‘Sideways Through Time’. Calvert and Temporality.
One meaning of temporality is time as it is subjectively experienced, as opposed to objective or clock time. As such it is influenced by an individual’s socialisation and cosmology. For example, ‘(a)mong the most profound ruptures initiated by the emergence of industrial capitalism was the rearrangement of our senses of time. Once tethered to seasonal, celebratory, or even cosmic temporalities, time in capitalist society was not only characterised by the regularity of clock-time, but specifically as the waged “labor hour” or work-time’ (1). Our conception, perception and experience of time is rooted in time and place shaped by our social and economic context. Ogle comments ‘’Temporality’ is taken to describe how past, present and future relate to one another, for instance through repetition and cyclical temporalities or ruptured and discontinuous temporalities, and through experiences and expectations’ (Ogle 2019: 3). She goes on to observe that the reconstruction of people’s sense of time due to industrialisation was gradual and that even a century later people’s experience and imagination of time was shaped by ‘task time and natural, biophysical rhythms’ especially in rural communities (Ogle 2019: 5). Although Ogle suggests there may be a lag in the internalisation of time as organised externally it would be reasonable to assume that our contemporary experiences of time are shaped, at least in part, by digital technology, IT and the need to be ‘connected’ 24/7 (Ogle 2019: 5-6) .
Calvert’s writings frequently explore ‘time’ and how it is experienced by the individual. From In Search of Space to the intriguing line, ‘sideways through time’, in ‘Silver Machine’, to the experience of a striking worker on Freq, Calvert plays with and explores the relationship of humanity with the past, present and future.
‘The Hawkwind Log’ that accompanied In Search of Space, ‘The Saga of Doremi Fasol Latido’, and the tour programme for the ‘Space Ritual’ tour all include Calvert’s writings; writings that created a mythology around Hawkwind. In the ‘Hawklog’ time as experienced is a recurring theme. The opening text, a prologue to the creation myth of Genesis 1, deals with time as experienced by God prior to creation, 'boredom, loneliness, mental and physical sterility’ while there is no external measurement of time, ‘no clock, no calendar to measure the length of thought’. Temporality without any objective measuring of time.
The main body of the Hawklog, a Calvert/Bubbles collaboration, is a collage of varying texts that create a mythic time. The introduction presents the writing as the log of the spaceship Hawkwind, the log discovered in 1971, the year the album was released. After that we enter mythic time with Hawkwind presented as space and time travellers. Day 1 is a record of the commissioning and departure of Hawkwind. Day 2 of the log is a Calvert poem cataloguing memories over ‘Ten Seconds of Forever’, the last line being ‘In the first and final second of forever I thought of the long past that led to now and never…never’. On the entry for ‘Day 3. 1619 hours. 25 January 1195 BC’ the writer records ‘We have observed that in this solar system the present is an ever changing point of balance between past and future and that life is a constant process of readjusting the interplay between the two’. The log continues, moving Hawkwind around time and space. The overall effect via poetry and prose is to present Hawkwind as mythic beings on a mission to ‘take the sound of these spheres, the sound of the Supreme One’ to the earth. Although, the log for ‘0300, 9 April 1946. Position Unknown’ states ‘We have been through so many time storms and warps in the fabric of reality that the purpose of our journey has long been lost to memory. Even our computers no longer speak with any certainty of the past. But still we journey on through space, in search of the present, leaving a trail of abandoned futures in our wake’.
The Hawklog plays with time and the experience of it, ‘(w)e have been through so many time storms…’. The entries are not in chronological order as the ship and crew move through time and space in an altered relationship to time where past, present and future are no longer perceived of, or experienced as, linear. The interplay between the three being in a state of flux.
Interestingly the text includes a version of ‘The Starfarer’s Despatch’ which reappears in ‘Spirit of the Age’.
