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On
his body of work
(and Italian dilletants):
"What I`ve achieved so
far seems to be a rather diverse body of work that has to be looked at
as a whole, really. The songs and the poems, and the plays I've done,
the one book I've done so far, the book I'm doing at the moment, and other's
I think I will be doing, will have to be looked at, if I live long enough,
as sort of different facets of the same output, rather than just firing
off in different directions. I hope I'm not a sort of - what's the Italian
word? - "dilettante". I hope I`m not one of those. I don't like Italians
very much!"
On
his working strategies - 4/81:
"My background was
in building. My father is a master builder, and my brother's a quantity
surveyor. I started up doing structural engineering.
The way I approach the staging of things is in effect what a chartered
surveyor, or a structural engineer would do, to see what your budget
is for your materials and do a quantity study on how best you can use
these materials, or like a civil engineer designing a bridge (...) You`ve
got a stage, you`ve got a certain budget or system of equipment to use.
If somenoe says, "Look, here`s a projection screeen, 5 musicians, 3
dancers, 2 actors etc., do me a show, that`s the sort of thing I can
work very well with. I find that a greater stimulus than someone saying,
"Look `ere, here`s a totally unlimited resource. You can have Mount
Fujiyama, combined with a complete flotilla of aircraft carriers, do
anything you like, I don`t think I`d be able to come up with very much.
I think I'd spend most of the time sitting abound dreaming of what would
be possible "
On his working times:
When I finished work (I work at night - I'm
definitely an insomniac) - I work these peculiar hours between ten at
night to five in the morning which may not seem like long hours to people
who do real work, but the rest of the time I'm thinking about it. After
I've finished, I get into bed and put a tape on and watch about three
movies before I go to sleep. This is the most bizarre thing - the birds
are singing outside and there are movies on TV."
On
his method of songwriting:
"What I do is mess about with the guitar until I find something
that works, an interesting chord progression for example. As I find
it difficult to play a riff and sing at the same time, I put that guitar
part down on a Revox and I can nearly always find a vocal line to go
over the top because most of my tunes come straight into my head and
what I usually find is that I tend to restrict my lyrics to fit my melody
lines.
(...) Songwriting is like any other task of making something - it`s
a very boring process. (...) It`s like laying eggs - a lot of squawking
before a final shape arrives."
On
his working method:
"My whole approach
to work is different from that of the Hawkwind's.
They're improvisers, but I meditate for a long time over something before
I commit it."
On
the literary and theatrical aspects + antics of his work with Hawkwind:
"„It’s
all very tied to fantasy and science fiction, obviously. What I’m
doing with the band is a very literary thing really, in that it’s
about words and images. In many respects it’s more to do with
the theatre than it is with music. Mine’s an acting job
really, I have to embody what the music’s about, which
is, I suppose, heroic fantasy really. Roger Zelazny type science fiction
heroics. Comics don’t really come into it. I never really liked
comics. No, I think the influence stems more from a paperback novel
of not the highest cerebral level. Not like JG Ballard. More Pulp science
fiction, like Michael
Moorcock or Roger Zelazny’s Damnation
Alley (around which Calvert has written one of Hawkwind’s
more compelling stage songs.) (...)
There’s a whole culture that’s acceptable in pulp novel
terms. Jules Verne rather than H.G.Wells. We even get letters from University
people, in the States in particular,who have found parallels between
science fiction and the literature of the past and who can fit Hawkwind
into that scheme. I still think we’re closely aligned with that,
but when it comes down to something like 'Uncle
Sam’s On Mars', it’s a little more serious.
(...)
We only do things that excite us. We do all sorts of things to keep
it going when we’re on stage. It’s spontaneous lunacy really.
One night on the last tour Dave Brock and I both had guns that fired
blanks and we had a shoot-out on stage. Everything stopped and we started
firing at one another. The audience must have thought we were insane
but it’s things like that that keep it all alive for us. If we
get bored with anything then we invariably drop it. We would like an
audience to have the same reaction seeing what we’re doing as
we would if we were to go and see ourselves:
A polished and astonishing act. That’s how I see it all
developing. With more props and theatricals used not as gimmicks and
effects but with a degree of artistry and skill to mean something of
some sort of value, as well as making good entertainment."
>
read the entire article/interview
On
his fascination for the negative - or rather ambiguous
protagonist - 4/74:
"I find something fascinating about the arms dealer as a figure
- I always had a sneaking admiration when I was a kid for the bad man
in the Westerns who incited the Indians to attack the farmers and then
supplied both sides with arms."
