The Story Behind The Song: Hawkwind’s space rock masterpiece ‘Silver Machine’
The first time I listened to Hawkwind‘s 1972 piece ‘Silver Machine’, aged around 11, I simply could not comprehend what I was hearing. Bar the work of Jimi Hendrix and Black Sabbath, I’d primarily thought the rock artists of the era were rather dull compared to the bands that had caught my imagination at that stage – Korn, Deftones, et al.
It was on a BBC Four programme that I came across the track, and to say I was bewitched was an understatement. Although the song’s verse is based around a typical 12-bar blues arrangement, there was a remarkably heavy groove in the track that I had never heard before. This sound was augmented by Lemmy Kilmister’s roaring vocals and the utterly bewitching solo by Dave Brock. In many ways, this was the first space rock track. Without its influence, you could say goodbye to elements of shoegaze, post-rock and later psychedelia.
This was the sound of mind-expanding drugs. Although I didn’t know it at the time, it was to be the start of a long journey into pushing my own brain and body to their limits. The echo-drenched waves of Brock’s guitar intermittently emerged from deep within to remind me just how ahead of their time the band and track were. Later, at the age of 18, I was given a copy of Hawkwind’s eponymous 1970 debut and was alerted to how overlooked they are – but that’s a story for another day.
Although there are elements of the song that haven’t aged well, when you take ‘Silver Machine’ in the context of 1972, it is difficult to deny how impressive it must have been upon first hearing it. It was such a success that the song hit number three on the UK chart and charted again when it was re-released in 1976, 1778 and 1983. There’s an otherworldy potency within the track, with a case to be made that this was the last hurrah of the counterculture before the new epoch arrived.
What’s more, the song fooled everyone. It wasn’t as serious as we all thought, and the listeners were the butt of a great joke played by frontman Robert Calvert and the rest of the band. However, it was taken literally and helped to re-energise rock.
The track was first recorded live at the Greasy Truckers benefit show at The Roundhouse, London, in 1972 and can be found on other compilations. Still, the record it is most noted for being on is the re-release and remastered version of In Search of Space. The overdubs to the original recording were then applied and mixed at Morgan Studios, with Douglas Smith and Dave Robinson overseeing proceedings. Brock later took the production credits under the alias of Dr. Technical.
Remembering the Greasy Truckers benefit gig, drummer Simon King later noted how indebted the song is to the blues: “[The Greasy Truckers] was about my third gig, and I didn’t know what I was doing. I hadn’t done any rehearsals, and I thought that ‘Silver Machine’ was a Chuck Berry number – really.”
The writing credits on the single are shared between Robert Calvert and Sylvia MacManus, with neither on the recording we all know. Sylvia was Brock’s then-wife, and he was using her name to put pressure on the publishers to improve his deal.
As for Calvert, he penned the lyrics and sang the lead on the original live recording. However, the rest of the band felt the performance was too weak for the single release, so they re-recorded them in the studio. At the time of the overdubbing, Calvert – who had bipolar disorder – had been sectioned and was unavailable to fulfil his duties. Cue Lemmy moonlighting as a frontman, a significant moment in itself.
Lemmy later said: “[Calvert’s] vocal was fucking hopeless, but he never realised it. That’s how mad he was. It sounded like Captain Kirk reading ‘Blowing in the Wind’. They tried everybody singing it except me. Then, as a last shot, Douglas said, ‘Try Lemmy’. And I did it in one take or two.”
Douglas Smith also recalled: “Lemmy just had the best voice for it. Of course, Bob was not pleased when he found out.”
Although it might not have been initially clear, the lyrics are actually a parody of space travel. The words were directly inspired by an essay by French symbolist writer Alfred Jarry – How to Construct a Time Machine. Calvert had interpreted the work as a description of how to build a bicycle and so took his reading and turned it into his greatest track. He explained: “I read this essay by Alfred Jarry [sic] called, ‘How to Construct a Time Machine’, and I noticed something which I don’t think anyone else has thought of because I’ve never seen any criticism of the piece to suggest this. I seemed to suss out immediately that what he was describing was his bicycle”.
Adding: “He did have that turn of mind. He was the kind of bloke who’d think it was a good joke to write this very informed-sounding piece, full of really good physics (and it has got some proper physics in it), describing how to build a time machine, which is actually about how to build a bicycle, buried under this smoke-screen of physics that sounds authentic. Jarry got into doing this thing called ‘Pataphysics’ [sic], which is a sort of French joke science.”
The frontman concluded: “A lot of notable French intellectuals formed an academy around the basic idea of coming up with theories to explain the exceptions to the Laws of the Universe, people like Ionesco the playwright. The College of Metaphysics. I thought it was a great idea for a song. At that time, there were a lot of songs about space travel, and it was the time when NASA was actually, really doing it”.
“They’d put a man on the moon and were planning to put parking lots and hamburger stalls and everything up there. I thought that it was about time to come up with a song that actually sent this all up, which was ‘Silver Machine’. ‘Silver Machine’ was just to say, I’ve got a silver bicycle, and nobody got it. I didn’t think they would. I thought that what they would think we were singing about some sort of cosmic space travel machine. I did actually have a silver racing bike when I was a boy. I’ve got one now, in fact.”
