Author: wamdines

It’s July 1990 and hotter than hell in New York City. Jon Bon Jovi and I are perched on the first-floor veranda of his manager’s Manhattan offices, gazing out at the taxi cabs crisscrossing Central Park South. Jon explains this is the very spot he and the rest of Bon Jovi first met to plot the seeds of a success story none of them really believed possible. All except for Jon, of course.

“Back then we didn’t have the price of a cup of coffee between us,” he says. “You ask me has the success changed me since then, I say sure, man. It changes everybody.”

He looked downcast. He confessed that the mammoth, life-changing success of the band’s album Slippery When Wet four years earlier had affected him both positively and negatively. “I think I’m a little more cynical and sceptical. I hope I am nicer, but people will say what they want about you. Everyone’s got their stories, you gotta deal with them. I just hope there’s more good than bad. But on the outside I’m a lot more cynical these days. A lot more.”

It was true. You could see it in his much older man’s eyes. The gee-whiz 22-year-old I had first encountered backstage at Wembley Arena in October 1984 was long gone. In his place stood a jaded 28-year-old who’d already been everywhere and seen everything. As he’d begun one of his most prophetic songs, Wanted Dead Or Alive: ‘It’s all the same, only the names will change…’

Back in ’84, Bon Jovi had just played their first London show, opening for Kiss, and a friend had asked if I’d let “the kid” be my plus-one to the Kiss after-show party. Newbies Bon Jovi might be the support act, but that didn’t mean they got to hang out with the headliners.

Jon smiled nervously as I waltzed us past security straight to the free bar. He couldn’t stop thanking me. Kid in a sweet shop time.

He still had that wide-eyed ‘I must be dreaming’ demeanour when we met again six months later. Same big city, different, smaller venue: the Dominion Theatre. Bon Jovi’s first London headline show. Jon was so proud he flew his folks in from New Jersey for the occasion. When I interviewed him the next morning by the pool at his hotel, various family members were seated nearby waving and calling across to him.

There had been two Bon Jovi albums so far and neither had made the earth move. Their first single, Runaway, had been pop enough to make US radio take notice, and Jon’s boy-band looks had helped the video score high with MTV.

Their debut album, Bon Jovi, released in January 1984, came smeared with rock credentials but diluted by outside writers: Runaway was junior Journey; Roulette, written by Jon and guitarist Richie Sambora, was jacked-up AOR; Shot Through The Heart was Billy Idol without the peroxide; the rest was Risky Business-meets-Ferris Bueller safety-first pop-rock. Fronted by a poodle-haired Rob Lowe type.

In Kerrang! a glowing album review was typically matched by a trashing of a live show. “I remember it very well,” Jon said. “‘Bon Jerk-off,’ I think the guy called us.”

Their second album, 7800° Fahrenheit, in March 1985, was consciously heavier – the title being the melting point of rock. Cos the rock’s so hot, baby! In order to emphasise its one-for-all authenticity, this time no outside writers were involved. This wasn’t a Jon Bon solo album in disguise. This really was an album written, sung and played entirely by the band. Well, that’s what it said on the credits, which even included a co-write for drummer Tico Torres on the chugalug Secret Dreams. Although none for bassist Alec John Such, 10 years older than Jon and not always first choice in the studio, put it like that.

The problem they faced was a familiar one for rock bands in the 80s: no hit singles. Not even a Top 40-adjacent ‘radio hit’ like Runaway. First single Only Lonely, co-written by Jon and keyboard player David Bryan, sounded like it was retrieved from the skip in which Survivor dumped their rejects. The second, In And Out Of Love, written by Jon, was Def Leppard without Mutt Lange. There was also an obligatory power-ballad single, Silent Night, that was so cringe-inducingly awful it made Mötley Crüe’s simple-minded Home Sweet Home, also released as a single that month, sound like I Want To Know What Love Is. None of 7800º Fahrenheit’s tracks would survive into their live show beyond the lifespan of the album.

Bon Jovi spent the rest of 1985 touring US arenas opening for then hot-as-a-pistol LA glam metallers Ratt. In August they were third on the bill at that year’s Monsters Of Rock festival at Castle Donington, beneath Marillion (then at their commercial peak) and ZZ Top (ditto) and one up from cool-as-fuck Metallica.

When the helicopter carrying Jon and crew inadvertently flew over the stage during Metallica’s set, however, hard-core Donington fans were outraged, interpreting it as a deliberate slight to Metallica. James Hetfield had the words ‘Kill Bon Jovi’ engraved on his guitar, and any hope Jon had previously entertained of his band appealing to serious-minded 80s metallists was crushed for ever.

