DAYS OF THE UNDERGROUND - THE STUDIO AND LIVE RECORDINGS 1977-1979

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Warrior On The Edge Of Time’, again courtesy of my brother. Everything about it – from the fold-out sleeve to the driving, Mellotron-soaked music – seemed incredible, and different from those other bands.

A DELUXE 10 DISC (8 CD / 2 BLU RAY) LIMITED EDITION BOXED SET FEATURING ALL OF THE RECORDINGS MADE AND RELEASED BY HAWKWIND AND HAWKLORDS BETWEEN 1977 AND 1979 FEATURING ROBERT CALVERT. The art of a great biographer is getting to the crux of the subject, warts and all, and with the new interviews, contemporary cuttings and critical analysis, this is one of the best books I have read that goes to such depth around a band, and there’s plenty to get your teeth into for both fans and non-fans. Nearly a decade after the release of the acclaimed surround mix of Warrior on the Edge of Time, a limited edition 8 CD / 2 Blu ray boxed set from Hawkwind that showcases the band's tenure with Charisma Records in the late 1970s is released in March 2023. On this deluxe box set titled “Days of the Underground: The Studio & Live Recordings 1977-1979” fans will find the music that breaks new ground, producing a series of classic albums that adapted to the changing musical times with invention and flair. Specifically, the boxed set features three albums: “Quark, Strangeness and Charm,” “Hawklords: 25 Years On,” and “P.X.R. 5” each with immersive 5.1 surround sound and Stereo remixes by Steven Wilson. Wilson is at work on remixing 1978’s 25 Years On which they released as Hawklords due to some legal issues. Typically perverse Calvert offers some unexpected lyrical content,including a long description of jumping out of a plane on Free Fall, and Aussie drug abuse in Flying Doctor – so a big departure from the sci-fi influenced work they’d been doing previously. Not bad for a band memorably described in one early Melody Maker headline as ‘The Joke Band That Made It’.Uncle Sam’s on Mars / The Iron Dream (live Ipswich 1977) 10 Quark, Strangeness And Charm (live Ipswich 1977)

The classic story of having an older brother with a large record collection! I started off playing his Slade singles, and ambiently soaking up the music from his bedroom – Pink Floyd, Queen, Deep Purple, Judas Priest… “They were musically unique” MIT Press Direct is a distinctive collection of influential MIT Press books curated for scholars and libraries worldwide. This is a quite comprehensive set of this period in the band’s history, well presented with plenty to discover and enjoy. It also shows the band’s ability to successfully ride the rising punk wave and deliver a period covering what could be one of the highlights of their long career. This is a set that should attract the attention of fans, collectors and casual listeners alike. Joe Banks: I’ve been a serious music fan since the age of 13. After school and university, I worked in music shops, sang in a band and made my own music. This of course meant that I was effectively broke most of the time, so in my late 20s, I bit the bullet and got a “proper” job in PR, which I did as a full-time career until 2013. Since then, I’ve been looking after my daughters while freelancing in PR. Oh, and passing myself off as a music writer. We also have a complete discography including where to find lost ‘70s recordings that were released post-1980, such as the Atomhenge/Esoteric reissues which tidied up the post-UA era for me, an era was subject to sub-par re-issues and incomplete compilations.In Days of the Underground, Joe Banks repositions Hawkwind as one of the most innovative and culturally significant bands of the 1970s. It's not an easy task. As with many bands of this era, a lazy narrative has built up around Hawkwind that doesn't do justice to the breadth of its ambition and achievements. Banks gives the lie to the popular perception of Hawkwind as one long lysergic soap opera; with Days of the Underground, he shows us just how revolutionary Hawkwind were, and their ongoing legacy's incendiary potential. Disc Seven has a live recording from the Sonic Assassins at the Queensway Hall, Barnstable on 23 rd December 1977. This concert has been remixed from the original master tapes, and a fine job has been done, the sound quality is good and clearly shows a band that are together, tight and have not lost any of their Hawkwind impetus in their performance of classic Hawkwind songs. It coincided with their signing to Charisma Records after an unexpectedly successful stint with United Artists, including their unlikely hit single Silver Machine. It also saw the departure of founder member Nic Turner, and the return of charismatic, but troubled, frontman and lyricist Robert Calvert. Of course, you can’t discuss the band and the music without the characters that inhabited the band, and there’s plenty of quotes from contemporary interviews with Lemmy and Robert Calvert, both sadly no longer with us. With such huge personalities, the music that they made was big enough to include all of them. In lesser hands this could have been taking on too much, however in Banks’ skilled hands, he brings the story of Hawkwind to life, and most importantly through the interviews and the sociological and political essays he deftly describes and argues quite convincingly why Hawkwind could be considered one of the first UK punk bands.

