Barney Bubbles – { feuilleton }

Space is one trip: the Hawkwind takes off

1: The album
Back in the 1990s, when it became apparent that record companies were committed to never-ending CD reissues of their most popular albums, I suggested to a friend that this development would eventually give us releases of the unmixed recordings which the listener would then have to mix themselves: “Now you can be George Martin!” My suggestion wasn’t entirely serious, and there are many reasons why this will never happen, but the wholesale remixing of “classic” albums has been a trend now for ten years or more, and will no doubt continue. It’s easy to see endless reissues as a pernicious development—how many more copies of The Dark Side Of The Moon does the world need?—but I can think of one or two albums which would benefit from a reappraisal of their original mixes. The first two sides of Amon Düül II’s Dance Of The Lemmings, for example, have always sounded sonically inferior to the group’s other albums. The first side in particular is swamped by bass, and the drums, which are so prominent on the previous album, Yeti, are buried in the mix. Given the overtly psychedelic nature of the cover art I sometimes wonder whether anyone in the studio was drug-free during the recording.

Hawkwind shared a record label with Amon Düül II for their first six albums, and the groups are further connected by bass player Dave Anderson who played on Düül’s Yeti in 1970 and Hawkwind’s In Search Of Space in 1971. The latter has just been reissued by Cherry Red in a variety of formats which include the three-disc package (2 x CD and a blu-ray disc) that arrived here at the weekend. The set features two new mixes of the entire album (one of them being the de rigueur 5-channel surround mix), a couple of outtakes, both sides of the Silver Machine single, plus the promo film for the single. The set also contains a substantial booklet which incorporates a reprint of the 24-page logbook that came with early pressings of the album. More about that below.

Hawkwind didn’t arrive as fully-fledged cosmic voyagers on their self-titled debut in 1970, it’s here on their second album that the group myth takes flight, presenting the band as travellers through time and space, or “Sonic Assassins” as they were depicted shortly before the album’s release in Codename: “Hawkwind”, a two-page promotional comic strip created by Michael Moorcock and Jim Cawthorn. Many British bands were playing with space themes in 1971 but Hawkwind were the only group to adopt the trappings of science fiction as essential elements of their persona, elements that persisted from one album to the next. In Search Of Space is loosely spacey on the musical side—You Shouldn’t Do That is the earliest example of a future Hawkwind staple, the extended mantra-like groove over which synthesizers swoop and burble—but it’s the album package created by Barney Bubbles and (in the logbook) Robert Calvert that dispels the ambiguity of songs like Master Of The Universe and Adjust Me in a science-fiction scenario where the “space” referred to by the title is dimensional as well as cosmological, with the group’s flattened spacecraft embodied by the physical album. None of this is suggested by the music, you need to read the logbook as well, but the book and the die-cut record sleeve help to frame what would otherwise be a collection of disparate rock songs into a complex artistic statement.

When it comes to the remixing of albums I’ve been sceptical of the benefits of the trend. For the past few years Steven Wilson has been the prime remixer of music from the 1970s and 80s; among other things he remixed Hawkwind’s Warrior On The Edge Of Time and the albums on last year’s Days Of The Underground set, all of which are worth hearing. Less essential have been his new mixes for King Crimson and Tangerine Dream, the latter especially where there’s little discernible difference between the old and new versions. I think the main attraction for many listeners will be the 5-channel surround mixes, especially in the case of Tangerine Dream, but I don’t have a 5-channel sound system so can’t say how effective they are. The new In Search Of Space mixes are the work of another Steve, Stephen W. Tayler, whose reworking of the album has taken me by surprise, giving it a radically different sound rather than the discreet adjusting of levels and instrumentation that I was expecting. Dave Brock has said in interviews that he always dropped acid before making the final mix of the Hawkwind albums up to Warrior On The Edge Of Time, which may explain why In Search Of Space has always sounded rather thin and dry, while the album that followed it, Doremi Fasol Latido, is a bludgeon by comparison, with everything compressed into the wall of sound which Hawkwind had developed in their live performances. Tayler’s new mix of Master Of The Universe is revelatory, bolstering the bottom end and emphasising the inverted echoes on Nik Turner’s voice, while You Shouldn’t Do That explodes into jet-propelled life. Everything sounds more substantial, and possibly more cosmic; I’ve not done a side-by-side comparison yet but I think Tayler has given greater emphasis to the effects throughout the album, especially all the swooshing and burbling electronic instruments. If you’ve ever shared my scepticism about the remixing trend then Tayler’s work here should be considered an argument in its favour.