On
Science Fiction and sources of inspiration - 12/78:
"I don`t like SF
that much. Nobody in this band (Hawkwind) is particularly an SF fanatic.
I think for a practitioner of that kind of thing, in literature or music,
there are much more intersting sources of inspiration to be found outside
this field altogether, in newspapers, and magazines like "Scientific
American", which is where the Quark,
Strangeness and Charm idea came from.
Most SF is trash, actually...
On
his early days, bands, his involvement with Hawkwind
and his aspirations to become a "durable star" - after his
Forties....:
I
was born in South Africa of English parents. My father`s in the building
trade - a kind of "Meisterbuilder" in the Ibsen tradition. We moved to
England when I was three, and my parents went back when I was in my teens.
My first band was when I was 15.
It was called "Oliver Twist and the Lower Third", and we played round
the Margate dancehalls. The next outfit was "Mordecai Sludd and the Others".
We were kind of satirical - a bit like the Bonzos (Bonzo
Dog Doo Dah Band) though it was a lot earlier.
Unfortunately, there wasn`t a lot of demand for satire round the dancehalls,
so we had a rather rough time. I remember I used to wear luminous socks...
Then I turned very snobbish and decided to be a poet instead of a singer.
I even got snobbish about music for a short time, decided it was an inferior
form. I used to enjoy sitting in churchyards and reading Verlaine, Keats,
Shelley, Dylan Thomas.
God I was naive! I thought you could make a living as a poet!
When I moved to London I had an exhibition of environmental poetry
at the Roundhouse "Better Place to Live" exhibition. I got involved
with the underground as soon as I came to London. I looked on myself
as a kind of anti-literary establishment guerilla. I hated the weak
impact of straight poetry, and realised that the only way to get through
to people is through music. I began working for "Frendz" writing fiction.
I'd known HAWKWIND before they even formed, and
we shared some anti-establishment attitudes. I still don`t like iambic
pentameters. I am more interested in what a poem can do - what a piece
of music is good for. What I liked about Hawkwind
is that they were experimenters you could understand. You either liked
them or you didn't - there was no "should" about it. I remember my time
with HW as an endless succession of flashing gigs. I wrote a fantastic
hymn to the sun at Glastonbury Fayre, and lost it the same day. That
really was the high point of the British
Underground.
Looking back, it`s impossible to put things in any chronological order.
Everything happened at the same time. Really, only someone who`s seriously
experimented with pharmaceutical agents could understand....
I know that I'd only like to be a star like George Bernhard Shaw -
durable.
A rock star's got such a short life expectancy, and it's difficult to
change direction. I'd alwas like to be fluid. I won't be a star till
I'm over forty. Which is cool - neither was Shaw!"
On
the french absurdist writer Alfred
Jarry`s "pataphysical" approach and how Silver
Machine came out of it:
(Warning
to all you Hawkwind space-cadets: this may lead to a serious demolition
of all illusions about this supposedly psychedelic-spacey-song...sorry
'bout that...):
"I read this essay by Alfred Jarry (author of "Ubu
Roi / King Ubu") called, "How to Construct a Time
Machine", and I noticed something which I don't think
anyone else has thought of because I've never seen any criticism of
the piece to suggest this. 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. A lot of notable French intellectuals
formed an academy around the basic idea of coming up with theories to
explain the exceptions to the Laws of the Universe, people like Ionesco
the playwright.
The College of metaphysics. I thought it was a great idea for a song.
At that time there were a lot of songs about space travel, and it was
the time when NASA was actually, really doing it. 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. I didn't
think they would. I thought that what they would think we were singing
about some sort of cosmic space travel machine. I did actually have
a silver racing bike when I was a boy. I've got one now, in fact."
On
FRENDZ, other underground magazines and the
decline of collective energy:
"Those papers were
actualy having international circulations (...)
FRENDZ had quite a wide circulation for an underground paper, so
had "International Times". They were also creating quite a stir at the
time; there were court cases and the police were taking notice, they
were raiding offices. It was good fun to be invoved in all that, it
was very much a key part of the underground movement."
(...) We are actually living in a period of very little collective activity.
Obviously activities are going on, but they don`t seem to be collectively
in any common root or any sort of common understanding. You have riots
going on, you have wars going on, terrorism going on, there`s no sort
of consciousness explosion of any kind that was taking place in the
late Sixties & early Seventies. And obviously the demise of the underground
magazines of that time is reflective of the fact that the whole thing
declined. (...)
