Einstein was not a handsome fellow Nobody ever called him Al He had a long moustache to pull on, It was yellow I don't believe he ever had a girl One thing he missed out in his theory of time, space and relativity Is something that makes it very clear He was never gonna score like you and me
Hark, Hark! I shall make a pronouncement, I like making those. I, 1537, have considered all time, all space, all human cultural endeavour and I hereby decree that the title track of Hawkwind Quark Strangeness And Charm is my favourite song ever about Albert Einstein’s sex life. Quark, quark!
Always a far more street* prospect than the zonked out heads they were often mistaken as Hawkwind, far from being blown aside by punk and its attendant sneery kerfuffle absorbed it and channelled the spirit of the age in 1977 with one of their very best LPs; during certain astrological conjunctions, with the wind blowing in the right direction, listened to an a ley line, Quark Strangeness And Charm is my favourite ‘Wind album. It really is that good.
As one of only 12 hip people in Britain who have never been in Hawkwind, I have studiously studied the band and their history for most of my adult (?) life. As any school age child knows Quark Strangeness And Charm was the first LP after Nik Turner’s departure and Rob Calvert, in his second stint in the band seized the reins. This really is his album, the music bends and warps around his theatrical personality and his witty lyrics; he co-writes everything here apart from the two instrumentals.
Your android replica is playing up again Oh, it's no joke When she comes she moans another's name (Spirit Of The Age)
I love a band who are confident enough to go for a laid-back LP opener and the brilliant ‘Spirit Of The Age’ is just this. Cranky atmospherics abound and then the band come on, motoriking along mildly as the sci-fi tale unwinds, ‘I would have liked you to have been deep frozen too / and waiting still fresh in your flesh for my return to Earth‘. I love the way the song subtly builds and builds; the repetition and banality being the real spirit of the age? it is that clever^.
‘Damnation Alley’ is your standard taut-boogie-post-apocalypse deal, based on the Roger Zelzany book. It’s a real belter and if you changed the oddball subject matter and took out Simon House’s excellent violin bits, you could imagine any number of conventional rockers belting this out. Dave Brock hits some really tasty guitar fills and riffs on this one. Hawkwind score mucho 1537 bonus points** for the line ‘Thank you Dr. Strangelove for going do-lally’, which is the only usage I can think of the phrase ‘do-lally’ in the entirety of popular music.
I really enjoy the plaintive ‘Fable Of A Failed Race’ which is as close to Floyd as I think Hawkwind ever got, it’s a slowburner which brings Side 1 down to a gentle finish…
… only to cue up a brilliant 1-2-3 on Side 2. Dig this, hepcats! This may actually be the best video ever made by anyone ever, in the whole history of foreverness. It is the stuff my very dreams are made of^^ and I have watched it at least 43 times today. True story.
But so is the song. Brilliant lyrics, funny, wry and knowing, all served up in a really simple power pop hit. The bit where Calvert goes ‘Quark, quark!’ is my favourite thing ever from 1977. Just genius.
Then Quark Strangeness And Charm does the impossible and gets even better somehow with the epic ‘Hassan I Sabbah’. This rocks out in a Middle-Eastern flavoured way and mentions hashish more than any song ever has, or has done since until Sleep came along. I love the intertwining of the story of the Old Man of the Mountain, as endorsed by Marco Polo and the, then current unrest, in the region^*. Basically though, smart as it all is, this is mostly an excuse to use the phrase hashshashin about 200 times.
Hawkwind then step sideways with some alacrity to invent ambient industrial stuff with ‘The Forge Of Vulcan’, featuring Simon House playing an actual anvil. When I first heard this, way out of context in the late 90’s, I thought it was the Orb. The use of keys and sequencers here is massively ahead of its’ time. This is one of my most played tracks on my iPod.
Then we switch back to a wistful and slightly spiky look back at Hawkwind’s place in the firmament of the counterculture and a brief tribute to the fallen in ‘Days Of the Underground’, which borrows a descending chord sequence straight from ‘Hassan I Sabbah’ and teams it with a robotic vocal from Calvert and typically great lyrics; ‘we smoked urban poison and we turned all this noise on’.
Which just leaves the instrumental ‘Iron Dream’, drummer Simon King’s pounding track based on Gustav Holst’s ‘Mars’ and named after the anti-fascist sci-fi book of the same name. Heavy.
Just on the grounds of wit and musical variation alone Quark Strangeness And Charm stakes a place on the top table of Hawkwind LPs. Okay so you lose the pounding heaviness of yore, that whole orbit-or-bust aesthetic, but at the gain of considerable nimbleness, as befits an album named after particle physics. I also really like the more literary, stagey sensibility that Rob Calvert brought to the fore*^ here. That the album only reached #30 in the UK charts I take as a searing indictment of my forebears.
The Hipgnosis cover was snapped in a Battersea Power Station control room and I am sure that any similarity with UFO’s Lights Out, also released in 1977 with a power station set LP cover by Hipgnosis is entirely coincidental.
My copy is a UK 1982 reissue, frustratingly this was issued without the inner sleeve. Arse, Arse!
Take the floor girls. Positions. Now I’m sure we all want to dance with an air of delicate grace. And since Theresa Taylor is our musical major, she may drop the needle on the record. Terry.
981 Down.
PS: You want twisted pop kicks with a zonked out Marc Bolan, two days before the end? then here’s Hawkwind without Dave Brock (who refused to play the show, reasons why vary) on Bolan’s TV show Marc. WTF did folks make of this at the time? I’m not ready for this in 2020:
*rather than field?
^contemporary live versions (the CD has a great one) add a touch more fire, to great affect.
**not that this is a band who need them.
^^the film that it was stolen from was Get Yourself A College Girl and the lady in red is Nancy Sinatra. Good on you unknown person who made this, I hereby nominate you for an Oscar in the ‘Most Amusing Stoner Power Pop Video, Prominently Featuring Ladies’ Bottoms’ category. Hurrah!
^*good job a succession of wise, far-sighted, unselfish world leaders have sorted all that fuss out, eh readers?
*^if you discount Mighty Michael Moorcock’s earlier (and later) association, but I’m twisting the facts to fit my own narrative here; it’s what I do.