DAVE BROCK BIOGRAPHY

David Anthony Brock, known to friends and the public as simply “Dave” was born in Middlesex, England on 21 August 1941. His youth years were entirely spent in Middlesex. Although at the age of 17 he finished high school he seems never to have aspired higher education. Despite this, in later years, he becomes what could be called a “Self-made intellectual” interested in a wide range of topics varying from druidism, social sciences to astronomy.
After leaving school he took up a variety of jobs, quitting them as fast as he took them. It seems that the only one that brought him at least some satisfaction was with an animation company. Stable life and pursuit of building a family seemed to have been alien to the young Brock. His real drives from early on were a nomadic existence and music, traveling the UK and Europe widely in his younger years. For sure money was always a problem, the worst effects of which he cured by earning the odd penny as a street musician.
Anyway, through most of what he did in his young years runs the red thread of a profound interest in music, although for quite a while he did not pursue a professional career in music. Even so, his exploits of those days brought him in contact with several young men who would later gain fame in music, among them Eric Clapton.

EARLY MUSICAL CAREER

The interest in music had been awoken early in young Dave Brock, it can be traced back as far as the age of twelve when he was given a banjo as a birthday present by a family member. The extensive busking of his nomadic days, and meeting with a variety of young and enthusiastic musicians were further steps on the way that would eventually lead him to become a professional rock artist.
Brock’s first real musical outfit was the Dharma Blues band, formed in late 1965 or early 1966, in which he performed traditional blues together with Luke Francis and Mike King. From this period originates the earliest recording in which Dave features, a cover of “Dealing with the Devil”, originally a composition by Sonny Boy Williamson II, which was put on tape somewhere in 1966. For reasons unknown Brock dropped out of the outfit soon with Francis and King continuing to make a single album effort one year later before sinking into oblivion.
Late 1966, however, sees Brock performing again with another band “The Famous Cure”, in which he played together with his friend Pete Judd and guitar player John Illingworth, (Illingworth being replaced with Mick Slattery in early 1967). Originally this group also concentrated on traditional blues, playing such tracks as “Bring it on Home” and “Dealing with the Devil” again. Although basically an obscure outfit, the group scored a modest single success in 1967 as well as a claim to international touring, jumping over the British Channel twice to perform in Holland.
Although a step forward in his musical career, The Famous Cure by far not brought in enough for a living, and Brock still had to spent the better part of his time performing as a steet mucisian. But the London of the late 1960’s was pregnant with musical change, and such an atmosphere would sooner or later give a chance to a keen young player like Dave.
Another feature of the time had certainly not passed Dave Brock and his friends by: Psychedelic drugs. The increasing use of them by the musical avant-garde led to profound changes in the ideas about music. Such effects were already noticeable in the later Famous Cure, which started more and more to use electrical instruments and unconventional ways of playing.


THE FORMATION OF HAWKWIND

Slattery as well as Brock had become increasingly dissatisfied with the musical stagnancy of The Famous Cure and were looking for new ways to bring their changing ideas into practice. In this a 1969 meeting with Bass player John Harrison proved fateful. Harrison, although mostly averse to the use of drugs himself, had ironically enough the most profoundest ideas about bringing psychedelic influences into music. Together the three decided to set up a new project that would break with the accepted musical conventions of the time.
With drummer Terry Ollis, Saxophonist Nik Turner and keyboard player DikMik, (The latter two having performed on and of as roadies for The Famous Cure), the new band was completed, and they managed in quite a short time to get a first gig arranged. Trouble was only that in all their enthusiasm and increasing LSD use they had forgotten to give the band a name, as well as preparing a set of songs. With a hastily chosen avatar “Group X” and a lengthy jam cover of “Eight Miles High” They managed to wrestle themselves through the performance. Not a great start, but enough to attract the attention of BBC announcer John Peel and concert organizer Douglas Smith, the latter swiftly being able to secure the band a record contract with Liberty Records.
Recording for a first album soon took a start, and although the band was plagued by several setbacks, such as the struggle to find a stylistic modus vivendi, and the dropping out of Huw Lloyd Langton due to drug overuse, things worked out fine and August 1970 saw the release of their selftitled effort as well as that of the single “Hurry on Sundown”. Even with both productions only selling modestly well, the foundation was laid and Dave Brock’s time in the musical sun seemed to have come.