Diversification has really got hold of everything, it`s almost like
alien cultures on one planet nobody really seems to be able to see eye
to eye at all."
On
Captain
Lockheed and the Starfighters - 5/73:
"Although I am known
as a poet and
songwriter, it's
been my ambition to become a playwright.
Since I was a young boy I`ve always wanted to be connected with aircrafts
- ideally as an "ace".
I`ve grown up with the Starfighter jets, which have accounted for the
lives of many young pilots. It has become so much a part of me that
I`ve had to write about it in order to get it out of my system. (...)
What concerns me is getting the play (on
the Lockheed album) staged at somewhere like the Roundhouse. I want
it to be a theatrical event in the true sense. Like those in the Elizabethan
era. The story is a true one about the German Airforce under the direction
of Franz Joseph Strauss, who
allgedly for political gain revitalised it with 700 Starfighter jets.
As we know, many of them have crashed, giving them names like "Jinx-Jets"
and Widow-Makers. A more
popular name now is a "Flying Coffin". The play is a comical tragedy
- it`s a good way to put across a heavy idea, although 159 crashed jets
is no joke."
On
the concept of Captain
Lockheed & his mental instability:
I've a tendency
to be manic-depressive
and the thought of not having regular sleep and meals is too much for
me to take. What I'm planning is to stage the play at somewhere like
the Roundhouse. A concept album will also follow. People like Vivian
Stanshall, Keith Moon, Neil Innes, Arthur
Brown - who`ll be the Gremlin and perhaps Jim Capaldi will also
be doing something towards the production. Being a hypo-maniac and consequently
having mental disturbances means that I need to be seen in one place
at a time, and by staging the play, I`ll be able to do just that.
On
Capt.
Lockheed and the planned stageplay/concert version of it:
The music is based
on the Germanic hypnotic riffs that Hawkwind
use. The thing derives from the Velvet Underground primitive rhythms,
but also using the technology of music.
The drama is in short scenes and the songs are a commentary on those
scenes and an extension of them and take you on to the next scene. Rather
what Bertolt Brecht called epic theatre in the thirties.
I have tried to present the situation in terms that are my interpretation
of the events, using my humour. The whole thing was laughed at by everyone
in Germany except the relatives of pilots that were killed. The plane
wasn`t designed to perform all the functions, including assault and
battery the Gemans wanted it to do, the instruction manual was always
changing, the pilots were constantly flying a new experimental plane
and the ground staff were only conscripts who couldn`t care less about
it anyway."
On the cancelling
of the stageplay/concert version of "Captain Lockheed": - A spokesman
told NME:
"There are two seperate reasons for cancelling the tour. The first is
that Calvert is now under new management, who consider that the cost
of the proposed tour would be prohibitive. After all, it was to have
been an elaborate show, complete with sets, and a one-nighter itinerary
on this basis would have presented many problems. Then again, Calvert
himself is not keen on the idea of touring." >
On
Captain
Lockheed and the Starfighters - 8/73:
Arthur
Brown is definitely the bloke to play the Gremlin - that`s the mythological
thing that pilots talk about jokingly as causing faults. And I think
Eno would
be wonderful as a lounging, laconic pilot. I want to use melody as a
way of conveying lyrics; two of my favourite song writers are Noel
Coward and Cole Porter."
On
Lucky
Leif and the Longships - Sounds, 11/75:
The idea for the album
came to me as a spin-off from a sort of Jacobean gangster musical I've
written. The music itself deals with America in the prohibition period,
and this, in some strange ways, prompted me to start thinking about the
Vikings. You see it struck me, when I was doing some background reading,
that it was very funny that when the Vikings dicovered America they should
call the place Vinland,
the land of wine, and that later the country should develop a bad drinking
problem. So, I started reading translation of the Vinland sagas, which
I could see as being relevant to the prohibition
days.
Then I had a very good idea for an album."
On:
Lucky Leif
and the Longships - NME 9/75:
All the tracks have got more than one musical reference. I tried to
keep the cross reference between American culture and Scandinavian foklore
and ancient myths. Brian
Eno made a lot of difference. We both had to compromise. I really
wanted his more objective view, it's easy to imagine that an ideas's
working out when in fact it isn't . I still think Eno's the best producer
I could possibly have had. The recording went like a dream.
