HW: Black Sword

[M Holmes]

Tony A. Rowe writes:

> > Moorcock indirectly got me into BOC, via Black Blade. I had read the Elric
> > series and was a big fan. At first I thought BOC just wrote a tune about
> > Elric, then realized MM had actually collaborated with them...then heard he
> > collaborated w/HW...finally realized he was actually a member with
> > HW...that was the evolution of my realization of MM's involvement w/rock
> > music...

Same here. I was a bejant (obUS: freshman) student in 1976 and had to
share a room in halls. I was avidly reading the Corum books at the time,
having just devoured the Hawkmoon and Erekose books. We had portable
cassette players which had only just become cheap and mass market items
here and were what then passed for student hifi. I was then listening to
Bowie and, I'm afraid, Abba. My roommate had two tapes which he played
pretty frequently: Hall of the Mountain Grill and Warrior on the Edge of
Time. They were just pretty much at the edge of my conciousness until
one day I caught the "And they screamed for a champion" when I was in
the middle of The Sword and the Stallion and I thought "That's a
coincidence, weird!" and started listening. By the end of that lyric I
was saying "Toss us those tape covers would you Jim?" and spotted the
Moorcock rune on the credits. "He played in a band? Better give these a
listen..."

By the end of a week my fave songs were confirmed as Magnu and You;d
Better Believe It and my roommate already didn't care if he never heard
Hawkwind again. On trawling through the tape and record collections of
everyone in the hall (57 people I think) I'd orchestrated tapes of
"Hawkwind" (weird I thought, and "sounds like a cow giving birth" my
farmer roommate commented on Seeing It As You Really Are), In Search of
Space, and Roadhawks. When I got back home for the summer I added Space
Ritual, Doremi and Greasy Truckers. Quark, Strangeness and Charm came
out and I bought it on cassette. In September they played Edinburgh and
I organised a minibus trip to go to the gig. The following year I bought
hifi and started collecting records. My uncle had a record shop and
ordered the singles for me so I nabbed everything except Kings of Speed,
Hurry On Sundown, and of course the one I still don't have: "Hassan I
Sabha".

Thus a Hawkwind Kollection was born...