Calvert continued his mythologising of Hawkwind in the next album with the ‘Saga of Doremi Fasol Latido’ this positions the writer, and therefore the reader, in a mythic time of ‘incubation halls, hydroponic gardens and even culto/psychic galleries’. The saga presents the album as a ‘collection of ritualistic space chants, battle hymns and stellar songs of praise’ as used by the members of Hawkwind who are again engaged in a mythic venture, this time to get help from ‘the legendary world of Thorasin’ for their beleaguered community. Again Calvert plays with time, setting the writing and reading of the text far in the future (12753) and the Hawkwind mission as commencing in ‘Mentet’ 1972, the year the album was released. In this Calvert positions the original readers in both their present, 1972, and the future simultaneously, disrupting the normal consecutive relationship between the two while placing Hawkwind in and out of recognisable time and place.
Calvert’s macro concept shaping the Space Ritual tour was that the shows would be ‘an audio visual portrayal’ of the dreamings and fantasies ‘of seven cosmonauts who are travelling through space in a state of suspended animation’ (author unknown 1972; no pag.). Calvert idea was influenced and inspired by The Black Corridor, a 1969 Michael Moorcock book. Running parallel with this concept was the organising of the band and equipment on stage by Bubbles according to the Pythagorean theory of sound (Means 1972: no pag.).
The programme for the ‘Space Ritual’ tour was another Calver/Bubbles collaboration. In it Calvert picks up from The ‘Saga of Doremi Fasol Latido’ presenting the members of Hawkwind as newly empowered and returning to Earth from Thorasin ‘to rid the planet of evil’.
This trilogy of writings by Calvert plays with the experience of time, its expected sequences and relationships between past, present and future. By creating a mythic world that overlaps with material reality - the meeting of elders that sends Hawkwind off to find help on Thorasin meets in ‘the wooded grove of Ladbroke’, a reference to Ladbroke Grove where early Hawkwind were based and a countercultural enclave - Calvert creates a surreal Alice in Wonderland mythos where the recognisable, including the experience of time, is reconfigured, ‘ruptured and discontinuous’.
The 2022 film Everything Everywhere All At Once explores the idea of many coexisting universes where different versions of an individual are realised, the heroine experiencing these different possibilities. Kermode commented about the film that ‘the narrative may be out of this world but the problems it addresses (a life of “fractured moments, contradictions and confusion” in which things only fleetingly make sense) are unmistakably human’ (Kermode 2022: no pag.). Similar things may be said about Calvert’s mythic writings in which the members of Hawkwind are reimagined and presented as occupying an alternative universe but also as experiencing responsibilities, homecoming, friendship, hope, difficulties and help.
In June 1972 Hawkwind released probably their best known song ‘Silver Machine’ as a single, the lyrics including the enigmatic line ‘sideways through time’. Calverts lyrics were based on How To Construct a Time Machine by Alfred Jarry, which he took to really be a description of how to build a bike. ‘I read this essay by Alfred Jarry called, ‘How to Construct a Time Machine’ …I seemed to suss out immediately that what he was describing was his bicycle…He did have that turn of mind. He was the kind of bloke who’d think it was a good joke to write this very informed-sounding piece, full of really good physics (and it has got some proper physics in it), describing how to build a time machine, which is actually about how to build a bicycle, buried under this smoke-screen of physics that sounds authentic. Jarry got into doing this thing called ‘Pataphysics’, which is a sort of French joke science…They’d put a man on the moon and were planning to put parking lots and hamburger stalls and everything up there. I thought that it was about time to come up with a song that actually sent this all up, which was ‘Silver Machine’. ‘Silver Machine’ was just to say, ‘I’ve got a silver bicycle’, and nobody got it…’ (Starkey 2022: no pag.). The lyrics are minimal for Calvert and apparently about a bike but it’s interesting that the inspiration came from the concept of time travel and the promise of altered temporalities, of being able to travel ‘sideways through time’. This theme of time travel was returned to in ‘Time for Sale’ on the Atomhenge 76 album.
The Hawklog includes a version of ‘The Starfarer’s Despatch’ which reappears in ‘Spirit of the Age’ on the 1977 album, Quark, Strangeness and Charm. Revisiting the ideas from The Black Corridor that informed Space Ritual, Calvert again has the protagonist as a starfarer, but this time one who has woken from suspended animation. In the poem and song the character bemoans the fact that his girlfriend's father wouldn’t allow her to be frozen and therefore, while he has awoken at roughly the same age he was deep frozen at, she is now around 60 years old and will be dead before he returns. He wistfully comments ’My time suspended (‘held’ in the song) dreams were full of you as you were when I left’. His past relationship with her filled his sleeping present while in reality his present/future and her present/future are now wildly out of synch.
