{"id":640370,"date":"2026-05-01T08:13:16","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T08:13:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/640370\/"},"modified":"2026-05-01T08:13:16","modified_gmt":"2026-05-01T08:13:16","slug":"hawkwind-the-band-accused-of-stealing-paul-mccartneys-bass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/640370\/","title":{"rendered":"Hawkwind: the band accused of stealing Paul McCartney\u2019s bass"},"content":{"rendered":"

A documentary about the 1972 theft of a bass from Paul McCartney recently upset Hawkwind leader Dave Brock<\/a>, when his band were named as suspects \u2013 although the real culprit was named later. But as Prog reported in 2022, the origins of Hawkwind<\/a> were some distance from \u201cpeace and love,\u201d and involved a series of nefarious incidents.<\/p>\n

On October 8, 1971, Hawkwind<\/a> released their second album, In Search Of Space. It\u2019s a landmark record, space rock ground zero, and every bit as mind-melting and innovative as the then-contemporary krautrock<\/a> scene in Germany.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But while Hawkwind were born out of the alternative society of Ladbroke Grove in west London, In Search Of Space wasn\u2019t an album fuelled by peace and love. Instead, as its title suggests, it was a radical escape route from authoritarianism and mainstream conformity, and a blast of sonic disgust against the foolishness of the straight world.<\/p>\n

Article continues below <\/p>\n

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The year of its creation was a tumultuous one for the band, with numerous altercations and brushes with death along the way. Yet by the end of 1971, Hawkwind would be the country\u2019s biggest cult band with a newly minted science fiction mythology and a secret weapon in their arsenal set to propel them to even greater heights.<\/p>\n

Hawkwind had ended 1970 by co-headlining the Christmas Space Party, a benefit gig at the Roundhouse for the underground press. It would prove to be his final show with the band for bassist Thomas Crimble, who\u2019d played a key role in moving them on from the jammy, often abstract psychedelia of their self-titled debut album, and helped develop a more driving sound based around an increasingly dynamic rhythm section. But it had been decided that Dave Anderson, ex-Amon D\u00fc\u00fcl II<\/a> and more recently a member of Van der Graaf Generator<\/a>, should replace him.<\/p>\n

Sonic Attack (Original Master) – YouTube
\n\"Sonic<\/p>\n

Watch On <\/a><\/p>\n

Although favourites of the Ladbroke Grove scene, Hawkwind were still building their profile outside of London, and the addition of Anderson gave them more than just a musical boost. He\u2019d become friendly with Angela Finbow, the live booker at the band\u2019s management company, Clearwater, and Anderson\u2019s future wife. \u201cI used to sit beside her in their office \u2013 every time the phone would ring, I\u2019d say, \u2018If they want a particular band, see if you can get Hawkwind as support!\u2019\u201d he remembers.<\/p>\n

Yet as heralds of the counterculture, playing the provinces was often a perilous enterprise. After a gig at Manchester University in January, the band were assaulted in their dressing room and required medical treatment; while at the Malvern Winter Gardens in March 1971, they were forcibly ejected from the venue after giving away free copies of underground magazine Frendz, “subversive literature” in the eyes of the local authorities. And the band got their first piece of national press when the Daily Mirror reported the fracas that ensued when teenage drummer Terry Ollis was seen playing naked at the Breaks Youth Centre in Hatfield.<\/p>\n

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A potential confrontation with The Man was always around the corner and would shape the lyrical content of their forthcoming album. As band co-founder Dave Brock<\/a> says, \u201cGuys with long hair were always getting picked up, always being searched in the street. Every time we arrived back in the early hours in our van, we\u2019d be stopped by the police in Notting Hill and searched. In those days, anyone with long hair was a drug addict.\u201d<\/p>\n

People still say, \u2018That gig you did in 1971 changed my life!\u2019 And I say, \u2018You sure it wasn\u2019t the acid?\u2019<\/p>\n

Terry Ollis<\/p>\n

But the siege mentality that Hawkwind developed also helped turn them into a tight-knit communal and musical unit. \u201cThat\u2019s what brings a band together, constantly playing and travelling,\u201d says Brock. \u201cWe toured and played nearly every day. We used to have our old yellow parcel van where we\u2019d sit in our sleeping bags because we didn\u2019t have a heater!\u201d<\/p>\n

