MOJO EYEWITNESS

After freak hit Silver Machine, Ladbroke Grove’s hard-tripping space rock marauders prepared to leave the planet and blow minds via a legendary multimedia stage show which they took on tour in late ’72. Cue mind-scrambling cosmologies, scorched retinas and riffs to make you ill. “The band and the audience seemed to grow into one creature,” recall players and collaborators. “Being in the middle of it was something else…”

Interviews by IAN HARRISON

Portrait by GIJSBERT HANEKROOT

In electric dreams: (main image) Stacia at the epicentre of Hawkwind’s Space Ritual.

Getty, Courtesy Cherry Red

Dave Brock: We had a hit with Silver Machine [Number 3 in August 1972]. That opened so many doors for us. The money that we got, we invested back into our live show. It was jolly handy.

Doug Smith: It was wonderful when Silver Machine was a hit, and you saw the opening straight away. The BBC made a film of it for Top Of The Pops, at the end of a show at the Dunstable Civic, with the lights on – very unatmospheric. The two cameras were the size of Daleks, with three people on each one and an enormous broadcasting unit outside, the kind you saw at football matches.

Andrew Lauder: Things were going very well by then. [Albums] X In Search Of Space had done well [Number 18 in September 1972] and Doremi Faso Latido did better [Number 14 in December 1972]. They were starting to get some big crowds and playing bigger venues. I loved it when Lemmy was in the band, and Simon [King, new drummer] was great too.

Star crew assembly: Space Ritual-era Hawkwind (back row, from left) Simon King, Ian ‘Lemmy’ Kilmister, Stacia, Miss Renée, (front row, from left) Dave Brock, Bob Calvert, Del Dettmar, Nik Turner; (inset) covers.

Getty (3), Barry Plummer, Douglas Smith, Courtesy Cherry Red

“I’D GO ON-STAGE ON LSD ALL THE TIME.”

Nik Turner

DS: Simon was one of the good people in the band and he balanced things an awful lot. And we’d had enough of Terry [Ollis, always-nude ex-drummer] falling asleep on the drum stool because he’d take too many Mandies.

DB: The Space Ritual came into being with basically Bob Calvert [on-off poet, singer and lyricist] and [designer] Barney Bubbles coming up with this idea, and Jonathan Smeeton, who was Liquid Len and the Lensmen, doing the light show and us, obviously, doing the music side of it. It was the vision of all the people involved in it, all hands on deck, all enthusiastic.

Nik Turner: Bob wanted to do his Space Rock opera, but he spent most of his time in [mental] hospital when it was being put together. So it was put together very loosely by myself, Jonathan Smeeton and Barney Bubbles. We tried to remember how Robert wanted it and I think we did justice to it.

DB: X In Search Of Space had The Hawkwind Log where Calvert was writing about going off into space in a spaceship and all that, and Barney had this idea of trying to do the colours of the spheres on-stage, which would work out as the Music Of The Spheres…

Barney Bubbles (in his notes for the Space Ritual stage show): ”The basic principle for the Starship and the Space Ritual is based on the Pythagorean concept of sound. Briefly, this conceived the Universe to be an immense monochord, with its single string stretched between absolute spirit and at its lowest end, absolute matter. Along this string were positioned the planets of our solar system… assuming the stage area to be our solar system, the audience becomes space outside our system… the music can awaken the Starship, but its fuel must be Audience/ Hawkwind Mind-energy. We were born to go. Bless all who sail in her.”