We did have some friendly arguments while we were working. Originally
I wanted some dialogue sketches between the tracks, to help along the
narrative. But Eno advised me that dialogue and humour don't really
work on an L.P. I decided he was right, and we left out the talking.
But the storyline`s still there. People had said that each track`s too
isolated, and the album doesn't flow. But to me, it`s just a different
kind of flow. At the time I was writing "Lucky Leif" I was very impressed
by Peter Barnes approach to theatre. It`s a magpie kind of attitude
- taking aspects of lots of theatrical genres, anything from music hall
to Shakespeare. That`s what I tried to do; to be eclectic not for the
sake of it, but when it seems appropriate.
On
an abandoned stage show on the "Dan Dare" character:
Calvert - shortly before Hawkwind`s `75 headlining gig at the
Reading festival, that marked Calvert`s
permanent return on a full-scale to the band: "I`ve just finished
writing a scenario for a stage show which is based on a character we
all know and love. It`s a theatrical story with a plot, character`s
actors, as well as music. The project revolved around Dan Dare, the
Eagle comic character, and was supposed to actively involve Hawkwind,
but never came to see the light of day. I wrote a script for the whole
thing. Everyone was behind it, it was just a matter of trying everything
up, legally. Unfortunately someone else stepped in with an offer for
the Dan Dare rights, bought them up and left me high and dry." This
actually marked Calvert's second major set-back in the field of theatre
/ music-shows, after the Captain Lockheed stage-show was cancelled by
his new management, very shortly before it was meant to hit the road.
On
his lyrics and interpretation of Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf:
The original idea came with Adrian
Wagner, who asked me to write a song about living in cities and
I was re-reading Steppenwolf
at the time. It seemed to me that there was a strong myth in it about
city life and it gave me the basic idea. Adrian played me the song he
had written and I put the words to it. 'Steppenwolf' was a borrowed
figure from the only Hermann Hesse book I can actually stand. I think
"Steppenwolf" is a great book and Harry Haller is a fascinating character.
He`s a sort of the last of the great romantic heroes, a solitary figure
who stays in his room writing poetry and letters in a smoking jacket.
The hero figure is something I am fascinated in, mostly in sending up.
I didn't take it really seriously, it's not a case of wanting to be
the hero. I wanted to be laughed at. I wanted to be funny, although
I think a lot of people took it as being more sinister. I must confess
I didn't really see anything funny in it myself, that was one of the
more serious pieces, but the rest of it was meant to be quite comic.
I think there was an element of tongue in cheek in "Steppenwolf". It
was definetely over the top. The melodrama elements were not spared
in it. I was really trying to do two things. If you take two almost
opposite things and mix them together in the right proportions, you
get an effect which is quite resonant. The idea was to have the Werewolf
films combined with Hesse's ManWolf with a big distinction between the
two." - the illustrated STEPPENWOLF
- plus sound files -
>
more on STEPPENWOLF from the ACTION MAN interview by Nazer Ali Khan:
'Steppenwolf' was a borrowed figure from the only Herman Hesse book
I can actually stand. I think 'Steppenwolf' is a great book and Harry
Haller is a fascinating character. He's not really a hero by any means,
although he's sort of the last of the great romantic heroes, a solitary
figure who stays in his room writing poetry and letters in a smoking
jacket. The hero figure is something I am fascinated in, mostly in sending
up. I didn't really take it very seriously, it's not a case of wanting
to be the hero. I wanted to be laughed at. I wanted to be funny, although
'Steppenwolf' I think a lot of people took as being more sinister. I
must confess I didn't really see anything funny in it myself, that was
one of the more serious pieces, but the rest of it was meant to be quite
comic. I think there was an element of tongue in cheek in 'Steppenwolf'.
It was defiantly over the top. The melodrama elements were not spared
in it. I was really trying to do two things. If you take two almost
opposite things and mix them together in the right proportions, you
get an effect which is quite resonant. The idea was to have the Werewolf
films combined with Hesse's ManWolf with a big distinction.
On
the Cricket
Star single:
I wanted to make a reggae single, as a sort of send-up of reggae.
In those days reggae wasn`t a commercially viable music. (...) It is
meant to be a joke, and is is a joke...I haven`t heard the song since
then, I don`t know how good it is, but it isn`t the original tape unfortunately.
The original tape was in fact so authenticaly reggae-sounding that the
director of United Artists, was absolutely horrified, he wanted to have
nothing to do with it at all."