This relentless touring schedule paid off, with the band building a significant fanbase around the country. \u201cWe used to pack out town halls, they just loved us,\u201d says Ollis. \u201cWe were all out of our heads, and so was the audience! We really connected. We lived what we believed and practised what we preached.\u201d<\/p>\n

What to read next<\/p>\n

Drugs were a major factor, of course, with saxophonist and frontman Nik Turner<\/a> acquiring a large supply of liquid LSD, which he gave away to the audience: \u201cI think it really compounded the band\u2019s popularity, because people still come up to me and say, \u2018Wow, that gig you did in 1971 changed my life!\u2019 And I say, \u2018You sure it wasn\u2019t the acid?!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"Terry\n<\/p>\n

Terry Ollis (Image credit: Phil Franks)<\/p>\n

Prior to recording their second album, Hawkwind previewed some of their songs in a session for John Peel<\/a>\u2019s Top Gear show, broadcast in April 1971. Audibly, the months spent on the road had transformed the looser, trippier sound of before into a shockwave of concentrated, feral intensity.<\/p>\n

It was also around this time that a number of important collaborators fell into Hawkwind\u2019s orbit. Foremost of these was Robert Calvert<\/a>, a friend of Turner\u2019s from his hometown of Margate, who began to perform his space age poetry on stage with the band, and worked in the background with design genius Colin Fulcher, aka Barney Bubbles<\/a>, on a fantastical sci-fi concept where the album became a two-dimensional spacecraft unmoored in time.<\/p>\n

I said, \u2018Can I get up and dance?\u2019 They made a remark like, \u2018If you take your clothes off.\u2019 I don\u2019t think they expected me to do it, but I did!<\/p>\n

Stacia Blake<\/p>\n

Calvert also introduced the band to Michael Moorcock<\/a>, author and editor of science fiction magazine New Worlds, who memorably described Hawkwind as \u201cbarbarians with electronics.\u201d He too began to perform with them at free gigs held under the concrete arches of the Westway, the newly erected flyover that runs through Ladbroke Grove. His first reading with the band was Sonic Attack, a public information parody that would increasingly define Hawkwind\u2019s musical philosophy.<\/p>\n

Yet the new addition to the band who made the greatest impact on stage was dancer Stacia Blake<\/a>. She became a human lightning rod and focus for Hawkwind\u2019s audio-visual onslaught after performing with them at a gig in Redruth, Cornwall. As she remembers, \u201cI just said to Nik, \u2018Can I get up and dance?\u2019 And they made some silly remark like, \u2018If you take your clothes off and paint your body\u2019, something like that. I don\u2019t think they expected me to do it, but I did! The feeling of total freedom is my overriding memory of that first appearance.\u201d<\/p>\n

The band travelled up to Aviemore in Scotland, where Anderson\u2019s uncle owned a ski school, to rehearse ahead of the album\u2019s recording. But disaster struck en route, as Turner recalls: \u201cDikMik [Hawkwind\u2019s electronics operator], two of the roadies and a couple of girls took a corner too fast, turning their van over. They hit a car, and the driver was killed. One of the roadies, John the Dump, had his arm sticking out of the window and when the van turned over, half his elbow was ground away.\u201d To make matters worse, the man they\u2019d killed turned out to be the nephew of the landlady where they were staying. Badly shaken, DikMik temporarily left the band to be replaced by road manager and soundman Del Dettmar.<\/p>\n

You Shouldn’t Do That (1996 Remaster) – YouTube
\n\"You<\/p>\n

Watch On <\/a><\/p>\n

But that wasn\u2019t the last of their close encounters with death, as Ollis remembers: \u201cOn that same Scottish tour, Nik got electrocuted. Start of the gig, he went to do the introduction, but as soon as he got hold of the mic, he started shaking and fell to the floor. Del rushed out from behind the desk and booted the mic stand out of his hand. Nik went off to the hospital, and we did the gig, but he came back for the last number, his hands bandaged up, and managed to play the flute!\u201d<\/p>\n