In this song Calvert again examines aspects of temporality as shared experience of time is disrupted between two people, one ageing normally, the other experiencing a suspension of that process for several decades. the situation where one character’s proceeding into the future was put on hold while the other’s wasn’t resulting in a shift, a disconnection between two people’s presents and futures. Calvert also includes dream time when our experience of chronology and objective time are scrambled and when aspects of the past are experienced as very present, ’My time suspended dreams were full of you as you were when I left’.
The other song on Quark, Strangeness and Charm that deals with temporality,’how past, present and future relate to one another…through experiences and expectations’ is ‘Days of the Underground’. In this song from 1977 Calvert reminds the listener of the band's early years as he reflects on their experiences and losses wondering ‘Whatever happened to those chromium heroes, are there none of them still left around, since the days of the underground’. The song helps perpetuate a memory of Hawkwind as a band who refused to be part of the music business and instead used their position as part of the counterculture to undermine an already collapsing system, describing them as ‘Street-fighting dancers, the assassins of silence, with make-believe violence on a hundred watt stack’. This song of recollection of their early radical countercultural, anti-establishment ethos and actions, creates a sense of continuity, re-affirming Hawkwind’s identity. Calvert constructs a sense of continuity through autobiographical narrative of who Hawkwind were and are, connecting the present with the past and positioning the present relative to the past. Autobiographical narratives enable people to explain to themselves and others how they have come to be who they are today (Nedeem 2015: no pag.).
In the 1982 interview ‘Ramblings at Dawn’ Calvert addresses the question “Why did I write ‘Days of the Underground’” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BDGTUTItT8). His answer is “Because I felt it was necessary to redress the balance of opinion at the time which was that nothing at all of any worth was created in the period referred to in the song, that psychedelic music had no influence and no value, which I considered to be something…quite untrue. The people mentioned were characters who were around at the time who used to hang around Frendz office and various other places. They weren’t major artistic figures by any means at all, they were the sort of types of people you’d see around all the time, sort of like companions. There was Smiling Michael who as his name implies was actually a jovial person… John the Bog was a bloke who did quite a lot of driving for us actually…Jeff was a…big strapping Welsh geezer who came down to London and wrote a bit of poetry… and was another one of those luminous personalities you like to have around but just didn't stay around long enough…” (Ramblings at Dawn 1982: no pag.). Here Calvert asserts that the purpose of ‘Days of the Underground’ was to refute the negation of Hawkwind’s earlier period - and the psychedelic music of the early 70s more generally - and to assert the cultural, political and social value of what they had done.
Interestingly in a 1978 interview, with Hawkwind/Hawklords personnel completely changed except for himself and Brock, he talked about how it would be good to be able to play free festivals again and ‘to even play under the motorway on the green in Notting Hill… go anywhere, play anywhere…do everything that Hawkwind is supposed to do and hasn’t done for a long time’ (Calvert 1978: no pag.). In this interview Calvert, as he does with ‘Days of the Underground’, re-visits the past to assert the importance of their past actions hoping that they can regain that earlier radical stance and attitude.
‘Days of the Underground’, ‘Ramblings at Dawn’ and the 1978 interview reference the band’s history to reaffirm its historic cultural importance but also relates the past to the present to affirm a sense of continuity in the band’s identity and as a means of encouraging the band to revive the radical practice of the period referred to in ‘Days of the Underground’.
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 argues in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? and elsewhere that post modernist neoliberalism/late capitalism has brought about a de-acceleration of culture and that many now experience a sense of nostalgia for lost futures. Fisher’s writings raise the question of what happens to 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 Calvert (and Bubbles) seemed to anticipate in the lyrics, prose and presentation around the album 25 Years On. The 1978 tour programme, again a Calvert/Bubbles collaboration, is presented as a brochure for Pan Transcendental Industries, a transnational corporation who have assumed ‘absolute authority’ over the planet, 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’. The year before the election of Margaret Thatcher Calvert seemed to perceive the trajectory of soon to be imposed neoliberalism where all is commodified and all alternatives are incorporated or erased.
