An account of the English rock band Hawkwind shows them to be one of
the most innovative and culturally significant bands of the 1970s.
Fifty years on from when it first formed, the English rock band Hawkwind
continues to inspire devotion from fans around the world. Its influence
reaches across the spectrum of alternative music, from psychedelia,
prog, and punk, through industrial, electronica, and stoner rock.
Hawkwind has been variously, if erroneously, positioned as the heir to
both Pink Floyd and the Velvet Underground, and as Britain's answer to
the Grateful Dead and Krautrock. It has defined a genre--space
rock--while operating on a frequency that's uniquely its own.
Hawkwind offered a form of radical escapism and an alternative account
of a strange new world for a generation of young people growing up on a
planet that seemed to be teetering on the brink of destruction, under
threat from economic meltdown, industrial unrest, and political
polarization. While other commentators confidently asserted that the
countercultural experiment of the 1960s was over, Hawkwind took the
underground to the provinces and beyond.
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 was.