The band began the recording of In Search Of Space at George Martin<\/a>\u2019s newly opened AIR Studios in London\u2019s Oxford Street \u2013 except nothing happened. \u201cWe were there for a week, but we never even got the gear set up,\u201d says Anderson. \u201cThe studio had suspension on the floor, so we spent the first day jumping up and down on that and running around like idiots! Then our friends the Furry Freak Brothers broke into George Martin\u2019s office and pinched all his booze. They also spiked up the engineer, who got completely freaked out and never returned for the rest of the week.\u201d<\/p>\n

That cowbell at the end that keeps going \u2013 we were meant to finish there, but we all came back in again. We were all on a space trip together<\/p>\n

Terry Ollis<\/p>\n

Decamping to Olympic Studios in Barnes, in south-west London, the recording of the album proper began under the watchful eye of experienced in-house engineer George Chkiantz, who had previously worked with Jimi Hendrix<\/a> and Led Zeppelin<\/a>, and is often credited with inventing the stereo phasing technique known as flanging (as heard on the Small Faces<\/a>\u2019 Itchycoo Park). Chkiantz marshalled Hawkwind\u2019s live-in-the-studio approach to produce a record that captures the band\u2019s cosmic energy, but sounds a good deal more subtle and controlled than later releases.<\/p>\n

The album begins with the 16-minute trance rock tour-de-force of You Shouldn\u2019t Do That, a track with its origins in the extended jams the band had performed the previous year outside the fences of the Isle Of Wight Festival. It\u2019s the song that defines Hawkwind\u2019s unique brand of raw, pulsating space rock, hypnotic yet shot through with pure adrenaline, and has been both hugely influential and much copied over the years \u2013 but in 1971, there was no other band that sounded remotely like this in the UK.<\/p>\n

Despite appearing to be skilfully arranged, You Shouldn\u2019t Do That is actually a product of the incredible musical telepathy that the band had evolved by this point, with Ollis\u2019 propulsive drumming to the forefront: \u201cWhat drove it was my bass drum, which used to go dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun pretty much from start to finish! We had a framework and some musical cues, so we knew when to change, but we listened to each other and could go anywhere that anyone wanted to take us. That cowbell at the end that just keeps going \u2013 we were meant to finish there, but then we all came back in again and did another bit. The whole thing was very organic. We were all on a space trip together.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

\"Stacia\n<\/p>\n

Stacia Blake in 1972 (Image credit: Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Brock confirms, \u201cWe played the whole thing virtually live, though the \u2018oohs\u2019 and \u2018ahhs\u2019 were put on afterwards. I used to listen to the old New Orleans jazz bands, and their rhythm sections are really driving, playing simple, solid beats that other people could do stuff over, and that\u2019s pretty much the same thing we do now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anderson cites the unexpected influence of Free<\/a> on the track, his bassline mimicking the octave jumping playing of Andy Fraser<\/a>, but also adds, \u201cThere was something special between me and Terry as the rhythm section. We ended up being like a clockwork motor \u2013 once we got into a groove, we were unstoppable.\u201d<\/p>\n

DikMik had a flicknife, but hadn\u2019t put the lock on properly. When I ducked out of the way, he stabbed the wall and the knife closed on his fingers<\/p>\n

Dave Anderson<\/p>\n

Perhaps unsurprisingly for lyric writer Turner, acid played an important role too: \u201cI think I took LSD every day for about two years. We were tripping when we did it, but it\u2019s still saying something: \u2018You\u2019re getting nowhere\/You\u2019re getting no air\/You\u2019re getting aware.\u2019 They merge together, but they\u2019re all meaningful to me. Information, spirituality, raising consciousness, putting people in a trance \u2013 it was spontaneously calculated!\u201d<\/p>\n

You Know You\u2019re Only Dreaming follows, and starts with a minute or so of cosmic troubadouring from Brock, accompanied by the keening sound of electronic seagulls courtesy of DikMik. \u201cHe used to try and play the audio generators in tune, which is quite difficult!\u201d says Brock. Then the song morphs into a moody jam recorded at another point during the sessions. (You can hear the splice at 1:16.)<\/p>\n

The most renowned track on In Search Of Space \u2013 and Hawkwind\u2019s first explicitly science fiction lyric \u2013 is the menacing, magisterial Master Of The Universe. While its popularity might be based on its \u201crelentless riff\u201d in Brock\u2019s assessment, this version is almost cinematic compared to the aural blitzkrieg of later outings, a mysterious stranger riding into town rather than an all-laser-guns-blazing galactic overlord.<\/p>\n

