Duke Elric - Michael Moorcock [2]
By 1971, when The Sleeping Sorceress came out, Hawkwind, a rather colourful bunch of musical outlaws, were being noticed for having played for nothing outside the famous (or infamous) Isle of Wight Festival. They were also beginning to be heard around Notting Hill/Ladbroke Grove, where I lived, which was then pretty much the nerve centre of British rock and roll and the alternative press. Oz, IT, Frendz, and others, including my own New Worlds, were all grouped within the same quarter mile and the Mountain Grill, the café where bands habitually met up before boarding a bus to start on a tour, was only two or three shops down from us.
The Grove was more or less the equivalent of the Haight in San Francisco, with a similar history. It was a little dangerous, run-down, famous for its race riots and high percentage of druggies, villains, creative people, and immigrants, with appropriately low rents. … I had lived there since the late 1950s. By 1970, Elric was almost the Grove's main ikon, and Hawkwind's name was borrowed from my Hawkmoon books. The band took inspiration from my work as, I was told, many did, from Deep Purple to Mark Bolan's T Rex. Even Bernie Taupin claimed that reading my stuff inspired the songs he was then writing for Elton John! My friend Bill Harry, who had first published John Lennon in his music paper Mersey Beat, brought me and Pink Floyd together. We spent two days visiting early electronic music studios (including Ron Grainer's BBC Radiophonic Workshop, creators of the Dr. Who theme) for no reason any of us could work out. There was a sense in the air that we could produce complex, ambitious work that, like Sgt. Pepper, would also begin to break down cultural barriers. It was in our blood. I know it was. I came from South London, and half the people you grew up with became musicians, while if you didn't own a copies of Sartre and Camus, you were considered impoverished.
By 1970, then, I was used to a lot of public attention and not especially flattered by most of it. I avoided one notoriously egomaniacal rock star's white Rolls-Royce by mounting the kerb on my bike and making for a pedestrian-only zone as he called after me. I was inclined to avoid musicians I didn't know very well. For various reasons, however, I got on very well with Hawkwind from the beginning. We were natural allies. I wrote material for them like “Sonic Attack,” and first performed it with them under the Westway, the stretch of motorway that now crossed the Grove. We perceived a political atmosphere seriously needing new ideas and a Paranoid Authority, increasingly resistant to the public will. I was soon performing with Hawkwind on a fairly regular basis. At that time I didn't write any specific Elric material for the band, but I helped produce an Eternal Champion concept album in Warrior on the Edge of Time, a title whose resonance, like Stormbringer, was later echoed by other writers’ titles. The record was a best seller for the band and remains one of the most popular Hawkwind titles. A little later I would write “Black Blade” for my own band, the Deep Fix. Our first performance was at the Roundhouse during Nik Turner's Bohemian Love-in, which was more proto-punk than late hippy in atmosphere, and it would be recorded in a somewhat different version by my friend Eric Bloom with Blue Oyster Cult.
People who want to get an idea of what we sounded like can obtain the albums on CD, though I still think we did a messy, fussy production on the Deep Fix's The New World's Fair! You can hear cleaner versions on Roller Coaster Holiday. I'd also recommend the excellent compilation album of Grove bands and performers Cries from the Midnight Circus.
The association between Elric and rock music started early, but nobody would begin to do audio versions of the books until this century, when AudioRealms, who have also done Lovecraft and Howard