Hawkwind: Days of the Underground

Hawkwind: Days of the Underground

Format Price Buy
Hawkwind: Days of the Underground Special Edition £50.00
Out of stock
Hawkwind: Days of the Underground Standard Edition £25.00

Description

Hawkwind: Days of the Underground

Hawkwind: Days of the Underground
Radical Escapism in the Age Of Paranoia
By Joe Banks

£22 (paperback) / £50 (hardback special edition)
216mm x 156mm
528 pp. approx
ISBN: 9781907222849528
Approx 150 BW & Colour images

Wraparound cover by Hawkwind cover artist John Coulthart.

Coming April 2020

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.

Special Edition:

• Hardback edition limited to 500 copies
• 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