you achieve more than you ever
would if you laid down dogma.

The success of "Silver Machine" is like a vital chapter out of Animal
Farm.   It makes Hawkwind an altogether more powerful prospect than they
were two years ago as a group for Isle of Wight outsiders.   Their
expanding reputation and financial assets must have boosted their
expectations of their friends and followers.   Yet understandably their
single hasn't affected the group in the same way.

In the words of Doug Smith, the group's visionary manager, they regard
it as two fingers in the air to a music business that used to write them
off.   Nothing more.  It doesn't trigger plans for a coup d'etat because
there never were such plans.   The group's more [conscentious] members -
Dave [Brick] (guitar), Nik Turner (sax) and Del [Dettnar]
(synthesiser) - insist that their objectives and activities will remain
much the same as before.   They aim at the head.   Once people are given
the incentive they will undertake their own metamorphoses.

This ability to plant their myth in to popular imagination has played a
large part in their making.   Hawkwind is a movement, not just a group.
In a quite mundane sense, they have a reputation for having one of the
largest retinues in the music business.   Far more important is the
empathy they achieve with many reaching in the same direction as
themselves.   Some eminent people are apparently interested in their
ideas, among them Sir Patrick Moore.

The fact that they are now hot news has made little impression upon
their gigs.   At Hastings last week the atmosphere was much as it had
been at similar gigs four weeks ago.

Dave Brock managed to break a couple of guitar strings and Lemmy even
succeeded in doing the same with a bass string.   The result was that
they played part of the set out of tune, to the [discomforts] of Doug
Smith.

But hang around at the close of one of their gigs and watch the way
friends and followers religiously make their pilgrimage on stage and how
they sidle past the [spealers] and the roadies and the rubbish right up
to Nik Turner's side.   Turner sits and peers [vacanty] around the
[halll], while the little half circle around him shuffle uncomfortably
into incredulous conversation.

Probably the only aspect that comes out in their gigs and which bothers
the bulk of their audiences is space but the other subjects are there
waiting to be explored.   Maybe their teen following comes to hear heavy
lift-off music, but its impossible to ignore the imaginative ideas of
the group and of Bob [Calvery], once a performing member and now purely
a writer of their material.   If their preparations work out and the
audience plays its part, Hawkwind's first major bill topping concert -
at London's Rainbow next Sunday - should reveal how far their ambitions
to project an environment go.

Picture:  [Stacia dancing in a loose-flowing robe}  titled:  STACIA
something like Isadora Duncan

Picture:  {Nik Turner with sax singing into a microphone}   titled:
HAWKWIND'S DOUG SMITH:  discomfort.

TRIPPING THE LIGHT FANTASTIC

For a girl brought up by nuns to strip off on stage before hundreds of
people may seem somewhat anomalous.

But Stacia, who performs with Hawkwind, goes into her act with no
inhibitions and firmly but gently discounts any suggestion that she
falls into the "stripper" category.

Not that she scorns strippers.   She would not dispute that "maybe 99
per cent" of such ladies' acts are motivated by erotic content.  "But
some of them are real artists," she says.  "And they must fulfil a
need," says Stacia with benign tolerance.   She is certainly not
prepared to pass any adverse judgement on them.

Stacia categorises her act with Hawkwind as "free-form dancing.   It's
something like Isadora Duncan," says Stacia.   And modestly adds:
"Though she was a million times better than I am.   But she is my idol."

Stacia regards her original [motiviation] in disrobing as a means of
overcoming an inherent shyness and lack of self-confidence.   "I was
always conscious about my height," she says.   "I'm six foot tall, and
when I was younger (she's still only 19) I was always stooping to
disguise my height."

Stacia, who comes from Exeter, had a variety of jobs before she joined
Hawkwind.     She worked as a bookbinder, in a garage, and in the record
shop of a department store in Exeter.   "But I was always interested in
dancing and acting," she recalls.   "Another of my interests was
classical music - Delius, Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Dvorak.   That's when I
was about eight.

"Then I listened to the Beatles and jazz stars like Stan Getz, Billie
Holiday and Dizzy Gillespie.   Dancing and acting were my main interests
but I was really too big and heavy to adopt these as a career.

"I first heard Hawkwind at the Isle of Wight Festival - the one with
Jimi Hendrix.   Then I met them again when I went to London where they
were rehearsing - at the Middle Earth.

"Then they went back to the West Country again, and they were playing
the Flamingo, Redruth, when I got up on stage and started dancing.   It
was one of those impromptu  things that just happened.

"I wasn't wearing any clothes on that gig;  I had just covered my whole
body in paint.

"No;  people watching did not regard it as a sexual thing.   Hawkwind
don't attract that type of audience.   They reacted to my dancing as an
expression of freedom.

"That's when I started to do occasional gigs with Hawkwind.   By then I
had started to wear costumes.  Before that, it was just paint."

Stacia does not always disrobe.   One gathers that she reacts to the
music as the mood takes her.    Stacia admits that outre suggestions
have been put to her.   "Somebody once approached me to do a
pornographic film," she says.   "I reacted quite violently - not
physically, but verbally.   I would never contemplate anything like
that."

And how do the male members of Hawkwind treat Stacia?   "I regard them
as brothers, and they treat me like a sister.["]   -   LAURIE HENSHAW

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