Here's editor Neil Mason's very kind review of Sideways Through Time v2... You can read it online here (keep scrolling!)
Earlier this year I hosted a talk with author Matthew Collin about his ‘Dream Machines’ book, a history of British electronic music that stretches back to the Second World War. My big takeaway from the night was that some acts were way more influential than you’d think. Hawkwind were on that list and we chatted about them for a while. They took a resolutely working class approach to being in a band. They were going to gig and they were going to earn money.
“So Hawkwind went around the country playing absolutely everywhere,” Matthew told me. “And they had a dedicated guy making noises - their roadie Dikmik. His job was to weird it up and they took this weirdness everywhere. You talk to people like New Order or Cabaret Voltaire, their idea of electronic music was not high culture, it wasn't Pierre Henry or Karlheinz Stockhausen or Luciano Berio, it was Hawkwind. And this is where one stream of our 80s/90s electronic music comes from, from people having seen them because they were the only band that came to their town to play.”
It all made me go back for a rethink. And that included revisiting Joe Banks’ excellent biography, ‘Hawkwind: Days Of The Underground’ (Strange Attractor). Joe is someone I know from my time as a commissioning editor and his obsession with Hawkwind has always shone through. The first time he approached me for work was with a great Hawkwind-related pitch. When you’re commissioning, people like Joe are spot on. Editors tend to ask themselves why is this person or that person the best choice for the job. In Joe’s case, having written a book about the space rock godheads, he’s the authority. But it’s not one book he’s written, it turns out it’s two.
There was a hardback special edition of ‘Days Of The Underground’ in 2020 that came with an entire 200-page bonus book, ‘Sideways Through Time: An Oral History Of Hawkwind in the 1970s’. The edition was 500 and it understandable sold out in a blink and the oral history has been in demand ever since. So here it gets a standalone release in a revised, expanded version all of its own. It adds eight brand-new interviews to the existing pile of conversations with band members, managers, crew, and assorted technicians of spaceship earth. The new stuff includes Dave Brock, Terry Ollis, Dave Anderson and Del Dettmar, as well as additional visual material.
Joe tells me it's the most comprehensive collection of Hawkwind-related interviews ever compiled “with new revelations guaranteed for even the most diehard Hawkfan”. And he should know. Using oral history to tell a story is often hit and miss and I think the best ones are the ones that happen by accident, like this. Joe just happened to interview a heck of a lot of people for ‘Days Of The Underground’ and as he’d only used a fraction of the chats for the first book, a plan was hatched for a further volume featuring the interviews. He hasn’t made an attempt to weave a story out of multiple interviews, but rather serve up the conversations wholesale before moving on to the next one. Simon Reynolds did this to great effect with ‘Totally Wired’, his companion interview collection for ‘Rip It Up’. And it works for Joe too.
He splits the book into the various factions - so the band, management, the crew, visuals, producers and friends and relations. There are, as you’d expect, some good tales. There is mucho drug talk too, hurrah. I especially like the new interview with drummer and original member Terry Ollis, who left the band in early 1972 having played on ‘Hawkwind’ and ‘In Search Of Space’. The story at the time was that he had to leave because he had a drug problem, which is a bit rich, and that the reason they had two drummers towards the end of his tenure was because he was off his nut all the time. “It’s a load of bollocks,” says Terry in the book. His drug of choice was Mandrax, an industrial-strength sedative that was banned in the mid-80s because people like Terry were enjoying it a little too much. For example, the band were doing some dates in Scotland, and Terry was sharing a room with Lemmy.
“I remember waking up,” he told Joe, “and for the first and only time in my fucking life, I said, ‘Lem, do you want a Mandy?’ He said, ‘No, you must be joking.’ So I said, ‘Alright, I’ll do yours then.’ Two of them. I thought we had the day off, but… we had a gig that day! Fucking hell… I played the gig that night, but I was incapable, the worst I’ve ever played. I apologised to them all after, and I remember Dave [Brock] saying, ‘You cunt!’ I felt really bad letting them all down. But that was the only fucking time.”
Turns out it wasn’t, but I won’t spoil it for you. The interviews are presented in their raw form as Q&A and there’s something rather bold about a writer offering up his material like this. You can tell a lot from a writer’s interview technique so publishing it like this is a bit like having to show your working out in maths. You can see how interviews are structured, how the writer guides the conversation, are they listening and responding rather than it just being a list of questions? I love how it lays bare the the process of a good writer and Joe is undoubtedly one of those. This is an essential companion to ‘Hawkwind: Days Of The Underground’. Nice one Joe.