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

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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 Disc 7 originally released in a different mix as Hawkwind As The Sonic Assassins (1977) and later appeared in more complete form on disc 2 of 25 Years On ALSO INCLUDING THE PREVIOUSLY UNRELEASED PROMOTIONAL FILM OF HAWKLORDS AT UXBRIDGE UNIVERSITY IN 1978 AND A PERFORMANCE OF ‘QUARK, STRANGENESS AND CHARM’ ON THE MARC BOLAN TV SHOW, PLUS A LAVISHLY ILLUSTRATED BOOK, ESSAY AND A POSTER.

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. 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. 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.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. 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. 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. Your book focuses on Hawkwind. As one of the most innovative and culturally significant bands of the 1970s, what’s most unique about them? Hawkwind: Days Of The Underground: Radical Escapism in the Age Of Paranoia’ | Interview with Joe Banks ‘Days Of The Underground’ is a decade-long trip into the music of Hawkwind, exploring the ideas and concepts that fuelled the band during their classic 1970s period, and speaking to the crew that manned the ship.

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.The four discs of live recordings from the period contain a great number of unheard (by me, anyway) gems, and all three albums have enough high quality outtakes with them to give each of them a greater resonance. In short, this is an exhaustive trawl for fans which also contains very little fat which could be trimmed – which is a remarkable balancing act.

MIT Press began publishing journals in 1970 with the first volumes of Linguistic Inquiry and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Today we publish over 30 titles in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology. 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. For a start, they were musically unique – there may have been parallels with some of the contemporary stuff coming out of Germany, but they were completely out on their own in Britain. But it wasn’t just that they sounded different – they acted differently as well, in the way that they were fiercely opposed to the “star trip” and how the traditional music business worked. They toured the country relentlessly and built up a genuine bond with their audience, inviting them to become part of a shared mythology. Just like the Beatles, they were a “revolution in the head” for many people, something which persists to this day. What inspired you to write ‘Hawkwind: Days Of The Underground: Radical Escapism in the Age Of Paranoia’? In shamanic cultures, the rituals and ceremonies are ultimately about transformation – the ability of the shaman actually to become another being, to be possessed by another spirit. For Banks, this is a key aspect of what he calls Hawkwind’s radical escapism: they offered not just a counter-culture but a counter-reality to a paranoid and profoundly disillusioned decade. Reality you can rely on, to use one of their slogans from later in the decade. As the country lurched deeper and deeper into crisis – be it political, economic or environmental – and trust in authority bled away, the band’s millenarian rejectionism of corporate and societal norms seemed a positive model for action.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. 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. That just leaves two Blurays, from which rises a previously unreleased film of the Hawklords Uxbridge Uni show in ’78 and a slightly bizarre appearance on the Marc Bolan TV show. A handful of promos and a nicely compiled (as usual – comes as standard I guess now as the expectation) booklet and assessment. A grand compilation, but we’d expect no less – compilers of the ‘light touch’ Genesis BBC Broadcasts take note…. 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.