They would continue crisscrossing America with Ratt for the rest of the year. By the final show in Las Vegas on New Year’s Eve, Bon Jovi were now all in with the Ratt crowd. On stage, Jon had taken to wearing tight, no-VPL spandex, leopardskin shirt undone to the waist, midnight-blue make-up, his fully-primped hair waving like corn in a field above a bright pink headband. Hey, it was 1985! Crüe’s Tommy Lee went on stage bare-ass naked in leather chaps. Even Ozzy was tottering around like a tattooed Liberace.

Looks wasn’t what was holding them back. Nor work ethic nor attitude, all of which Jon exemplified. Bon Jovi had big guns behind them. Hence the high-profile tours. But as far as record sales went, it was so far so meh.

As Bon Jovi’s larger-than-life manager Doc McGhee later told me: “It took a couple years building them from the ground up, but they were finally ready. We knew if we could just get one damn song on the radio, one big video on MTV, things could start to roll.”

But where did you find one of those?

John Charles Barrett was a 32-year-old singer-songwriter from Florida known professionally as Desmond Child. After his own band, the R&B-driven Desmond Child & Rouge, flamed out, he tried writing songs for others. His break came when Paul Stanley invited him to co-write the 1979 Kiss disco hit I Was Made For Loving You. Child would go on to write or ‘co-write’ I Hate Myself For Loving You, Joan Jett’s bubblegum metal anthem, and Dude (Looks Like A Lady), the overnight rock classic that gave Aerosmith their biggest hit for 10 years. Child would go on to write so many hits for so many artists that he became one of a coterie of go-to 80s songwriters – which also included Jim Vallance, Holly Knight and Diane Warren – that everyone from Alice Cooper to Barbra Streisand sought out for hits.

But the keys to Desmond Child’s kingdom would be the songs he was about to co-write with Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora. The ones that would transform them into superstars.

Child later maintained that when he first got together with Jon and Richie, “their scheme was they would collaborate with me because I was a pop writer, and we would pitch songs to other artists so they could make money and keep their band going. But the first day that we got together, I pulled out a piece of paper with the title You Give Love A Bad Name on it and Jon’s face lit up. So we wrote the song and they decided to keep it for their band, and we continued writing together.”

Paul Stanley introduced them and they hit it off immediately. Both Jon and Desmond were musical misfits shape-shifting to get by. Both leaned more towards Bruce Springsteen and Elton John than towards Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. Both were so ambitious that they would do whatever it took to make it big. Because both knew they had to. “There was no plan B,” Jon told me. “Even if we didn’t make it, I knew I’d still end up singing and playing in some bar in Jersey.”

“It was time for a do-over,” McGhee said. “New writers, new producer, new studio. It felt like last chance with the label so we had to give it our best shot.”

Early in ’86, they entered Little Mountain Sound studios in Vancouver, Canada where 36-year-old producer Bruce Fairbairn was waiting to take them to the next level – musically and figuratively.

Another talented musician whose own career never gained traction, Fairbairn had produced the first four Loverboy albums, all multi-platinum, two of them Top 10 in the US. Working out of Little Mountain with his protégé Bob Rock, in the same five years Fairbairn produced albums for Blue Öyster Cult, Krokus and Honeymoon Suite, whose The Big Prize went triple-platinum in Canada that year.

Like everyone associated, after doing Slippery Fairbairn’s career skyrocketed. Like Child, his next major gig would be working on Aerosmith’s big ’87 comeback album Permanent Vacation. After that, AC/DC were waiting.

“That’s what happens when you’re the guy that just produced a huge million-selling record,” Doc McGhee said, smiling.

The were several factors involved in that winning Slippery formula, however. “For the first time, we were allowed to be us in the studio,” Jon recalled. Fairbairn told Classic Rock in 2006: “I’ve been lucky enough to work with so many different talents. But Bon Jovi may be the finest. There was record company pressure to deliver the hits, but they were a joy. People seem to concentrate so much on their success that they lose sight of how good these guys are.”

Ultimately it was all down to the songs. The ones Desmond Child worked his magic on to help fashion into huge international hits. “Jonny was defining who he was,” Doc said. Once Desmond came on board and lit the way, Jon knew where to go. “He kept his formula of songwriting, the choruses, and all those hits, they all sound the same. Like everybody else. Elton John writes the same fucking song a hundred times.”

Child didn’t sit around waiting for inspiration to hit, either. He went right to work. He began by dismantling one of his existing songs, If You Were A Woman (And I Was A Man), written for Bonnie Tyler and included on her then just-released album Secret Dreams And Forbidden Fire. Child took the big vocal harmony intro and melded it with a Jon song from the first album called Shot Through The Heart. The result was the infallible rock classic You Give Love A Bad Name. “I saw Jon’s billion-dollar smile and we never looked back,” Child recalled with glee.

Desmond and Jon worked out the album’s other giant hit, Livin’ On A Prayer, sitting around a table in a dingy basement. Jon and Richie told Desmond “they wanted a working-class anthem”. So he did something he’d made it a rule never to do, and drew ideas from his own personal experience.

