Transcription of presentation at Punk Scholars Network Conference UK 2023 at Buckinghamshire New University 16 Dec.
According to Joy Division/New Order drummer, Stephen Morris ‘Punk rock started because in every small town there was somebody who liked Hawkwind’. (Banks 2020a: no pag.). By 1978 with 25 Years On, Hawkwind had morphed into Hawklords releasing one of the great post punk/new wave albums. The album, stage show, tour programme and associated singles all include a preoccupation with the subjective experience of time under capitalism, often within a framework of 25 years as we’ll see.
The album was released in October 1978, a turbulent time in the UK, culminating in the ‘Winter of Discontent’ between November ‘78 and February ‘79 (1).
As Hawklords toured, the UK was months away from the beginning of Thatcher’s rule, the end of 30+ years of social democracy and the imposition of neoliberalism.
Accompanied by Bubbles striking imagery, the tour programme documents the ascendency of a mythic transnational corporation within the framework of 25 years, 1953-78. The 16 page booklet gave Robert Calvert the room to develop his concept of Pan Transcendental Industries that underpins the 25 Years On project. Through a reciprocal arrangement with governments, and financing by corporations and states, all power over the planet has been ceded to PTI who are creating ’a successful radical alternative reality’ and engaging in a restructuring of the globe, one that will affect ‘the majority of the world’s population’ (2).
The text continues, ‘In 1966, Pan Transcendental Industries began its historic programme for the industrialisation of religion. To fuse the popular with the metaphysical and the commercial with the sublime… the reduction of culture to commodity’…‘a wholesale megastructural rehabilitation of the globe’ (2).
Lyons, reviewing Joe Banks’ book, comments ‘the dark satire of Pan Transcendental Industries – developed by Calvert…offers a prescient metaphorical critique of global corporate hegemony that’s acutely alive to the essential absurdity of hegemonic ambition…(Lyons 2020: n.pag.). In the programme Calvert seems to grasp the trajectory of neoliberal late capitalism, its totalitarian ambitions where all is incorporated, eradicated, commodified, and governments have in reality ceded power to corporations.
As Conlon writes ‘…in spite of his bipolarity, or perhaps as a result of it, (Calvert) was able to perceive with lucidity the authoritarian contours of an emerging dystopia’ (Conlon 2013: n.pag.).
Much of the 25 Years On project compares and contrasts the differentiated experiences of capital and labour, contrasting the experience of the working class to that of an ascendent Pan Transcendental Industries.
Calvert commented in an interview that the song ‘25 Years’ was about “the small man, the average person’s plight” (Davies 1978: n.pag.). This class element was emphasised by the tour presentation designed by longtime Hawkwind collaborator Barney Bubbles and Chris Gabrin (Banks 2020: 316).
Hawklords plus dancers, entered the stage in ‘industrial overalls’, as a film depicted ‘workers filing through a tunnel, in the style of Metropolis’, ‘the stage is lit by prison-camp watchtowers’ and during the concert ‘a troupe of drably dressed dancers…sweep the floor and perform other mundane tasks’, while ‘(s)lides are projected in rapid succession behind the stage’ (Banks 2020: 312).
The stage design brings to the fore working class experience of mundanity, alienation and control under (the industrial) capitalism (of PTI). Steve Swindells observed “The stage set was fantastic…Very Metropolis…very visual…” (Abrahams 2004: 130).
The overall effect was to position Hawklords as part of the industrial working class and the industrial working class as at odds with capitalism. Mulvey’s writings on cinema and Pizarro et al on Durkheim’s concept of ‘collective effervescence’ suggests that the viewers, individually and collectively, would be encouraged by the organising of the stage set to identify with the band and dancers creating a sense of (shared) working class identity in opposition to capital (Mulvey 1975: n.pag. and Pizarro et al 2022: n.pag.).
25 Years the Single.
The preoccupation with working class experience of subjugation under all pervasive capitalism also informed the artwork of the single 25 Years released on 18th May ‘79, two weeks after Thatcher’s election (Banks 2020: 414).
The single cover was designed by Alex McDowell who, influenced by Barney Bubbles’ interest in Russian Constructivism, was known as Rocking Russian (Banks 2020: 355). Tying the single in with Calvert’s overarching concept the front cover has the date 1979 (the date of release) in the top right hand corner of a pencil sketch of oppressed working class sailors moving en masse while overhead are flying three military jets whose function seems to be primarily surveillance and control on behalf of an unseen elite, this is communicated by the descending searchlights illuminating the crowd. It is an image of ‘power over’ (Mathie et al 2017: n.pag.).
The backcover is dated 25 years on, 2004. In this image the working class sailors have risen up, one of the planes lies crashed in the middle ground while the foreground is dominated by an heroic figure, brandishing a flag and urging others on. It is a picture of a revolutionary working class uprising drawing on imagery and ideas from Eisenstein’s early soviet film Battleship Potemkin and explicitly copying the composition of Delacroix’s 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People.
It is a depiction of ‘power with’, ‘the relationships and possibilities that can emerge when people collaborate’.(Mathie et al 2017: no pag.).
