Sideways Through Time: An Oral History of Hawkwind in the 1970s by Joe Banks
Release date: October 31, 2024Label: Strange Attractor
While researching and interviewing for his excellent 2020 book on 70s Hawkwind, Days of the Underground: Radical Escapism in the Age of Paranoia, Joe Banks found he had too much material from the interviews to fit into the book which led to a companion piece, Sideways Through Time: An Oral History of Hawkwind in the 1970s being made available as an accompanying supplement with the first 500 copies of Days of the Underground. Fortunately for people like me, a revised and enlarged version of Sideways Through Time has now been re-issued as a stand alone book!
This new version has 34 interviews with people who were in and around Hawkwind in the 70s including Dave Brock, DikMik, Stacia Blake, Doug Smith, David Hardy and Michael Butterworth!
Both these Strange Attractor books are works of art in their own right, beautifully produced and visually pleasing. As with Days of the Underground: Radical Escapism in the Age of Paranoia this new book has plenty of interesting visual material; reproductions of newspaper articles, ads and tickets from the time.
The interviews have been curated into six categories; Musicnauts, Mothership Control, Space Crew, Visuals and Optics, Technicians of Spaceship Earth and Friends and Relations. Musicnauts includes various band members, Mothership Control includes Doug Smith and Jeff Dexter and so on, it proves to be an effective way of grouping the diverse interviews for maximum cohesion and focus and allows the reader to follow themes through that may have otherwise have got lost.
The themes that I personally found really interesting was the idea of DikMik and Del Dettmar as early innovators of electronics in music, the overlap between Hawkwind and the Kosmische bands in West Germany, success built on constant gigging including many benefits, a grass roots mentality that kept the band close to their fan base, the band as an avatar of the underground, Robert Calvert.
One of the interviews I found most refreshing, interesting and engaging was Stacia Blake, which brought another perspective and fresh insight to the recounting of the early years. I particularly liked her comment, after describing Robert Calvert and Spike Milligan as being “way ahead of their time”, that “People talk too much about Bob Calvert’s illness rather than his genius” (p.61). For me Stacia’s interview brought to the fore and crystalised an intriguing aspect of oral histories and the recounting of historic incidents and periods. The interviews took place between 2016 and 2023 and I wonder if they sometimes seem to tell you more about that person’s knowledges, wider understandings, developments and emotional intelligence than they do the reality of what actually went on 40-50 years ago?
History is always written from a certain standpoint and oral histories are by their very nature a collection of subjective perspectives on both individual and collective experiences and events and so you get a diversity of accounts of what happened. The great thing about this book is the way the interviews have been internally structured and themes brought to the fore by Banks’ questions with his notes at the end of each interview clarifying or bringing extra information to bear on that particular interview.
With Sideways Through Times as with Days of the Underground: Radical Escapism in the Age of Paranoia Joe Banks has provided Hawkwind fans with a thought provoking, engaging insight into 70s Hawkwind. Will you have a more objective, factual understanding of what went on and of certain episodes? I have no idea, but you will have a better grasp of what some people think went on!
As Doug Smith observes “And if there was a story that was a bit of a myth, you would let the myth carry on, you wouldn’t stop it” (p.111).
