NIK TURNER
Hawkwind’s Mighty Thunder Rider (1940-2022)
NIK Turner never much cared for musical perfection. As the freeblowing saxophonist in Hawkwind – with whom he also sang, composed and played flute – he helped define the wild aesthetic of their voyaging space rock, his squalling distortion central to the band’s pursuit of chaos, noise and rhythm. “I don’t have any illusions about my technical ability,” he told Sounds in 1971. “I tend to use it as an electronic medium rather than an instrument.”
If Dave Brock was Hawkwind’s guiding pragmatist, then Turner was its untamed spirit. He was a formidable stage presence, a rangy figure in silver face cake and DIY spacewear, as animated as the music raging around him. He and Brock had first met in the Dutch city of Haarlem in 1967, when both aspiring musicians had been busking around Europe, picking up odd jobs on the way.
Co-founding Hawkwind two years later, Turner was pivotal in their emergence as what he called “the people’s band”, becoming mainstays of the free festival scene and immersing themselves in various community projects. “Hawkwind in those days was almost an anti-band, we had no interest in stardom,” Turner told Uncut in 2013. “We just enjoyed playing.”
Turner’s key songwriting contributions over Hawkwind’s first six studio albums included “Master Of The Universe” and “Brainstorm”. But he was ousted in late 1976, supposedly for refusing to rein in his more wayward tendencies on stage. He returned in 1982, only to be expelled again a couple of years later after further tensions with Brock. In between, Turner undertook a number of leftfield endeavours, chiefly 1978’s Xitintoday album, centred around flute music that he’d played inside the Great Pyramid of Giza; and the formation of post-psychedelic ensemble, Inner City Unit.