On another later
abandoned theatre-project which Calvert had finished writing around
`77 - combining the strange and fatal coincidencies of the late Rolling
Stone Brian Jones and the "lone sailor" Donald Crowhurst,
who died in mysterious circumstances during a Sunday Times marathon
yacht race.
"A lot of the things that were happening to Brian Jones were happening
to Donald Crowhurst. The play is full of strange circumstances because
they were both driven to a kind of suicide by inadequacy and the drive
of ambition for fame. They were carried along by the publicity. The
point I`m trying to make in the play is to show the pressures individuals
have to put up with when they`re faced with the whole Rolling Stones
machine or the Sunday Times.
At the end of the play Brian Jones and Donald Crowhurst meet up with
each other after they`ve died and they have a kind of underwater conversation."
>>
READ more about this project
On
Quark,
Strangeness and Charm - interview for "Rock-on", BBC Radio;
6/77:
"Quark" is one of the few albums available at the moment which is
very much in touch with the modern world, and Hawkwind is a band which
has always been in touch with the modern world, in spite of what people
say in the press, boringly and interminably, that we are left over from
a peace and love psychedelic era, which we were in fact, a part of,
but we were still very much in touch with what was outside of that -
that revolution at the time, and we still are. The album`s title itself
is an expression of modern physics terminology ... You will find on
this album a selection of musical and poetical interpretations of the
world we live in, including the threat, not only of nuclear
war, but the threat
of the Middle East becoming a very powerful influence on the future
of this globe, as they are proving at the moment with their dominance
of the energy resources." Illustrated version of the lyrics for QUARK,
STRANGENESS & CHARM
On
a strangely vanished project around a character named "Luigi Brilliantino":
"Luigi Brilliantino, the Italian hairdresser has become this gangster
musical ("a sort of Jacobean gangster musical") which I told you about
earlier. I got so involved with the whole thing, and I was very anxious
to present it on stage, but when I'd finished writing it I had an immense
script that would probably have run for three hours. So I had to cut
it down to workable size. It`s being polished and perfected right now
- I've completed the dialogue and stage directions, Andy Roberts is
currently writing the music. (...) I would like to do something on a
"Jesus Christ Superstar" scale, but what I`ve written is slightly too
nasty. It`s full of nasty humour - the sort of humour I like - with
lots of verbal excess and dark and and devious plots. (...) More like
the "Rocky Horror Picture Show, although my musical has much less to
do with suspender belts." - another article - 4/74, mentions this project
as the follow up to "Captain Lockheed" under the title "The Ride and
Fall of Luigi Brilliantino".
"The play is set in Chicago of 1928-35 and traces the story of Luigi,
who sets out from Sicily to avenge the murder of his father and his
mother`s remarriage with the murderer. Calvert says it has an Oedipus-style
twist at the end so you may be assured that his literary reference points
are respectable. He has gone some way into writing words and dialogue
for the presentation, which he calls "another black comedy". The music
for this will be a kind of "swingrock" - rock music with a basis in
the swing band sound of the Thirties. Although the subject matter is
to be weighty, Bob insists that the treatment will have an element of
parody which will make the music appropriate."
On
The
Kid from Silicon Gulch and the practical aspects of the Shakesperean
era:
"What gave me the idea to do a detective play is the fact that I`ve
got this really battered old raincoat, like a detective`s raincoat.
This is the way, I think, good art is produced. The Elizabethans did
marvellous things with their theatres. It was a tradition. This is why
Shakespeare`s plays are all the same in format, if you look at them.
They have all all got one big court scene, or a big scene on a heath
somewhere. They`ve all got these big set pieces and it was very easy
for the theatres to do them, they had the facilities, the costumes and
the actors to do it. "Right, this is the old court scene lads,
on with the old cossies, get the throne out" - because they were
all in store, you see. So I think it's a great challenge to work to
budgets.
The limitations start to happen when you get other people in with ideas
that conflict. This is the real limitation, working with people whose
ideas are not the same as yours."
>
Click HERE for an
extensive feature on THE KID FROM SILICON GULCH
-
really one of Calvert's masterpieces - incl. images, animations, sounds
a.m.
On
Calvert`s first published novel Hype
and the record by the same title - from a 1982 radio interview:
"HYPE focuses on the music business but it isn`t based on my own experiences
as such. It is derived obviously from stuff I picked up hanging around
record companies.