THE 1970’S WITH HAWKWIND

Following up a year of relentless touring, free gigs, and squatting their way in at major festivals – completely in style with Brock’s non conformist, nomadic nature -, Hawkwind soon managed to gather a strong cult following. Musical style had also stabilized under Brock’s influence and settled on a heavy, monotonous, almost cosmic concept. Recognition and fame also came, with steady releases of new albums during the first half of the seventies, all reaching high rankings in the album charts. Above all financial solidity had been created, not in the last place by the million-selling single “Silver Machine” of June 1971.
In the meanwhile the band had seen frequent personnel changes, with Dave Brock and Nik Turner remaining the sole stable factors. Being now an established name in rock the band had attracted several more strong musical personalities as there were bass player Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister and artistic centipede Robert Calvert. Brock more and more profiled himself as the man pulling the strings from the background and proving himself as not easy to work with. Inevitably the ship proved to small for so many “captains” and following personal and artistic conflicts, by the end of the seventies, Lemmy, Turner and Calvert were all gone, leaving Brock the undisputed commander of “Spaceship Hawkwind”
Although very domineering in setting the direction of the band, Brock, unlike other artists of so strong character, never seeks the limelight for himself, remaining in the background on stage and letting other band members take the front. But such changes nothing at the fact that he is the absolute axis around which the band, artistically, organizationally, financially and in other ways, revolves.
That such a organization structure must lead to frequent line-up changes needs no argumentation, and the 1970’s was a coming and going of band members, although by the late 1980’s and the nineties, the core of Hawkwind would stabilize considerably, personnel changes have remained a feature up to the present day, with several dozen musicians have passed through the band over the years.
Several sources in the past have mentioned that Dave isn’t very much interested in the lyrical part of the music, being happy enough to leave the writing of lyrics to others. But in this I beg to differ: As he is a man of strong spiritual and political convictions, he certainly is profoundly interested in the content of Hawkwind lyrics and would never tolerate if other lyrics writers for the band would stray of the set path to far. Apart from that he is an extremely able lyrics writer, which he has proven on numerous occasions. In my view his 1972 lyrics for “Space is Deep” are among his best: The “space” in the title is both interpretable as the outer, cosmic, space as well as the inner, spiritual, space.


DAVE BROCK, SPIRITUAL AND POLITICAL CONVICTIONS

With Dave Brock being almost interchangeable with Hawkwind, it is obvious that the ideas laid down by the band are actually his personal ones. Even with a lot of, obviously ignorant, sources having portrayed the lyrics of Hawkwind as consisting of “Urban live and fantasy related topics”, there is much more to the issue than that.
Politically, Brock (and thus Hawkwind), can best be filed as representing the non-party, anti-authoritarian extreme left. Proof for this can be found in many lyrics of the band dealing with the power hunger of leaders, the greed and social ignorance of the establishment and so on. In general the lyrics express pessimism as well about the present as about the future, laying down a humanity which is moving ever farther away from any common sense and morality and in the process of rapidly destroying mother earth which gave it live. If I had to classify Dave Brock politically, I would call him an Anarcho-socialist, (Hope you can forgive me for this, Dave)
On the spiritual side the band’s opinions are even more well defined. One musical critic managed to call the band “ radically atheist”, but this one clearly doesn’t know them at all! In reality they express strong ties to European, (And in Richard Chadwick’s case North American), Shamanism, which, being from the British Isles, means a strong affinity with Druidism. This finds its expression in the bands frequent appearances at solstice celebrations, most prominently the annual 21st of June Stonehenge festival.
However, for Brock and the other band members, convictions mean not so much ideas as action. Although I could give some more examples to back this up, the best proof for this is found in the bands long lasting support for the “Seasheperds” an early split off of Greenpeace which mostly concentrates on opposing, often with violent, unlawful means, the hunt for sea mammals, (Reminds me I have to make a donation again later………). But well, Ok, that makes sense for a group that once composed a song called “Urban Guerilla” and is performing it on and of up to the present day………


