Robert Calvert steered Hawkwind towards their greatest achievements as the band’s frontman and poet, but struggled to balance his artistic ambitions with mental health issues. He died aged 43 in 1988. Among the many creatives he inspired was Auteurs leader Luke Haines, one of the pioneers of Britpop. He told Prog what he’d learned from Calvert in 2018.
“When I was growing up, and then in art college, there was a subculture of people into Gong and Hawkwind, who I had always dismissed as hippie bands. Then I heard the Calvert era, which got me into Hawkwind, and I love all eras of the band now.
On Quark, Strangeness And Charm [1977] and 25 Years On [1978], he seemed to turn Hawkwind into a different band, because those albums sound nothing like the early albums.
My favourite three Calvert albums are probably 25 Years On, Captain Lockheed And The Starfighters and Freq. I love Captain Lockheed for its full-on-ness. Freq is the album that seemed most prescient about the times we live in – it’s about the destruction of the working class. It’s a really angry album, although it was fairly ignored at the time.
I also like what he did with Steve Peregrin Took, in which no one seemed particularly interested in 1974.
I’m not massively keen on the idea of genres. Actually, a lot of what is called prog is a lot more post-punk than anything that actually was post-punk. It’s full of ideas and madness, which is what rock’n’roll should be.
Calvert really pushed me towards concept albums and being fairly full-on about it – the only way to approach stuff is to run straight at the wall head first, minus the crash helmet. I made a weird drone album about a year and a half ago called Freqs. Although it was nothing like his album Freq, it was a subconscious homage, if you like.
Calvert was an artist who clearly wouldn’t have been stopped by the constraints of the music industry or anything like that. Without alluding to mental health in a negative way – and we’re obviously a lot more aware of these things now – he was batshit crazy, but in a really good way.
He didn’t want to be a rock star but, weirdly, made a great rock star. He carved out this world of his own. For me, he’s up there with David Bowie.”