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New Wave Strangeness: Hawkwind’s Calvert years

Antique badges not included.

My weekend has been spent immersed in Days Of The Underground, the latest box of Hawkwind albums from Cherry Red Records. I’d avoided many of the earlier sets but this one was irresistible for being a 10-disc collection (8 CDs and 2 blu-rays), the core of which is three of the four albums recorded by the group for the Charisma label–Quark, Strangeness And Charm (1977), 25 Years On (credited to Hawklords, 1978), and PXR 5 (1979)–with all three albums being given the Steven Wilson remix treatment. The studio material is complemented by further Wilson mixes of live recordings and alternate takes, plus demo tracks (previously available but I didn’t have them). You also get three bonus video clips: Hawkwind (minus Dave Brock) playing the Quark single on Marc Bolan’s TV show in 1977, together with two promo films from the 1978 Hawklords concert at Brunel University. Absent from the set is the group’s first album for Charisma, Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music (1976), also the two singles that were released that year. I’ve not seen any explanation for these omissions but reasons may include the uneven quality of the music (recorded shortly before the group imploded), and Dave Brock’s lasting dislike of the album.

Cover design by Hipgnosis; photography by Peter Christopherson with graphics by Geoff Halpin. Aubrey Powell says that Robert Calvert commissioned this one after the pair met each other at a party. The photography made use of the interior of Battersea Power Station in the same year that Hipgnosis used the building for a rather more famous album cover.

Steven Wilson did a great job of remixing the Warrior On The Edge Of Time album so I had high hopes for this set, hopes that have been substantially fulfilled. Many of the adjustments are individually minor–boosted bass, more prominent keyboards, some extended intros–but taken together they offer a refreshed experience of three very familiar albums. The packaging has been well-designed by the estimable Phil Smee with a booklet that presents a snapshot of the graphics produced for the group during this period, not only album artwork but also posters, ads and pages from the tour programmes. As a bonus there’s a small reproduction of the 1977 tour poster, a welcome inclusion since I used to own an original one of these which I’ve either misplaced or lost altogether. The attention to detail extends to the animated graphics of the blu-ray interface; when the Quark album is playing you can watch sparks dancing around the control room. The Marc Bolan TV appearance was something I’d seen many times before (including its original broadcast) but the live Hawklords films are revelatory when there’s so little footage of the band from the 1970s with synched sound. The performances of PSI Power and 25 Years offer a frustratingly brief taste of Robert Calvert’s magnetic stage presence, and make me hope that a video of the entire concert may be released eventually.

Cover art by Philip Tonkyn.

Robert Calvert is the key figure here, to a degree that Hawkwind’s Charisma years are also known as the Calvert years, this being the period when the group’s part-time lyricist, occasional singer and conceptual contributor graduated to lead vocalist and songwriter. Calvert’s new role as front man changed Hawkwind from an ensemble of underground freaks into a more typical rock group, albeit one with a very theatrical singer prone to changing outfits to suit the songs, and with props that included a loudhailer, a machine-gun (fake) and a sabre (real). The songs became shorter and, in places, poppier, although none of the singles managed to repeat the chart success of the Calvert-penned Silver Machine. Nevertheless, Brock and Calvert were a great song-writing team, and the lyrics that Calvert wrote from 1976 to 1978 are better than anything else in the discography: witty, alliterative, and filled with clever rhymes that range widely in their subject matter, from the usual science-fiction fare to Calvert’s own obsessions, especially aircraft and flying. Calvert’s approach to science fiction was more sophisticated than the freaks-in-space approach of the group’s UA years. You get a sense of this from his contributions to the Space Ritual album (only Calvert would have known what an orgone accumulator was), but his Charisma songs go much further, condensing whole novels—Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley and Jack of Shadows, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451—while maintaining the spirit of the New Wave of SF, where the emphasis was as much on inner as outer space.

