It’s 50 years since Hawkwind played the Liverpool Stadium and gave us ‘Space Ritual’. It was a show unlike any other I’d seen before or since, giving rise to a legendary live album. This story is of my unlikely introduction to Hawkwind, masters of the universe.
It’s coming up to Christmas, 1972. I’m wearing Doc Marten’s, polished cherry red, parallel jeans, Ben Sherman shirt, braces and a tonic Harrington - that’s two tone. The cropped hair has been grown out. Saturday nights I’d wear brogues. You can’t dance in DMs and they wouldn’t let you in anyway. Northern Soul culture. Whether standing on the Kop at Anfield or pretending to be a young soul rebel at Whitchurch Civic, the image helps a 16 year old fit in. Yet at home the music I listen to is very different.
Since the Spring we’ve been picking up a hitch-hiker at Nomansheath on our way to the match. He’s from Liverpool so with wicked imagination the locals call him Scouse. About five years older than me and working, he’s someone I look up to. One day in September he suggested we go to watch the Reds play Leeds away.
“We’ll have to thumb it to Liverpool in the morning then pick up the special from Lime Street.”
“The special?”
“It’s a special train, just for fans going to the game. I can get you a lift home later, if you’re prepared to wait until around eleven.”
“How come?”
“Me and my mates are going to see a band.”
“Who are you seeing?”
“Hawkwind.”
“Ah, I love Hawkwind.”
Taking a step back, he looked me up and down, grinning, even though I’d started to grow my hair.
“But surely you’re a soul boy, aren’t you, dressed like that?”
“When I go out with my mates, yeah. But at home I listen to all sorts of stuff.”
So he got me a ticket. And I inadvertently set out on a new phase of life. We beat Leeds 2-1 and the special train experience was an eyeopener. The gig was at Liverpool Stadium, opened in 1932 as the world’s first purpose-built boxing stadium. We met Scouse’s friends in the St Paul’s pub - Chalky, Martin and Konk. They also thought it was hilarious, someone looking like me going to see Hawkwind. Instead of going in for one of the support acts, Sutherland Brothers and Quiver, we got another round in. I nipped to the loo. Through the open window I heard the strains of a song called ‘Sailing’ that I’d heard on the radio. Missing good support acts thanks to having “one more pint” would become a pattern. Within a few years, this same track would be covered by Rod Stewart and shift over a million copies.
Outside the pub, people milled round the streets off St Paul’s Square. It was dark, growing colder, but happy after three pints and a pie, we made the short walk to the entrance of the Stadium. Its Art Deco facade had six squared-off pillars in front of the doors, under a corrugated canopy, the letters ‘STAD-UM’ illuminated above in big red capitals. A bass-heavy throb vibrated through the walls as we queued to have our tickets torn. Into the toilets first, where the aroma of stale piss hung in the air. Everyone stared at me. Amongst the long hairs and flares, the beads and beards, I’m an alien.
The auditorium is circular, its stage in the centre. Walking to find seats, I was captivated by what’s coming from the speakers. Like the sound of science fiction, thrilling and visceral, I’d never heard anything like it.
“What’s this, Konk?”
“Pink Floyd… ‘One of These Days’.”
The lights, the people, the music, so loud and so…what’s that sweet smell in the air? The curious concoction of joss sticks, patchouli oil and fat cigarettes, passed between mates. Five more pints arrived in plastic glasses that wobbled if you held them too tight. Brinsley Schwarz came on. Brinsley himself was pointed out to me on guitar, along with bass player and lead singer Nick Lowe. They weren’t bad although nothing really stood out. While the stage was prepared I took a walk round. Suddenly, from behind, two hippies snatched my Noddy Holder cap with the red bobble and ran off, like naughty overgrown kids. When I pointed them out to the lads, Chalky and Konk set off, returning a minute later.
“Here” said Chalky, throwing me the cap, “the f**kers won’t be doing that again.”
The lights went down, cheers went up. The start of my voyage into the unknown, a door opening to another culture. Picking out the band members in that lighting was a stretch. The volume was something else. A sonic assault.
Then, out of the dry ice, a woman throwing shapes emerged. Very tall, voluptuous, dark hair, she glided round the stage, in and out of lighting effects. At some point, I don’t quite know when or how, her dress disappeared and she was gyrating topless in front of the 3,000 audience, showing off the patterns painted over her body. Sixteen years old, the first time I’d seen real breasts in the flesh. And not just real breasts. They were huge breasts. Like an Amazonian goddess. This was Stacia. Lest you fear her assets may be exaggerated, bass player Lemmy, in an interview many years later, described her as ‘six feet two with a 52 inch chest’. Apart from the magnetic Stacia, the overwhelming impression was of the noise. Space rock they called it. Highlights included ‘You Shouldn’t Do That’, ‘Master of the Universe’ and, of course, ‘Silver Machine’.
