HW: Epoch Eclipse review in Time Out

[Andy Gilham]

> Hawkwinds One of johnny rottens fav bands eh?

I've heard this one a few times - sometimes it's claimed he was a Hawkwind
roadie, but I don't think that's true.  Mind you, knowing Rotten, he might
just say he likes HW to piss people off.

>
> I didn't read that in his autobiography. Why is it that no one famous
> ever acknoledges hawkwind as a fav band or an infulence on there own
> material(even though its obvious that they are) in interviews. Take for
> example Primal Scream they covered Motorhead on ther last album it
> resembled the hawkwind one not motorheads version but i can't remmeber
> any interview with the band acknowledging hawkind.I always thought
> there was some kind of stigma surrounding liking hawkwind.
>
> colm

That's for sure!

The line in the Time Out review about HW being the "bridge between
psychedelia and punk" was spot on, and got me thinking.  It's sort of
against received wisdom that such a thing could even be; in the
user-friendly blister-packaged Rock Circus-style history of popular music,
punk didn't even exist before Johnny said "shit" to Bill Grundy.  But it
ain't so - for instance, in the press clippings on hawkwind.com, you'll find
in an item from February 1975: "Their music sounds like good, solid punk
rock to me."  And a couple of years ago, there was an exhibit of punk rock
art at the Festival Hall, purporting to show how punk design was radically
different from all that had gone before.  And what was one of the key
exhibits?  Barney Bubbles' sleeve designs for Elvis Costello!  They could
have had a much more interesting exhibit showing how punk had in fact
*evolved* from what had happened before, and that what happened in 1976 was
just the media catching up with it some years after the fact.

It's all symptomatic of something, anyway - Hawkwind have always been rock's
awkward squad, never conforming to any of the nice little genre labels.
(Like "hippy-drippy prog-rock bollocks,", a form I never had much time for
myself. :)

--Andy

mailto:Andy.Gilham at btinternet.com; http://www.btinternet.com/~andy.gilham