WITH HAWKWIND FROM 1980 TO THE PRESENT


The 1970’s had not only established Hawkwind as a lastingly successful rock act, but had also put Dave Brock firmly in the leadership position of the act, a status quo that would never seriously be assailed again.
In my and many other hawkfans’s opinion, the 1980’s proved kind of a low period in the bands creative history, Brock often relying on repeat performances and slightly changed new versions of older material. This however does not in anyway implicate that not the material from this period is utterly solid, it is only to indicate that new creative impulses were largely lacking.
Brock himself was by no means inactive during this period. During Hawkwind’s previous years of existence he had built up a huge archive of never released recordings, which in the second half of the decade he began to sort meticulously and licensing them out piecemeal for release to various record labors. This resulted in such interesting series of releases as the 8 volume “Weird Tapes” and the 6 volume “Friends and Relations”.
Hawkwind and Brock in particular have often been called “taper unfriendly” but this is somewhat besides the truth as can be seen clearly on the band’s website. If reading the chapter on taping concerts carefully one cannot conclude other than that, within certain limitations, they do not disapprove either of taping nor the distribution of such materials as long as it is done on a limited scale. That such indeed is the case can easily be deduced by the availability of well over a hundred bootlegs of the band and Brock solo. It even seems that Dave Brock might have been personally involved in authorizing certain bootleg projects, more specifically the “Hawk Logs Master Series” a 16 volume bootleg series of very limited, (75 copies per album), releases, which contains such specific material that it could hardly have been obtained without the cooperation of Brock.
It does not need much explaining to understand that such a steady stream of personally authorized, semi authorized and fully unauthorized releases had to lead to a virtual bombardment with compilation albums, often utterly superfluous ones, by all the labels that own the rights on certain Hawkwind recordings. Whether or not this is in agreement with Dave and the band is not known, anyway, given the commercial laws there would be little they could do about it.
Had the 1980’s been a somewhat boring period in Brock’s creative history and thus the band’s also, from 1989 on that changes again. This might have a lot to do that besides Dave now two other long lasting and very like-minded members appear, bassist Alan Davey and drummer/percussionist Richard Chadwick (The later after working with Brock for over 21 years now, is still present in the band’s line up). Some of the best Brock compositions and lyrics, as well as several of the best band releases saw the light in this decade. Dave also produced several “solo” projects during this period, but in fact they could just as well be classified as band productions as on all of them several present and past band members feature. Another accentuation of the truth: Dave Brock had become Hawkwind and Hawkwind had become Dave Brock to a large extent!
The undamable stream of compilations and bootlegs by the 1990’s had become a raging torrent, ranking the band now with such entities as Deep Purple, Rolling Stones, Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden as having the most releases to their name. – Although Hawkwind never reached the general popularity of any of the mentioned, it always remained to much a sub culture phenomenon to go much beyond a rather large cult following -.
The period from 2000 up to present saw a gradual decrease of the band’s as well as of Dave’s solo releases, which is probably understandable as Dave and others are growing old. However, there has never been a let up in their touring and festivalling activities. On the contrary, as these words are written the largest “Hawkfest festival” so far, a three day event on the Isle of Wight has just been closed.


DAVE BROCK, PRESENT AND FUTURE.

On the 12th last month Dave celebrated his 69th birthday, (Congrats, Dave!) and he is still in good health, looking a lot younger than his actual years, and full of ideas and plans also. Never a very talkative man, nor one that seeks the limelight of the press, the interviews he gives are sparse, but in a recent one with “The Obelisk” webzine he announced that later this year he will be releasing a new solo album, containing apart from music also recitals of his poetry , - As usually featuring most if not all of Hawkwind’s band members –
I want to end with that all in all I have the feeling we haven’t heard the last from Dave Brock yet, one of the true monuments of Rock music!