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Echoes of de Chirico

The Song of Love (1914) by Giorgio de Chirico.

His art studies, begun in Athens, were continued in Munich where he discovered the work of Max Klinger and Arnold Böcklin, not to mention the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer, whose influence is perceptible in the paintings he went on to produce in Florence and Turin. In addition, his melancholy temperament lay behind the works that Guillaume Apollinaire labelled “metaphysical,” works in which elements from the real world (deserted squares and arcades, factory chimneys, trains, clocks, gloves, artichokes) were imbued with a sense of strangeness.

Keith Aspley, Historical Dictionary of Surrealism

The Enigma of a Day (1914) by Giorgio de Chirico.

Plate II from Let There Be Fashion, Down With Art (Fiat modes pereat ars) (1920) by “Dadamax Ernst”.

The Birth of an Idol (1926) by René Magritte.

Some time during the latter part of 1923 [Magritte] came face-to-face with his destiny, in the form of a painting by Giorgio de Chirico, who was one of the painters most admired by the Paris Surrealists: Le Chant d’amour (The Song of Love, 1914); to be more precise, a black-and-white reproduction of that painting in the review Les Feuilles libres, a very contrasty reproduction, as Sylvester has it, which only heightened the drama of the outsize objects suspended in the foreground of one of de Chirico’s “metaphysical landscapes”… He was shown it by Lecomte, or Mesens, or both. He was overwhelmed. […] Magritte always spoke of de Chirico as his one and only master. As a rule, he was exceedingly parsimonious in his assessment of other artists, past and present. In his own time, de Chirico (1888–1978) and Ernst (1891–1976) appear as the only two he admired, more or less unconditionally.

Magritte: A Life by Alex Danchev

Sewing Machine with Umbrellas in a Surrealist Landscape (1941) by Salvador Dalí.

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Twinkle, twinkle little stars

Xitintoday (1978) by Nik Turner’s Sphynx.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had a reason to write about Barney Bubbles but I’ve finally worked out why one of his more mysterious album covers looks the way it does.

When Nik Turner was unceremoniously kicked out of Hawkwind in 1976 he headed to Cairo to consider his next move. While there he recorded an hour or two of flute improvisations inside the sarcophagus in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. The resulting tapes provided the basis for his first solo album, Xitintoday, which was released in 1978 on the Charisma label, and credited to Nik Turner’s Sphynx. Steve Hillage produced the album, helping to craft the meandering solos into a suite of songs based on passages from The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Xitintoday is one of the more unusual concept albums from a decade filled with such things. I’ve always liked it, in many ways it’s closer to Hillage’s oeuvre than Turner’s, as well as being very different to anything else in the Hawk-sphere.

A faded promo badge. The ballpoint scrawl is Mr Turner’s autograph.

Barney Bubbles’ design for the album is also very different to anything else in the Hawk-sphere, an example of what might be called his High Modernist period, when the hippy motifs and decorative pastiches of his earlier work were replaced with bold, flat colours and playful graphic designs. Xitintoday was released with a square booklet containing lyrics, notes about the mythological theme, and a series of pictures which combine diagrams and Ancient Egyptian reliefs with calligram-like wordplay. The back cover of the album exemplifies the latter, with the word “Day” spelled out in much smaller words reading “Night”; inside the booklet there’s a page for Isis the Moon Goddess where the words “Isis is is is is…” form a curve around a photograph of the Moon. The cover design continues the cosmic theme with a field of star shapes in which each star is created by the word “Twinkle”. The star field makes sense in the context of the booklet but I’ve wondered for a long time why Barney Bubbles thought it was a suitable cover design rather than simply being another booklet page.