I've drawn characters who are recognizable types but not individuals
from these experiences, but the story line of the book and the events
in it are not based on my own experiences but are fiction. There`s an
album included to this novel which is published by New English Library
- and they complement each other - as the book describes what happens
to a young band who get very badly used by a record company and internal
power struggles between two over-ambitious individuals, who use this
band as an elaborate game of spy vs. spy. - but it`s not a comedy. I
wanted it to be a comedy. When I had initial talks with NEL about doing
the book I had very much in mind doing it almost like P.G. Woodhouse
would might have written about the music business, had he known about
it. I wanted to write about the music business in the late 70s and early
80s the way he wrote about Hollywood in the Twenties. But they talked
me around to the way of seeing the potential of writing a thriller about
the business which I ended up doing but it has got elements of black
humour and sarcasm although the plot is very much a sort of fast moving
thriller type plot.
The album features the songs of the band themselves - the Tom Mahler
Band. And that`s going to be released the same time as the book. "
On the Hype
project - from another article and interview:
"Hype" is a fictional look inside the music industry, centered around
a rock star called Tom Mahler. The book is a superb example of pop literature;
a fast highly accessible read which is literally unputdownable. Where
it jumps ahead of the growing family of rock business exposés, however,
is in the simultaneous release of an album "Hype" performed by Calvert
and featuring the musical talent of Behtnal, with the songs of the book`s
hero. "The way the record came about, was because when I was writing
the book I had to keep inventing songs to make it credible. Every time
I thought of a song-title it seemed necesary to quote a line from it,
and suddenly it took shape as a song. This bloke Tom Mahler actually
did become quite real to me at one point. I didn`t actually plan to
do an album of the book until I was about a quarter of the way into
it. It came to me that I`d have to record his songs. One excuse for
doing it...I`m not comparing the literary worth to Boris Paternak...but
Pasternak, in "Dr. Zhivago" quotes a collection of Zhivago`s poems,
and I`d often felt that it was an interesting idea to invent somebody
who does something, and then do it - it gives it another dimension of
fictional reality." Q: "The book blurb describes you as having been
there and made it back again. Do you feel you`ve returned to sanity?"
"In a way I do feel as though having absolutely stopped any sort of
work with Hawkwind at all is a kind of coming back to sanity and reality.
I just couldn't go on performing "Silver Machine" over and over again
or "Master of the Universe" and all that stuff for the rest of my life.
It's not insanity, it can lead to insanity, in my case it has done actually.
On one or two occasions I have got very ill over it. (...) The book
is not about the band`s situation as much as the actual types who work
in the business itself, who are for the most part horrifying examples
of humanity. (....) The music business is a world of its own, divorced
from everyday reality entirely, and yet it has quite a big influence
on it, this is the alarming thing."
On
Ezra Pound, a poet admired by Calvert and
about whom he wrote one
of his best poems and planned a stage-play about:
"I want to do this play about Ezra Pound, and actually do the whole
thing to the extent on growing a beard like him. I`ve got this marvelous
tape of Ezra Pound reading his poetry. He's got an extraordinary voice,
like a cross between Irish, Scottish and olde English, which he concsiously
developed as a way of speaking himself, totally eccentric. He was arrested
for treason by the American forces and locked up in a sort of cage in
Italy, and he had a searchlight trained on him night and day so that
he couldn't sleep. Eventually he broke down from pure lack of sleep,
he collapsed in a catatonic state. But in the meantime, what was fascinating
was the way he behaved in this cage which is what the play`s about.
His way of passing the time with the guard and with characters of his
imagination It`s a play that would be very easy to stage with just two
people: one who plays Pound and one who plays the guard, who can change
roles and come in as characters that Pound is imagining as well."
On
the Cellar
Tapes:
"The reason I did them was because I know myself would be interested
if I could hear the demos made of songs that I`ve liked. I think the
demos are often very much more intersting than the finished recordings
which are done under such a clinical set-up."
