When Hawkwind figured out how to disorientate police sniffer dogs
In the UK at least, psychedelia’s real successor was the rag-tag space rock ensemble Hawkwind.
As the 1960s’ lysergic promises curdled into the bloated farce of prog rock, the trippy boundaries pushed by the likes of The Beatles or The 13th Floor Elevators found the unveiled cosmic terrain’s calling among the German experimentalists scoring the country’s political fire across the student campuses and communes amid its youthful radicalism, given voice by the likes of Neu!, Can, Faust, and a proto-Kraftwerk. Over in Jamaica, psych would trickle into the King Tubby reggae studio, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry sculpting mammoth expanses of heady dub charged with interstellar sonic energy.
Such far-out explorations held little sway in the UK, with the exception of Pink Floyd at their best. While Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer were enjoying their brief chart bubble, down on the streets was Dave Brock fronting his hard-nosed, psychonaut Hawkwind. Formed in London’s Ladbroke Grove in the wane of the city’s swinging era, Brock and the eventual settled line-up, including Nik Turner on sax and Michael DikMik’ Davies’ electronic tonalities, cut a darker, more hypnotic edge to the day’s psych-rock, later adding heavier rock bludgeons and future Motörhead frontman Lemmy’s jagged bass attack for extra proto-punk heft.
Magic would be conjured across their 1972 tour promoting that year’s Doremi Fasol Latido. The myths and legends that surround Hawkind would be cemented here: Barney Bubbles’ immersive light show amid the darkened venue, naked dances from performance artist Stacia, and on-stage poetry and cryptic narration from sci-fi writer Michael Moorcock and/or Robert Calvert.
Crucially, copious amounts of LSD were consumed most nights to enter the deepest recesses of the cosmos. So dedicated to the experience, they’d eagerly cause maximum mayhem by locking the exit doors to ensure no possible escape. The sets at Liverpool and Brixton would be collated for the following year’s Space Ritual live album, Hawkwind’s definitive LP that serves as the perfect gateway to their shamanistic garage fever.
Yet, at the centre of Hawkind’s druggy shenanigans was a fierce political compass and class-conscious edge. While their peers were wrecking hotel rooms and living the life of monied excess, Hawkwind were organising free gigs and benefit shows for everybody from striking miners to the militant Angry Brigade, and played Glastonbury Festival back when it was associated with the countercultural fringe. Through the 1980s, Hawkwind would be closely aligned with the New Age travellers, playing the final Stonehenge Free Festival in 1984 before the Thatcher government’s ideological assault on the perceived “enemy within” living lives outside the confines of her neoliberal dogma.
Hawkwind had been hassled by the police for years previously, some counts reaching as high as 68 times since their 1969 founding, especially in relation to drug searches. The band had discovered a novel way of throwing off canine scents, however. Deploying DikMik’s signal generators, the on-stage gear deployed through tape echoes and ring modulators to conjure their heady soundscapes, the electronics mage was supposedly so adept at wielding his generator he was able to emit low-level frequencies unheard by the human ear but disorienting enough for sniffer dogs to abandon their smell duties.
As well as protecting their precious chemical stash, DikMik would stand as pivotal for the band, adding his electronic lightning to Hawkwind’s chromatic sound and forming an essential ingredient to their sonic attack, and instrumentally, the member who insisted his pal and fellow speed fiend Lemmy join the group, cementing both the look and sound of the psychoactive outsiders during the Space Ritual era and leaving a dissident legacy that punk, industrial, and acid house would all owe a debt to.