The solution arrived last week when work-related research had me looking through old design books for examples of Ancient Egyptian ornamentation. One of these, The Grammar of Ornament (1856) by Owen Jones, contains several pages of full-colour plates filled with Egyptian pattern samples.

And on one of those pages there are these two squares which made me think immediately of the Xitintoday cover. This might seem tenuous when the cover design doesn’t feature any red dots but Barney Bubbles was an avid Egyptophile, avid enough to name his son after one of the Egyptian gods. A quick search revealed many more examples of this pattern which are closer matches for the cover design.

It turns out that the yellow star on a blue background was a common way of representing the night sky in Egyptian art, you’ll find the same stars in wall paintings and on the ceilings inside royal tombs.

For years I’ve regarded the Xitintoday cover as being uncharacteristically random and abstract, surprisingly so when Bubbles designs from the same period are all so smart and well-considered. This discovery puts the Sphynx album in the same category, a design which avoids many more obvious solutions for a combination of the very old and the very new. Another feature of Barney Bubbles design is a kind of “Aha!” moment, when your appreciation of the design catches up with the thinking behind it. The appreciation this time has taken an outrageously long time to arrive but I’m pleased to have got there in the end.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Led Zeppelin IV: Jimmy Page versus Little Bo-Peep
• The Grammar of Ornament revisited
• On the pyramid

Weekend links 549

The Shepherd’s Dream, from Paradise Lost (1793) by Henry Fuseli.

• “16 April. A card from Tom King with news of the tattoo of me that he had put on his arm: ‘The tattoo remains popular, though bizarrely one person thought it was of Henry Kissinger. It also makes for an amusing conversation during intercourse.’ This suggests the intercourse might be less than fervent, my name in itself something of a detumescent.” Alan Bennett‘s diary for the year is always a highlight of December.

• “I know that if I don’t write, say on holiday, I begin to feel unsettled and uneasy, as I gather people do who are not allowed to dream.” The Paris Review removed its paywall on their Art of Fiction interview with JG Ballard.

• “A biologist and composer have turned the aurora borealis into sound to create a magic melding of art and nature.”

If we let it, dreaming gradually erodes wake centrism—that waking consciousness to which Westerners in particular are inordinately attached. You might think of wake centrism as a pre-Copernican-like worldview that presumes waking to be the centre of the universe of consciousness, while relegating sleeping and dreaming to secondary, subservient positions. It is a matrix, a cultural simulation evolved to support adaptation, yet it inadvertently limits our awareness. Wake centrism is a subtle, consensual, sticky and addictive over-reliance on ordinary ways of perceiving that interfere with our direct personal experience of dreaming. To paraphrase the 16th-century British clergyman Robert Bolton, it is not merely an idea the mind possesses, but an idea that possesses the mind. Wake centrism is a flat-world consciousness. It warns us to stay away from the edges, to refrain from dialoguing with dreams and the unconscious.

Rubin Naiman on sleep and dreams

• 96th of October: an online fiction magazine dedicated to “tales of the extraordinary”.

• “Punk artist Barney Bubbles joins Manet among works given to UK public in 2020.”

• The results of the Nature Photographer of the Year contest for 2020.

• A list with a difference: Twenty Four Psychic Pop Relics by Woebot.

• Merve Emre on how Leonora Carrington feminized Surrealism.

• Mix of the week: XLR8R Podcast 675 by Teebs.

• I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night) (1966) by The Electric Prunes | The Room Of Ancillary Dreams (2000) by Harold Budd | Blue Dream (2001) by Sussan Deyhim & Richard Horowitz