The classic story of having an older brother with a large record collection! I started off playing his Slade singles, and ambiently soaking up the music from his bedroom – Pink Floyd, Queen, Deep Purple, Judas Priest… “They were musically unique”

Since 1981, legendary Canterbury musicians Dave Stewart (Egg, Hatfield and the North, National Health) and Barbara Gaskin (Spirogyra) have built a reputation as one of the UK's most respected, intelligent and musically inventive Pop acts. The duo are now planning a summer concert featuring Beren Matthews on guitar. What inspired you to write ‘Hawkwind: Days Of The Underground: Radical Escapism in the Age Of Paranoia’?Calvert rejoined the band in 1976 and the three albums-worth of material they recorded in 1977–8 – Quark, Strangeness and Charm, 25 Years On (released under the Hawklords name) and PXR5 – are among the best and most consistent they made. It’s the only period for which Calvert wrote almost all the lyrics, and his conceptual concerns, at once both future-facing and urgently contemporary, are more lucid and direct than any of the band’s other songwriters. While the ritual space chants are long gone, and the music is more structured and conventional, the radicalism – the offer of an alternative, rejectionist understanding of reality – is still very much there. In particular, the dark satire of Pan Transcendental Industries – developed by Calvert, again in partnership with Barney Bubbles, for the 1978 Hawklords tour, and drawing on the thinking of architectural theorist Rem Koolhaas – offers a prescient metaphorical critique of global corporate hegemony that’s acutely alive to the essential absurdity of hegemonic ambition. The tour programme came in the form of a corporate brochure for PTI, a business engaged in the industrialisation of religion; proof of PTI’s success, Calvert writes, is the fact that angels have now exchanged their wings for car doors. As if we don’t get enough Hawkwind in various forms from beneath the Cherry Red umbrella (including an upcoming new studio album at the end of April) here’s a collection that pushes the boat out. The period between 1977 and 1979 when Hawklords continued to fly the Hawkwind flag is safely gathered in with a set of live and studio material from the era. Steven Wilson’s been at it again, with new masters/remixes of Quark Strangeness & Charm, PXR5 plus the Hawklords’ 25 Years On, all of which get expanded into a swirl of surround sound in 5.1 on the Blurays. Disc Seven has a live recording from the Sonic Assassins at the Queensway Hall, Barnstable on 23 rd December 1977. This concert has been remixed from the original master tapes, and a fine job has been done, the sound quality is good and clearly shows a band that are together, tight and have not lost any of their Hawkwind impetus in their performance of classic Hawkwind songs. In fact, it’s hard to emphasise enough how much of an outsider band Hawkwind were, even in their heyday in the 1970s. Founded in Ladbroke Grove in the last gasp of the previous decade, they were routinely dismissed as hippy recidivists, a poor man’s Pink Floyd, riding on the rapidly disintegrating tailcoats of psychedelia and the counterculture.

Established in 1962, the MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design. For a start, they were musically unique – there may have been parallels with some of the contemporary stuff coming out of Germany, but they were completely out on their own in Britain. But it wasn’t just that they sounded different – they acted differently as well, in the way that they were fiercely opposed to the “star trip” and how the traditional music business worked. They toured the country relentlessly and built up a genuine bond with their audience, inviting them to become part of a shared mythology. Just like the Beatles, they were a “revolution in the head” for many people, something which persists to this day. Selected items are only available for delivery via the Royal Mail 48® service and other items are available for delivery using this service for a charge. By 1979, Calvert had left the band again – for the last time – and while Banks goes on to discuss Hawkwind’s tour at the end of that year and their 1980 album Levitation, I’m not sure he shouldn’t have ended his book with the last of Calvert’s work to be released. Decades are an imprecise measure of anything and Hawkwind’s 1980s – a difficult and very different period for the band – began with Calvert’s departure. MIT Press began publishing journals in 1970 with the first volumes of Linguistic Inquiry and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Today we publish over 30 titles in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology.

That just leaves two Blurays, from which rises a previously unreleased film of the Hawklords Uxbridge Uni show in ’78 and a slightly bizarre appearance on the Marc Bolan TV show. A handful of promos and a nicely compiled (as usual – comes as standard I guess now as the expectation) booklet and assessment. A grand compilation, but we’d expect no less – compilers of the ‘light touch’ Genesis BBC Broadcasts take note…. Nearly a decade after the release of the acclaimed surround mix of Warrior on the Edge of Time, a limited edition 8 CD / 2 Blu ray boxed set from Hawkwind that showcases the band's tenure with Charisma Records in the late 1970s is released in March 2023. On this deluxe box set titled “Days of the Underground: The Studio & Live Recordings 1977-1979” fans will find the music that breaks new ground, producing a series of classic albums that adapted to the changing musical times with invention and flair. Specifically, the boxed set features three albums: “Quark, Strangeness and Charm,” “Hawklords: 25 Years On,” and “P.X.R. 5” each with immersive 5.1 surround sound and Stereo remixes by Steven Wilson. ALSO INCLUDING THE PREVIOUSLY UNRELEASED PROMOTIONAL FILM OF HAWKLORDS AT UXBRIDGE UNIVERSITY IN 1978 AND A PERFORMANCE OF ‘QUARK, STRANGENESS AND CHARM’ ON THE MARC BOLAN TV SHOW, PLUS A LAVISHLY ILLUSTRATED BOOK, ESSAY AND A POSTER. Whereas other bands used the emerging synthesiser technology as just another keyboard instrument, DikMik used an audio generator – at the time used by no other band in the world aside from New York’s Silver Apples – to create whole species of pure noise. Buffeting, whining and roaring on top of the pounding rhythms, it sounds like nothing so much as a pagan god of electricity thinking out loud to itself.