25 Years On the album.
As well as designing the stage presentation Barney Bubbles also designed the 25 Years On album cover,
Wasler observes on heavy metal (and it is applicable to wider heavy rock of the time) that its ‘generic cohesion…until the mid 1980s depended upon the desire of young white male performers and fans to hear and believe in certain stories about the nature of masculinity’ (Wasler 1993: 154). AC/DC, who had two albums out in ‘78, would be good examples of a hyper masculinity and heteronormativity prevalent in rock at that time. Seventies ‘heavy rock’ as a genre included Hawkwind, but the front cover image of 25 Years On runs contrary to all the accepted and expected norms, Banks describes it as ‘ a strikingly ambivalent image with homoerotic overtones, like a sci-fi appropriation of a Robert Mapplethorpe shot’ (Banks 2020: 311).
John Appelby commented on Facebook that he had read in the music press of the time that it was an image of a PTI worker (Appelby 2023: no pag.). Peter Saville - who, along with others, also drew on early 1900s avant garde - comments on Bubbles’ familiarity with Russian Constructivism and this may throw some light on the cover (Poynor 2003: 70-77 and Saville 2022: 6). Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein was a contemporary of Russian Constructivism and influenced by it, his ‘picture of revolution’ in October and Battleship Potemkin, being described by Gillespie as ‘homoerotic’, drawing attention to a scene in the latter of topless muscular sailors, ‘asleep in hammocks’, with bare chested workers also appearing in another Eisenstein film, Strike (Gillespie 2000: 44, 48).
It may be, enthusiastic as he was about early Soviet art, that Bubbles is reproducing Eisenstein’s imagery of the bare chested, heroic worker in this image (Gorman 2022: 91, 98).
Early Soviet art again appears to be appropriated on the back cover where the main image shares many of the component parts, and strongly resembles a dismantled 3D version of El Lissitzky’s Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge.
One side of the inside cover is dated 1953, the other 1978; 25 years on and the same time period referred to in the tour programme.
As can be seen the conceptual framework around 25 Years On was highly developed and coherent. However, the albums lyrics are more diverse,
Only tracks ‘Automaton’, ‘25 Years’, ‘The Only Ones’ and ‘The Age of the Micro Man’ deal with PTI and differentiated class experience.
‘Automoton’, is the sound of accelerating machinery, the increasing speed of a mechanised world, the ever accelerating ‘nature’ of industrial capitalism. Industrialisation increased speeds and volumes of production, the telegram, phone, rail and later digital technology have increased speeds of communication, globalisation has been characterised by increased volume and velocity of flows,. The modern era, and particularly late capitalism, has been marked by acceleration with consequential effects on the temporality of those subject to it. ‘Automoton’ anticipates and encapsulates that experience as the intensity and speed increase.
‘25 Years’, written by Brock, deals with both the experience of the drudgery of paid labour (something Brock had experienced) and the protagonist's inability to meet the requirements of industrial capitalism (Gett 1978: n.pag.). Within the song the character’s stance changes from one of detached listless aimlessness “I stand around the streets, I lie around the floor. Looking at the sky, I watch the world go by” to a more assertive resistance to the demands of capital, “Twenty five years of social reform ain’t gonna make me change or make me conform”.
In contrast Calvert’s lyrics to ‘The Age of the Micro Man’ record the alienation and monotony of working life under capitalism. Without purpose or awareness of an overarching plan the worker, due to the division of labour, has been reduced to an adjunct to technology. The lyrics condense and prefigure the sterility and mundanity that has often characterised working class experience of industrialisation and work under late capitalism.
“It's the age of the micro man who sees the detail but never the plan, it's the time of the tiny creep, who pulls the levers while he falls asleep, it's the age of the insect man who pushes buttons and takes back the can, It's the age of the micro man, who sees the detail but never the plan’. (Brock/Calvert)
The questions around temporality that these two tracks raise are extremely pertinent to much working class experience in the early 21st century when work life is increasingly intense and precarious for many while the future under corporate hegemony looks like a continuation of the present. If as Ogle writes, ‘‘(t)emporality’ is taken to describe how past, present and future relate to one another’, what happens to the individual when there is no hope of rupture or discontinuity to an anxious, insecure ongoing present (Ogle 2019: 3)?
The ‘outer’ tracks include ‘Psi Power’, which explores the experience of someone with ESP power who initially is able to enjoy the experience before being overwhelmed by the relentless flow of information and stimulus. “It’s like a radio you can’t switch off, there's no way to get peace of mind. I’d like to live inside a lead-lined room and leave all this psi power behind. Circle, square, triangle, waves, it's a gift that soon turned sour. Why don't they let me get some rest, too much to understand, to digest”. (Brock/Calvert). In this track the normal relationship of past, present and future is disrupted. The narrator of the song finds that the constant stream of information about, and from, those around him overwhelming, commenting, ‘it's like a radio you can’t switch off, there’s no way to get peace of mind’. The continual reception of multiple flows of information simultaneously, including information that would normally be sequential, withheld, filtered or mediated, with no way of filtering out or blocking the various flows leads to an experience of an always overwhelming present where there is ‘too much to understand, to digest’. It could be argued that Calvert’s description is now more commonly recognisable as information overload, a recognised phenomena that ‘can lead to physical and psychological strain’ (Whelan et al no date: no page.).
Conclusion
Writing in 2009 about the film Children of Men, Mark Fisher comments that the film ‘connects with the suspicion that the end has already come, the thought that it could well be the case that the future harbours only reiteration and re-permutation. Could it be that there are no breaks, no ‘shocks of the new’ to come’ (Fisher 2009: 3). Fisher’s writings raise the question of what happens to individual and societal temporality when the future is envisaged as more of the present, when the possibilities of change have been closed down? These are questions that Bubbles and Calvert particularly seemed to anticipate in the lyrics, prose and presentation around the album 25 Years On.
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