Joe Banks
528 pp. approx / 216mm x 156mm
Approx 150 black & white and colour images
Limited hardback edition of 500 copies
Paperback / Hardback
£25.00 / £50.00
Wraparound cover by Hawkwind cover artist John Coulthart.
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Voted one of the top ten music books of 2020 in MOJO, Uncut, Prog, and Shindig!
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Hardback edition of 500 copies includes:
• Sideways Through Time: An Oral History Of Hawkwind In The 1970s – a 200 page companion volume of interviews, including DikMik, Nik Turner, Michael Moorcock, Stacia Blake, Alan Powell, Paul Rudolph, Adrian Shaw, Paul Hayles, Harvey Bainbridge, Andrew Lauder, Doug Smith, Jeff Dexter, Jonathan Smeeton, Renée Berg, Michael Butterworth, and Pamela Townley
• A print of Michael Moorcock & Jim Cawthorn’s ‘Sonic Assassins’ comic strip from Frendz
• Postcards featuring unseen photographs from the ‘Space Ritual’ shoot by Laurie Lewis
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[A] meticulously researched, entirely engrossing history of the pioneering space-rock behemoth from their inception in 1969 through to the turn of the 1980s.
- The Wire
Rounded out with countless photographs, flyers and poster, this is thoroughly researched and expertly written, Banks having deeply trawled through the archives in research (the footnotes themselves deserve their own book).
- Shindig!
Fifty years on the English rock band Hawkwind continues to inspire devotion from fans around the world. Their 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. They have defined a genre—space rock—while operating on a frequency that's uniquely their 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 were, and their ongoing legacy's incendiary potential.
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About the author
Joe Banks is a music journalist who writes regularly for MOJO, PROG, Shindig!, Rock & Folk, and The Quietus.