Calvert rejoined the band in 1976 and the three albums-worth of material they recorded in 1977–8 – Quark, Strangeness and Charm, 25 Years On (released under the Hawklords name) and PXR5 – are among the best and most consistent they made. It’s the only period for which Calvert wrote almost all the lyrics, and his conceptual concerns, at once both future-facing and urgently contemporary, are more lucid and direct than any of the band’s other songwriters. While the ritual space chants are long gone, and the music is more structured and conventional, the radicalism – the offer of an alternative, rejectionist understanding of reality – is still very much there. In particular, the dark satire of Pan Transcendental Industries – developed by Calvert, again in partnership with Barney Bubbles, for the 1978 Hawklords tour, and drawing on the thinking of architectural theorist Rem Koolhaas – offers a prescient metaphorical critique of global corporate hegemony that’s acutely alive to the essential absurdity of hegemonic ambition. The tour programme came in the form of a corporate brochure for PTI, a business engaged in the industrialisation of religion; proof of PTI’s success, Calvert writes, is the fact that angels have now exchanged their wings for car doors. As if we don’t get enough Hawkwind in various forms from beneath the Cherry Red umbrella (including an upcoming new studio album at the end of April) here’s a collection that pushes the boat out. The period between 1977 and 1979 when Hawklords continued to fly the Hawkwind flag is safely gathered in with a set of live and studio material from the era. Steven Wilson’s been at it again, with new masters/remixes of Quark Strangeness & Charm, PXR5 plus the Hawklords’ 25 Years On, all of which get expanded into a swirl of surround sound in 5.1 on the Blurays. The period between February 1977 and June 1979 saw the recording and release of this trio of classic albums, which saw Hawkwind adapt to the changing musical times and adopt a ‘new wave’ approach both on record and on stage. I’m currently working with Strange Attractor on what I hope is going to be long-running project involving lots of writers as well as myself. I’m also continuing to review for Prog, Shindig! and Electronic Sound magazines. Joe Banks

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In Days Of The Underground, Joe Banks repositions Hawkwind as one of the most innovative and culturally significant bands of the 1970s. Rejecting the accepted narrative that views the band as one long lysergic soap opera, he shows us just how revolutionary Hawkwind were and how enduring their legacy remains. Profusely illustrated with rare and previously unseen archival material, Days Of The Underground will rewire your perceptions of Hawkwind forever. By 1979, Calvert had left the band again – for the last time – and while Banks goes on to discuss Hawkwind’s tour at the end of that year and their 1980 album Levitation, I’m not sure he shouldn’t have ended his book with the last of Calvert’s work to be released. Decades are an imprecise measure of anything and Hawkwind’s 1980s – a difficult and very different period for the band – began with Calvert’s departure. Whereas other bands used the emerging synthesiser technology as just another keyboard instrument, DikMik used an audio generator – at the time used by no other band in the world aside from New York’s Silver Apples – to create whole species of pure noise. Buffeting, whining and roaring on top of the pounding rhythms, it sounds like nothing so much as a pagan god of electricity thinking out loud to itself.