The album includes several tracks that explore the experience of time from different perspectives. The inside album cover includes the dates 1953 and 1978, the first 25 years of PTI’s existence referred to in the PTI booklet. The programme informing the reader in 1978 that PTI ‘have started to implement (their) next 25 year plan’. The programme represents the previous 25 years and the present as a time of ascendency for PTI in stark contrast to the lived experience of workers.
‘Automoton’ is a continually accelerating instrumental by Calvert and Brock that works as an extended introduction to ‘25 Years’, as such it seems to represent 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 flows and the velocity of those 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’ both anticipates and encapsulates that experience as the intensity and speed increase.
The track ‘25 Years’ by Brock records the protagonist’s inability and reluctance to conform to the demands of capital, by 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 Fisher’s comments about the sterility and sense of mundanity that characterise working class experience under late capitalism. The questions around temporality that Calvert raises in these two tracks are extremely pertinent to much working class experience in the early 21st century when work life is increasingly intense (and precarious) and yet the future looks, for many, 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?
The third track on 25 Years On that deals with temporality is ‘Psi Power’ in which the relationship of past, present and future is very disrupted! The narrator of the song, after initially enjoying the experiences and advantages of having psi power, 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 when the experience of many in the digital/social media age is of information overload, a recognised phenomena that ‘can lead to physical and psychological strain’ (Whelan et al no date: no page.).
The working class experience of time was also addressed post Hawkwind on Calvert’s 1985 solo release Freq. The track ‘All the Machines are Quiet’ is the most poignant of Calvert’s explorations of temporality, it is an account of a worker’s experience of being on strike. The song’s lyrics catalogue the striker’s different social, physical and emotional experiences of time slowed down in the absence of wage labour and work; of days spent dreaming, time spent queuing, of frustration and financial precarity. The song captures the changed experience of time for the worker who is so used to experiencing the familiar imposition of capitalist time and tasks that their absence feels alien, ‘I could scream, all the machines are quiet’. To quote Gang of Four, ‘At Home He Feels like a Tourist’.
Conclusion.
As can be seen from the above Calvert’s writings frequently play with, and interrogate, the concept and experience of time. In the trilogy of mythic writings about Hawkwind he places the band simultaneously in and outside of conventional time, the reader repositioned by the text and experiencing the band’s relationship to time as a problematic dimension as they move forwards and backwards through past, present and future and/or exist in alternative realities that parallel and intersect with that known. That sense of ‘ruptured and discontinuous temporalities’ is continued in ‘Spirit of the Age’ as two people’s experience of time singularly and relative to each other is profoundly changed.
In ‘Days of the Underground’ from 1977 and the 1978 interview, ‘A Disagreement Has Been Reached’, Calvert connects the past with the present through autobiographical narrative both affirming continuity and highlighting an intermediary time between the period covered in ‘Days of the Underground’ and 1978 as one of discontinuity.
In the album 25 Years On and the accompanying booklet about PTI Calvert’s lyrics and prose contrast and compare the different experiences of time by capital and labour; PTI gaining increased power while working class experience of the present and future is depicted as bleak. (although the cover of the ‘25 Years’ single does offer revolutionary hope!) Calvert’s prescient writings anticipated the imposition of neoliberalism which involved the wholesale restructuring of the UK including confrontation with organised labour, his lyrics on Freq drawing attention to changed working class temporalities in that struggle.
Image from video of ‘25 Years’ on Days of the Underground boxed set, Atomhenge 2023.
Bibliography.
(1)Time and Capitalism: the Economics of the Clock, Instructor: Lygia Sabbag Fares, Brooklyn Institute for Social Research,
https://thebrooklyninstitute.com/items/courses/new-york/time-and-capitalism-the-economics-of-the-clock/ [accessed 5 October 2023 via bing].
