In Search of Hawkwind

For those of you know don’t know, Hawkwind are a seminal psychedelic rock band; formed 1969 from buskers and hippies, they gave hundreds of free gigs to help raise donations for various worthy causes, attended the legendary Isle of Wight festival where they played for free and got tribute and recognition from Jimmy Hendrix, and have for the last thirty five years toured Britain, Europe, and America, with a distinctive Space-&-Fantasy set of lights, lasers, poetry, readings, and music that predated dance’s ambient, groove, and chill-out, by at least three decades. You might not know their work except their famous single “Silver Machine”, you might not know any of their band members except Lemmy. They got Lemmy before he was famous, and they sacked him, giving him the impetus to form Motorhead. If you have heard of Cream, after they split they got the legendary drummer from that crew, Ginger Baker, and sacked him too (headline: world’s best drummer sacked by world’s worst bass player).

(click to enlarge)

It turns out they sacked a lot of people over the last thirty five years, and it’s those hirings-and-firings, and the often bitter recriminations that arose, rather than the music, that is the content of Carol Clerk’s “The Saga of Hawkwind”. I could put the 550-page tome down, discovering endless revelations and allegations. I’ve heard it said from Hawkwind fans they found the book “depressing” in parts, sad to see the dirty laundry of a Love-&-Peace band. I don’t see it that way, their music (and live shows) speak for themselves, and the ins-and-outs of the band is incredibly interesting. As Clerk says, sometimes ‘more Spinal Tap than Spinal Tap’. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, it’s not a good work to introduce someone to Hawkwind to, but it’s a great read for fans.

Now I know I’ve seen Hawkwind live at least once, where they headed a 12 hour event, the Mildenhall Rock and Blues Festival, above such acts as Mamas Boys, a sub par English Whitesnake, the Atom Seeds, a sub par English Chile Peppers, and the Mean Red Spiders, not the Canadian white-noise pop outfit formed in 1995, but the unknown blues band who gave us the immortal track “she’s a whore in the kitchen and a cook in bed”. For some reason my mind is trying to convince me I saw Hawkwind a second time. This might be, and probably is, pure imagination on my part. But I can’t shake the feeling…

Nonetheless, it looks like I have opportunity to go to the now-annual Hawkfests, a private festival run by Hawkwind, mid June in Derbyshire, a nicely-central location in England. I’m very, very much looking forward to it.

The Dog Delusion

“The God of the Bible is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

So starts Richard Dawkins in his magnificent The God Delusion. Noted for his works on evolutionary biology Dawkins has long been an advocate for atheism and against creationism. This is the work in which he spells it all out, from evolutionary morality (why we don’t require religion to get a moral framework, that our moral framework predates religion, and anyway religion is easily used to deter us from our inherent moral framework) to irreducible complexity (evolution is natural selection, not chance); this is the book i which he sets out to convert people to atheism, unlike previous ones which converted people as an incidental by-product (notably Douglas Adams). The book is full of fire, almost like an Old Testament preacher from the pulpit, but always replacing the preacher’s threats with scientific rationality. Well worth a go.

Are YOU “Hip To Death”?

UPDATE. I haven’t gotten any further with Blade Runner 3 and probably I never will. I want to show you an extract of dialogue which, I hope, will fully explain why. Of course K. W. Jeter isn’t going to write in the style of PKD’s Do Androids Dream…? but he doesn’t even make an effort to, well, write well. In this section Deckard is talking to a film director about why one of the replicants was shot on-set, mimicking one of his own Blade Runner ‘retirements’:

‘Can it.’ Deckard had had enough of the director’s rattling on. ‘The Kowalski replicant didn’t faint. I don’t need to know about video production to see what happened to him. I’m hip to death.’ His voice lowered to a grim frequency. ‘That was my job … for a long time. I know what a dead body looks like.’

‘”Hip to death.” That’s a good one.’ Urbenton nodded in a show of appreciation. ‘I like that.’

“Hip to death”? Deckard? Hip to death??!. Not only did Jeter put dialogue worthy of E. J. Thribbs into Rick Deckard’s mouth, he goes ahead and fucking congratulates himself for it.

On the swing-side I have started I am alive and you are dead: a journey inside the mind of PKD by Emmanuael Carrère (reviewed by Michael Moorcock). I haven’t read any other PKD biographies so obviously I can’t compare, but it’s good, in a tangential, messy way, written with confident flair. The author asserts, as the title implies, he has tried to get inside the mind of PKD and empathised with him, and wrote as-if an insider. Perhaps only a Frenchman would dare take that perspective. It’s entirely appropriate for a work on PKD.

I think he would have approved.

Battle For The Mind

My trip to the Oxfam had a happier outcome with BATTLE FOR THE MIND: The Mechanics of Indoctrination, Brainwashing & Thought Control, by William Sargant.

There are some fabulous sections which will have to find themselves onto my walls, t-shirts, business cards, etc.

It should be more widely known that electrical recordings of the human brain show that it is particularly sensitive to rhythmic stimulation by percussion and bright light among other things and certain rates of rhythm can build up recordable abnormalities of brain function and explosive states of tension sufficient even to produce convulsive fits in predisposed subjects.

Incredible quotability, eh?

Some people can be persuaded to dance in time with such rhythms until they collapse in exhaustion. Furthermore, it is easier to disorganize the normal function of the brain by attacking it simultaneously withs several strong rhythms played in different tempos.

Sounds like student-flat drum-club is going to be dangerous. Give us some more, Sargant.

Rhythmic drumming is found in the ceremonies of many primitive religions all over the world. The accompanying excitement and dancing is also maintained until the same point of physical and emotional collapse has been reached.

Alcohol and other drugs are often used to heighten the excitement of religious dancers and this too hastens the breakdown, after which feelings of being freed from sin and evil dispositions, and of starting life a new, may occur.

Belief in divine posession is very common at such times, and so is the mystical trance.

As my bruvvers might say this shit is dyyin’ to be sampled.

Blade Runner 3

It’s like a bad dream. A random visit to an Oxfam on a book-hunt for a little light reading I uncovered a hardback BLADE RUNNER™ 3: Replicant Instinct. By K. W. Jester, sorry, Jeter. It’s not so much bad as shit. It reads exactly as you would expect if a fourteen-year-old with a failed comprehensive education tried to write a sequel to the novelisation of the movie Blade Runner. For a work “fully authorised by the Philip K. Dick Estate” this “an evocative and haunting novel” as the publishers gamely hoax but is a fanboy rewrite of Blade Runner, and certainly not anything to do with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

The publisher dreadly warns us “in his first sequel to the movie, Blade Runner™2: The Edge of Human, Jester, sorry, Jeter, resolved many of the discrepancies between the movie and the novel upon which it was based”. I’ll bet it does, but what I doubt it’ll do is correctly inform us why the two are so different, and that’s down to Ridley Scott being a competent action movie director and PKD being a genius-at-work. I enjoy the movie, it’s about a space-age bounty-hunter flashing about in a hover-car. The novel is about crisis of identity, in fact a good number of them.

I’ll finish the work and not be so tough on it. I’ll enjoy it at some vapid level, like I’d enjoy a Marshall-Smith. Genius it ain’t.