JIM OCH DU

 

 

 

On a silent Sunday afternoon, fourteen years ago, I was waiting for a bus on Kings Avenue, Brixton, South London. In the bus shelter, a shaking man with a Special Brew can met my eye. I’ve always been someone strangers feel entitled to talk to, but few of my long conversations with racist pensioners in city centre pubs and drug addicts at bus stops lead to lasting friendships, though I’ve siphoned some off into stories. The man at the Brixton bus stop saw I had a plastic bag full of vinyl records and asked me if I liked Hawkwind. I did like Hawkwind, a bit. Throughout my teens and twenties, knowing a little about the invincible British acid-rock collective helped me through many unsolicited encounters with similar characters. For a generation of would-be cyborg-biker-warlocks, Hawkwind wasn’t just a band. It had offered, like the Grateful Dead, a lifestyle. And by the late 80’s, many of the once young men who had followed the psychedelic warlords enthusiastically through the 70’s were reaching that age where the effects of one trip too many were all too evident. From the mid-80’s to the mid-90’s, it seemed that all the glazed-eyed men that proffered me their life-stories owed their current woes to early 70’s hippy culture generally, and Hawkwind in particular.

 

 

 

In Cornwall in 1984, and man who claimed to be a part-time antiques dealer nobbled me at a train station, eulogised the hippy activist Wally Hammond, explained how he had met Merlin in a dream at a Stonehenge free festival, and told me his philosophy; “it makes no difference who you love, so long as you love.” In 1991, I sat opposite a man on a Central Line London tube station, who reminded me of him, but he didn’t recognise me. From Notting Hill and North Acton he told a young woman next to him his unrequested tale, of Wally Hammond and Merlin and his philosophy of love, hundreds of miles East, and seven years older, but word for word the same. And outside a rural riverside pub in Oxforshire in 1987, not far from a temporary traveller encampment, a snooker game gone sour led to a knife held at my throat, until I agreed, rather controversially, that Hawkwind’s sometime frontman and lyricist, the late Robert Calvert, had been more important to the group than its long-term leader Dave Brock. Nowadays I am a part-time music critic for newspapers and magazines, but I have never since felt so certain about the value of a previoulsy overlooked talent.

 

 

 

The man at the Brixton bus-stop had his Hawkwind story too. He’d been homeless, he explained, since the early 70’s, when he had lived in a flat in Notting Hill with Lemmy, now of Motorhead, but then the guitarist with Hawkwind. One night when Lemmy was absent, he may, he admitted, have dropped a smouldering joint, starting a fire. When Lemmy returned to the smoking wreck of his home, the man was given his marching orders, and he had been homeless ever since. Naturally this fascinating story couldn’t fail to liberate me of the remainder of my small change, and it became one of my arsenal of interesting anecdotes. But was it true? Probably not. And in a way, it didn’t matter. It was a good story, and the idea of a Hawkwind flat burning down as a result of an abandoned joint had, I suppose, a pleasing metaphorical flavour. Cultural commentators will tell you the 60’s ended with the murder of an audience member by Hells Angels security guards at The Rolling Stones’ Altamont show, or at the time of the Manson Murders. For me it was when Lemmy’s flat burned down. The story served a little purpose. The worst thing that could happen would be if were almost confirmed.

 

 

.
Two years later I went to meet a friend on the Portobello road. She had just bought a long-derilect flat there and was doing it up herself. We went to her local newsagents. “Is it you that’s taken on that flat at the end of the road?”, said the man behind the counter. “Lemmy from Motorhead used to live there, but it caught fire years ago.”

 

 

 

 

Stewart Lee