Author unknown. 1972. Hawkwind Musicnauts, https://web.archive.org/web/20040310033535/http://www.starfarer.net/musicnauts.html [accessed 7 October 2023 via https://www.daysoftheunderground.com/press-articles]
Calvert, Robert. Bubbles, Barney. 1971. The Hawkwind Log, https://vdocuments.mx/hawkwind-log-1971.html?page=21 [accessed 6 October 2023 via bing].
Calvert, Robert. 1972. ‘Saga of Doremi Fasol Latido’, Doremi Fasol Latido, 2001 EMI Records.
Calvert, Robert. Brock, Dave. 1972. Silver Machine, United Artists Records.
Calvert, Robert. 1972. Space Ritual tour programme.
Calvert, Robert. Brock, Dave. 1977. Spirit of the Age, Quark, Strangeness and Charm, Charisma Records.
Calvert, Robert. 1977. ‘The Starfarer’s Despatch’, Centigrade 232, Gonzo Multimedia 2007.
Calvert, Robert. 1977, ‘Days of the Underground’, Quark, Strangeness and Charm, Charisma Records.
Calvert, Robert. 1977, ‘Spirit of the Age’, Quark, Strangeness and Charm, Charisma Records.
Calvert, Robert 1978. ‘Pans Transcendental Industries’ tour programme.
Calvert, Robert. 1978. ‘Psi Power’, 25 Years On, Charisma Records.
Calvert, Robert. 1978. Robert Calvert – ‘A Disagreement Has Been Reached’ – A Hawklords Interview from Capital Radio,1978 https://soundcloud.com/nickcalvert/robert-calvert-a-disagreement [accessed 8 October 2023 via Echoes and Dust].
Calvert, Robert and Gadd, Tim. 1982. Ramblings at Dawn www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BDGTUTItT8 [accessed 20 December 2023 via bing].
Calvert, Robert. 1985. ‘All the Machines are Quiet’, Freq. Flicknife Records.
Fisher, Mark. 2009 Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Zero Books (Winchester UK/Washington USA).
Jarry, Alfred. 1965. How To Construct a Time Machine translated by Roger Shattuck, Patakosmos Press Open Access https://www.patakosmos.com/database-open-access/Machine-time-jarry-en.pdf [accessed 8 October 2023 via bing].
Kermode, Mark. 2022. Everything Everywhere All At Once review - multiverse madness with meaning, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/may/15/everything-everywhere-all-at-once-review-michelle-yeoh-jamie-lee-curtis-daniel-kwan-daniel-scheinert [accessed 9 October 2023 via bing].
Means, Andrew. 1972. ‘A Mystic Preview of Hawkwind’s Latest Project, Space Ritual’, Melody Maker, 28 October 1972 https://web.archive.org/web/20201026222045/https://plasticfragment.com/cuttings/cuttings-1969-1979/a-mystic-preview-of-hawkwinds-latest-project-space-ritual/ [accessed 7 October 2023 via https://www.daysoftheunderground.com/press-articles].
Nedeem, Nahala. 2015. Autobiographical narrative: An exploration of identity construction processes in relation to gender and race, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304185583_Autobiographical_narrative_An_exploration_of_identity_construction_processes_in_relation_to_gender_and_race [accessed 8 October 2023 via bing].
Ogle, Vanessa. 2019. Time, Temporality and the History of Capitalism, Past and Present, https://www.academia.edu/39805517/TIME_TEMPORALITY_AND_THE_HISTORY_OF_CAPITALISM [accessed 5 October 2023 via bing].
Starkey, Arun. 2022. The Story Behind The Song: Hawkwind's space rock masterpiece 'Silver Machine, https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/story-behind-the-song-hawkwind-silver-machine/ [accessed 8 October 2023 via bing].
Whelan, Eoin. Islam, Najmul. Brooks, Stoney. No date. Cognitive Control and Social Media Overload, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/301371995.pdf#:~:text=The%20extensive%20adoption%20and%20use%20of%20social%20media,which%20can%20lead%20to%20physical%20and%20psychological%20strain. [accessed 7 October 2023 via bing].