"The fact that they were recorded on primitive home equipment, some
of it home-made, and one in mono, made me wonder, if in this age of
digital-compact-no-noise-ultra-high- clarity-recording, they might seem
like fossils of wire-recordings dug up out of a time- capsule - perhaps
that is part of their charm." (24/1/87)
On
The
Earth Ritual poems:
I wouldn't say I was an urban poet. If you are going to be rude about
it, I am more of a sub-urban poet at the moment. I wrote "The Earth
Ritual" book as a deliberate escape, obviously taking the Space
Ritual and putting it back down to earth as a title, to approach
subject matter from a different perspective other than speculative or
science fiction thinking processes. But I think that a number of the
poems still come out as science fiction - if you didn't actually fully
realise that this book was meant to be a down-to-earth view of reality
I think you probably would suspect that it was still science fiction,
like the title poem itself has a lot of SF references in it, and most
of the poems in it do, actually, and refer back. A lot of them refer
back to pre-history which again is hardly a suburban or urban outlook
to constantly be placing things, say woodlice, in the perspective of
evolution.
On
(another un-realised) project and himself being diagnosed as schizophrenic
in his youth:
article: Calvert also has another solo project up his sleeve, " a
painful sort of album" about a teenage schizophrenic for which he hopes
to get together with label-mate R. D. Laing. "I was diagnosed as a schizophrenic
in my youth, treated as that, but then I was told afterwards that I
wasn't actually a schizophrenic at all. It might end up as part of the
next Hawklords album."
On
South-Africa, his familiar background and the situation of the self-chosen
exile:
I am in actual fact, in exile from the situation through choice. Although
I was brought up in England, my parents went back to South Africa in
the early Sixties, and they gave me the chance to stay here or go with
them - they weren`t just going to dump me here - and I chose to stay
in England which they suggested was not a wise decision on my part.
They said England was actually sinking at the rate of one inch per year
into the sea!
It has always been a conflict of attitudes in the family. I`ve always
been very much against the system in South Africa and couldn't live
there myself, although the rest of my family seem to have no problem
dealing with it.
My feelings about this are expressed as clearly as I can in the poem
White Dynasty.
(...) Although I`ve divorced myself from active participation in an
exploitative system, I'm still descend from white fascists who live
there, but they are my family, and I must say that the talk about the
bloodbath is very disturbing from all points of view, but especially
from my personal feelings about it. I have a lot of dreams about South
Africa, which is hardly surprising, and I dont really see any easy solution
for that situation at all, but then there aren`t any easy solutions
for this entire planet anyway."
On
his way to get obsessed by certain subjects - starting from the fact
that he recently restored a shed in his own garden - to use it as his
"writing shed" - 10/85:
(...)...our garden was a Science Fiction nightmare of vegetable attempts
at world dominiation. Buried in this Burma of weeds was a tumbling down
shack. (...)
While I was building this place I got obsessed to the point that my
only topic of conversation was sheds. Shed building. Wood work. Tools.
The virtues of various kinds of paint. I was reading doityourself magazines
and quoting from them at the breakfast table. My wife acutally broke
down in tears at one point - the last time it got this bad was when
I formed an obsession with genetic science. I had to write an album
of songs to get it out of my system."
.....and later on Englands wildlife and the advantages of writing in
sheds:
"You just never realize the variety of insectr life that can exist in
a mild climate like Englands`s until you start rebuilding a shed. Spiders
the size of octupi and Kamikazi squadrons of flies. I hate these things.
I`m surrounded by an arsenal of deadly sprays with names like DOOM;
MAFU; VAPONA. (Mafu?) I hope they`re not out there planning some dreadful
revenge on me. This constant battle against the elements is half the
attraction really of writing in a shed. It`s back to nature. It reminds
you constantly of the realities of life - that you can easily forget
under the glow of electric light with central heating and video. (...)
It`s rickety and fly-ridden and spider haunted but on the whole III
feel I`m a very lucky man to have this shack.
This cabin.
This shed."
On
insomnia and working - 8/84:
"I do need to get more sleep. But I`m on holiday. It`s great. I haven`t
had any leave from my work for over a year now.
I call it work. But I love doing it so much that I have to have a wife
to drag me away from my machines. Otherwise I`d be on them twenty four
hours a day."
On
the advantages of an elegant lifestyle:
"I am going through an elegant phase at the the moment. Clean Shirts
and things feel good and uplift me.
Unfortunately my lifestyle is governed by being a manic-depressive.
For instance when I wrote the Lockheed play, I started by sitting on
an old boat lying in a cove in Cornwall. It just looked like the remains
of a crashed aircraft and just being near helped me to relate to what
I was trying to do.
I completed it in Morocco at a time when I was feeling very depressed."