“The Gina character [who ‘works the diner all day’] is Maria Vidal,” he revealed. Maria had been in Rouge. “But [her] waitressing name was Gina Velvet.” As for Tommy with ‘his six string in hock’, “that’s me,” he said. “It was originally Gina and Johnny, but Jon said: ‘I can’t sing Johnny, that’s my name.’ So Johnny became Tommy. The struggling couple were ‘halfway there, livin’ on a prayer’, and the rest is history.”

The ingenious composer brought more than just words and melodies, though.“I read somewhere that the most successful music has some element of soul and R&B in it,” he said. “So you can hear that in Bon Jovi. The songs I co-wrote with them, the bass lines are just right out of Motown.” In particular Livin’ On A Prayer, whose crisp blend of white rock and black R&B could be traced all the way back to I Was Made For Lovin’ You. He knew that Bon Jovi “were supposed to be heavy metal”, but because they had a piano and organ “they had that Jersey sound like Southside Johnny and Bruce Springsteen, but with AC/DC and Rolling Stones mixed in”.

Desmond Child titled his 2023 autobiography Livin’ On A Prayer – Big Songs, Big Life. Because for him that song will always be “most special. To this day it’s the biggest song that I’ve ever collaborated on.

“In the beginning, Jon wasn’t thinking the song should go on Slippery– he thought it was too sentimental, maybe too soft. Richie and I got on our hands and knees and begged him. ‘Please, at least record the song.’ Then when they got in the studio with Bruce Fairbairn, and their engineer Bob Rock… magic happened!”

Some years ago, I fell into conversation with a highly respected producer of music radio and TV. He was not an especially avid rock fan, he explained, but in his opinion Slippery When Wet was “one of the most perfect ten-out-of-ten records of all time.” He went on: “Technically it’s spot-on, the sound quality, the sequencing of the tracks, the whole thing feels like it’s been built in the laboratory to be absolutely perfect.”

I felt a ‘but’ coming on…

“No buts,” he said. “It’s quite perfect. That’s all there is to it.”

It was true. Side One, as it was originally conceived, was a flawless five-song suite. Opening with Bryan’s sonorous mad-maestro at the pipe organ intro to Let It Rock, this was heavy rock on the grand 70s-scale of a Deep Purple but with the added gloss of 80s-style Def Leppard harmony vocals. Five minutes-plus of Deep Leppard and Def Purple that became a returning musical mantra throughout the album.

From there it’s the wham-bam-blam of You Give Love A Bad Name and Livin’ On A Prayer, both of them destined to become No.1 in the US chart when they were released as singles in the summer and autumn of 1986.

All killer, followed, surely, by some quick-breather filler? Not a chance. Instead we’re off to groovy town with some sticky-fingered Rolling Stones in the form of Social Disease; rock as nasty stuff for badass boys – and especially girls; and the chef’s-kiss finale of Wanted Dead Or Alive, a self-mythologising cinematic epic that would serve for Bon Jovi as Stairway To Heaven had for Led Zeppelin. It was the first monumental Bon Jovi hit that Desmond Child had nothing to do with, written entirely by Jon and Richie.

If Side Two had merely comprised standard-fare 80s claptrap, Slippery would still have been an outstanding piece of work. Instead it continued to reach for the stars with two Jon-and-Richie standouts in the gloriously uplifting Raise Your Hands, and Never Say Goodbye, like one of Rod Stewart’s scarf-waving singlongs from the 70s.

The album ended with Jon’s Wild In The Streets, his unashamed homage to Bruce Springsteen, if by homage you mean straight rip. But that Noo Joisey boy just loved him some Broooce. As evidenced by the other two numbers he and Richie co-wrote with Desmond Child: Without Love, which channelled the Boss’s 80s top-five hit Hungry Heart, and I’d Die For You, which sounded like every down-on-one-knee backstreet-testifying anthem Springsteen ever wrote.

Released worldwide in August 1986, Slippery When Wet was the first of what to date is six US No.1 albums for Bon Jovi. In the UK it reached No.6 and went triple-platinum. It also bent the charts out of shape in loads more countries, eventually selling more than 30 million worldwide.

By the time Bon Jovi returned to London in November for the first of four sold-out nights at Hammersmith Odeon, the band still exuded the elation of finally having made it – not just anywhere, but everywhere, all at the same time.

Afterwards in the dressing room, Jon was the same goofy lotto-winner as before. “I’m like the kid whose Christmases just keep coming,” he gurgled at me, all toothy grin and puppy-dog eyes.

Richie Sambora was the one who looked most comfortable in his new celebrity skin. He told me he was off the next day to meet up with his new best friend Jimmy Page at a guitar shop in Earls Court where they would spend the afternoon in the store’s basement “just jamming on all these great guitars”. He said he was hoping Jimmy might share some of his secret Zeppelin tunings with him.