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\"Nik\n<\/p>\n

Nik Turner (Image credit: Phil Franks)<\/p>\n

For Turner, it felt like a major step forward: \u201cI wasn\u2019t singing until I wrote Master Of The Universe. I wrote these lyrics and said, \u2018Right, who\u2019s going to sing them?\u2019 They said, \u2018Well, you are!\u2019 So that was my first foray into vocalising. It was an emotional thing for me, you know, \u2018I am the centre of the universe\u2026 Has the world gone mad or ism it me?\u2019 It\u2019s a sort of self-assessment, an observation of myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

A track that\u2019s gained in stature as a portent of things to come, We Took The Wrong Step Years Ago, is an old Brock busking number transformed into a definitive pro-ecology anthem, and a more traditionally melodic song amid the freak-out music that surrounds it. \u201cDave is a bloody good busker, and that song is an absolute work of art as far as I\u2019m concerned \u2013 it\u2019s beautiful,\u201d says Anderson.<\/p>\n

We tried to consciously rail against conventional music. People frowned on us, but we said, \u2018We do it this way\u2019<\/p>\n

Nik Turner<\/p>\n

Adjust Me is another in-studio improvisation fashioned into a song, and the first time that the recurring theme of android replicas appears in a Hawkwind track. The involvement of Calvert, Moorcock et al pushed the band in a more future-facing direction, though as Brock notes, \u201cAll of us used to read sci-fi books constantly.\u201d Its mournful, lost-in-space introduction would be recycled on later recordings such as Seven By Seven and Welcome To The Future, while the main section sounds like it\u2019s harking back to the Eight Miles High-inspired Sunshine Special jam.<\/p>\n

The final track, Children Of The Sun, was a last-minute addition to the running order, when it was discovered that the album was five minutes short. Anderson was called at one o\u2019clock in the morning by Chkiantz, who pleaded with the bassist to return to the studio \u2013 something that Anderson was disinclined to do, having already handed in his notice to leave Hawkwind due to what he perceived as a violent undercurrent within the band: \u201cDikMik used to try and stab me, but I ended up having to take him to hospital one day. He had a flicknife, but hadn\u2019t put the lock on properly, so when I ducked out of the way, he stabbed the wall and the knife closed on his fingers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Master of the Universe (1996 Remaster) – YouTube
\n\"Master<\/p>\n

Watch On <\/a><\/p>\n

Given the nature of his departure, it\u2019s ironic that the track Anderson and Turner quickly knocked together is a rose-tinted eulogy to flower children basking in the glory of a new day.<\/p>\n

Upon its release, In Search Of Space reached No.44 in November 1971, before returning to the UK charts the following year due to the huge success of Silver Machine<\/a>, eventually peaking at No.18. Altogether, it spent 19 weeks on the chart, making it by some distance Hawkwind\u2019s best-selling album.<\/p>\n

Reaction from the media at home was cautiously positive, with Richard Williams at Melody Maker observing, \u201cIn the rush to applaud the Amon D\u00fc\u00fcls and the Cans<\/a> from across the water, we\u2019ve all tended to forget the prophets in our own backyard.\u201d But it was the US press that really went to town in praising the album, with Lester Bangs describing it in Rolling Stone as \u201cmusic for the astral apocalypse.\u201d<\/p>\n

Looking back on it now, Anderson says, \u201cI\u2019m proud to have been on it and that it\u2019s stood the test of time.\u201d Ollis adds, \u201cI think it\u2019s really good, but I\u2019m surprised that 50 years later there\u2019s still interest in it,\u201d while Brock bluntly states, \u201cI haven\u2019t listened to it in years!\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet its impact and resonance is undeniable: this is where modern space rock begins. As Turner observes, \u201cWe tried to consciously do something different, to rail against all that conventional music. People frowned on us, but we said, \u2018We do it this way.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

\"Dave\n<\/p>\n

Dave Brock in 1972 (Image credit: Michael Putland\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A documentary about the 1972 theft of a bass from Paul McCartney recently upset Hawkwind leader Dave Brock,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":640371,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":["post-640370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=640370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640370\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/640371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=640370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=640370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=640370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}