On Johnny Rotten - singer of the SEX PISTOLS, the punk-ish attitude
of early Hawkwind times and his collaboration / single with Hawkwind
- Urban Guerilla:
"I knew him vaguely from some time ago, but I don't want to blow his
image for him." - (article: In fact Calvert admires much of the
punk rock scene:) "Johnny Rotten is proving that freedom of speech cannot
be taken for granted in this country.
But while they`re saying decadence is to be despised they`re manifesting
another sort of decadence just as much the same sort of star syndrome.
We've done punk kind of things - in fact back in 1972, just think of
Silver Machine
we wanted to follow it up with Urban
Guerilla, a very dangerous piece of work actually.
It was about urban bombing and just after we released it the IRA had
a really concentrated attack all over London, so the record was quickly
withdrawn. United Artists quite rightly got cold feet about it because
it would have been very likely they'd have made a target for a bomb
attack."
On
his- and Hawkwind`s
influence on various punk bands:
"There's also the punk connection - if you listen to Born
to Go now, it sounds like a punk band; it coud be the Buzzcocks,
or someone like that. Indeed, Pete Shelley acutally confessed to us
that he'd spent a lot of his early youth listening to albums like the
Space Ritual
and derived quite a lot of his musical direction from it. Which doesn't
surprise me, but this is something which never gets mentioned in the
press."
(Both Brock and Calvert acknowledged some form of acquaintanceship
with Johnny Rotten, the spokesman for the Punk and New Wave movements
in earlier times, as well as to The Buzzcock's Pete Shelley and The
Stranglers. Joe Strummer, head of The Clash cited Hawkwind as an influence
when discussing the first Clash album in a widely circulated media interview:
"I wanted to do a Hawkwind version of a song that was familiar to us,
and we just did it within our limitations." - a proof that the public
admittance of your liking of Hawkwind didn't tarnish your street credibility
even during the heyday of punk. D. Watson)
Calvert also worked with Rat Scabies and Captain Sensible of THE
DAMNED on various occasions.
On
the -sometimes frightening- effects of (involuntary) living theatre
(in combat outfit) ... an almost legendary anecdote from the `77 Hawkwind
tour:
"A combat outfit is unbeatable as a travelling unit. (...)
Due to circumstances beyond my control it so happened that on this European
tour with Hawkwind, I didn`t have enough gear with me to keep changing
clothes all of the time.
So I spent a lot of time wearing this sort of combat outfit., and I
ended up, after having a bad scene with rest of the band, being left
behind in Paris, wearing this outfit, and being a short haired chap,
looking like I could be a British Army officer. I recall the image of
actually chasing a silver Mercedes limousine, that had four or five
long-haired indivduals in it with the windows all wound up, through
the main street of Paris, wearing this uniform.
This is absolutely true, all the passers by, the people out shopping,
stopped dead. It was like a scene out of a movie like "Alphaville".
All these people stopped dead in their tracks with their mouths open
watching this scene take place, this silver car speeding away with this
guy chasing it, wearing this uniform.
When it got to the traffic lights I was so fucking annoyed with Brock
and the others that I tried to get the door open, shaking this vehicle
up and down.
It looked like I was single handedly trying to turn it over and arrest
these people in it. When the lights changed, the car went off. It was
more like a Woody Allen film than anything else.
When the car drove off, I was left standing there in this uniform, suddenly
realising what on either side of this main throughfare in Paris were
all these people shopping, who were used seeing terrorism. (...)
I think everyone felt this panic. I think they thought , fucking hell,
there`s a bomb going to go off any minute somewhere. Is this guy trying
to arrest these people? What have they done?
Are we going to be blown up? (...)
There was a lot of shooting going on at the time, a lot of explosions,
all these Red Brigade people, an a lot of other organisations were there.
I had to walk back through the streets, walk the Gauntlet of Stares,
wearing this uniform, trying to say, in simple French, hey, look, it`s
alright...calm down. I could feel their panic. It was like being on
stage, having just discharged a grenade in front of the audience, who
are absolutely stunned.
That to me is an example of the pure power of theatre - I mean it
was pure theatre . My actions were theatre for the benefit of Dave Brock
and the others, and their behaviour was theatre for me.
They were showing me that they were fed up with the way I was carrying
on. We had a big fucking argument. They were pissed off. It was a mutual
demonstration to each other of our discontent that this audience in
the street misinterpreted. I could see why immediately.
It was actually an unfortunate sartorial mistake to wear that gear
on that day."
Read the whole ongoing story on the
Calvert / Hawkwind relation page(s). |