My ears were ringing as we left the venue. Still ringing next morning.
“What did you think of Stacia?” Martin wanted to know.
Raising my eyebrows, I shook my head. Speechless.
It was tight in Chalky’s white Cortina, three squeezed into the back. A few miles along the A41 we pulled into the Wimpey at Eastham for a hamburger - 1s 6d, or 7.5p for any whippersnappers reading this. It had been a revelation. When I’d said I loved Hawkwind, the truth was I’d only seen them doing ‘Silver Machine’ on Top of the Pops.
So Friday, 22nd December. Last day of term before Christmas and we’re off to the Stadium to see Hawkwind again. I read about the tour plans in Sounds. Three light shows, a specially converted cinema screen, four dancers, three designers and a DJ. Barney Bubbles is producing it. They’d been working with Michael Moorcock, legendary sci-fi writer, who’d written spoken word contributions like ‘Space Attack’ and ‘Black Corridor’. He’d said of Hawkwind it "was like being aboard a generational starship whose crew had gone totally raving barmy”. The tour’s theme is “the astronomical concept of the nine planet system” and “dancers would be choreographed to imply the movements of the planets around the sun”. Right.
Inside the Stadium, seeing the stage set, they’ve clearly made an effort. The group’s equipment is housed in six-sided cabinets built into six-pointed star formations. There are rumours they’ll be recording some of the concerts on the tour for a live album and Konk speculates how brilliant it’d be if it was tonight’s. Music journalist Nick Kent had toured Europe with Hawkwind earlier that year. He’d written about witnessing the guitarist Dave Brock, “a chronic haemorrhoid sufferer, having to stop off and drop his trousers in order to bathe his tortured rectum in any nearby lake”. So rock’n’roll. It appears the reason the band released ‘Silver Machine’, their only commercial track ever, was to raise money to pay for this tour.
The lights go down. Strange announcements carry a sense of foreboding. It’s like a space rock theme park. Whooshing electronic noises unfurl around the venue and there’s a countdown. The show takes off with Liquid Len’s light show and lots of dry ice. The band crank through the gears and it soon feels like outer-space has all the best riffs, a thrilling experience.
“Do not panic” announces the inimitable Robert Calvert. “You have only a few seconds to escape. Use those seconds sensibly or you will inevitably die.”
Not a good time to be off your tits on acid.
My first primal, psychedelic space journey is underway and, as it becomes trance-like, two dancers appear and I snap out of it. One is the unmistakably monumental figure of the prodigiously chested Stacia who, once she’s said goodbye to her dress, is breasts akimbo for the whole evening. Miss René, another performance artiste, wears an identical costume and is blonde, petite and perfectly formed. Apparently there’s a third dancer but for some reason I don’t notice him.
It’s only the special effects of Dik Mik and Del Dittmar that suggest one song has finished and another might be about to begin as we boogie with Lemmy through the continuum of space, where no man has gone before. Well, at least not since last night’s show at King George’s Hall, Blackburn. Another Calvert announcement carries a health warning:
“You will feel dizzy. You will need to vomit.”
Having just returned from the toilets there are a few for whom the warning came just too late. Some of the audience dance round in their own sweet way. Others shake their head from side to side. By far the most popular movement is the metronomic nodding head, like those dogs that people stuck in their rear car windows back then.
“Do not panic. Small babies may be placed inside special cocoons and should be left if possible inside shelters.”
I look round. Can’t see any babies. Still, it ratchets up the tension. Finally it’s ‘Brainstorm’, awesomely executed but so long I wonder if they’ve forgotten how it ends. And there they leave us, abandoned on some distant planet. What a ride though. Merry Christmas, you crazy space lords.
A few months into 1973 it was announced the live recording would be released on a double album: ‘Hawkwind - The Space Ritual Alive in London and Liverpool’. It’s long since achieved legendary status and rightly so. According to ‘1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die’, this double live album featuring Hawkwind’s classic line-up, is their “magnum opus and perhaps the ultimate sonic trip”. An inspiration for space cadets everywhere. And for the odd soul rebel.
This article is extracted from Paul’s next book, an auto-fiction called ‘I Should Have Been Revising’. Set between 1971 and 1974 it’s about a council house kid trying to keep up at grammar school and his brotherly relationship with an older friend. A social, cultural and economic snapshot of the early seventies. Featuring music, from Northern Soul to Knebworth; football, from Anfield to Wembley; rugby, from the fourths to the first team; the joy of living in a Shropshire market town; and school, of course, from the fifth form to to the upper sixth. Watch this space!