The next time I saw Jon Bon Jovi was when the band headlined Donington the following summer. Sequestered in his own purpose-built VIP-within-the-VIP section, the kid was now gone. The Slippery world tour was more than 200 shows old by then and still had another three months to go. Two nights before, they’d mimed their fourth single from the album, Never Say Goodbye, on Top Of The Pops before the band were taken out for the night at some millionaire’s pleasure dome in Soho.

Jon didn’t just look tired, he looked completely burned out. Sitting with him in his large empty dressing ‘area’, the conversation was stilted. I recall asking him what it was about the cowboy image evinced in Wanted Dead Or Alive that really spoke to him. His answer was telling, I still think: “It’s just that kind of lifestyle. It’s like life on the road. I feel that you ride into town, you don’t know where the fuck you are. You’re with your ‘gang’, stealing money, getting what you can off any girl that’ll give it to you, drinking as much of the free alcohol as you can and being gone before the law catches you – before someone wakes you from this wonderful dream and says: ‘You’re an asshole, you’re going to jail.’ Because it’s not the real world I’m living in. It’s a dream sequence, a big fucking wet dream.”

A slippery when wet dream, you might say.

Mick Wall is the UK’s best-known rock writer, author and TV and radio programme maker, and is the author of numerous critically-acclaimed books, including definitive, bestselling titles on Led Zeppelin (When Giants Walked the Earth), Metallica (Enter Night), AC/DC (Hell Ain’t a Bad Place To Be), Black Sabbath (Symptom of the Universe), Lou Reed, The Doors (Love Becomes a Funeral Pyre), Guns N’ Roses and Lemmy. He lives in England.

Hawkwind’s fifth studio album, 1975’s Warrior On The Edge Of Time, might easily be their most prog-friendly, but its genesis was far from easy with the band seemingly at each other’s throats the entire time. Still, from chaos came greatness as Dave Brock and others told Prog for this 2025 cover story…

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“It’s getting to be like a war, isn’t it?” – Dave Brock, December 1974.

At the beginning of 1975, Hawkwind were at the peak of their commercial success. The band were in the middle of their annual UK winter tour – extended over three months – and were playing to thousands of adoring fans each night in sold-out city halls up and down the country. They’d also started to break North America, having toured there twice the previous year, with their last album Hall Of The Mountain Grill making a decent showing on the Billboard chart. They were a band in demand, and apparently destined for even greater things.

But they were also physically and mentally exhausted, and fast approaching burnout. As the quote above (taken from a Melody Maker interview with Allan Jones in February 1975) highlights, bandleader Dave Brock felt they were in the middle of a ceaseless military campaign. Hawkwind had a reputation as a hard-gigging band, with their early success built on bringing the good news of the counterculture to every town in Britain, creating a dedicated following in the process. Yet despite working as much as possible outside of the mainstream music industry, they increasingly found themselves on a corporate treadmill, spending months away from home on the road and operating more and more like a traditional rock group.

In fact, ever since their 1972 single Silver Machine had become an unexpected smash hit around the world, Brock and saxophonist frontman Nik Turner in particular had become concerned about losing touch with Hawkwind’s roots as a ‘people’s band’. The money generated by the single had enabled them to mount the Space Ritual Tour, which had acted as a springboard for their current trajectory as a major cult band breaking into the big time. But it meant the days of Hawkwind being able to play a benefit gig for free at the drop of a hat were long over.

Looking back today, Brock remembers it as a stressful time: “When you’re doing one album after another, and it’s successful, the record company want you to knock another one out as soon as possible. There was a lot of pressure all the time. It did us in. We did one tour of North America, had two weeks in England, then back to America again. All of us in the band had problems, not being home that much. And everybody had American girlfriends, it was all very complicated…”

Things came to a head in the latter stages of the UK tour in February 1975. Hawkwind had already played three concerts in London that month, but they’d booked an additional show on the 16th at the Roundhouse, originally intended as a benefit for the charity Radical Alternatives To Prisons. However, following the theft of both Simon King and Alan Powell’s drum kits from the band’s west London lock-up, the show had turned into a means of buying new equipment (despite both kits being recovered before the gig happened). Speaking to International Times, Turner expressed his displeasure at the change: “I’m told that our financial situation is what governs that sort of decision and that’s what pisses me off, having to come to terms with the fact that it is a business… That is the sort of situation I very often find myself in, torn between what I really believe in and the reality of the situation.”

The reality of the situation at the Roundhouse was heavier than just
a clash over where the money was going – with the gig sold out once again, around a thousand people had been locked out of the venue, some of whom decided it’d be a good idea to try and burn down the side entrances. Not for the first time at a Hawkwind gig, the police had to attend to restore order. For the band, it was the final straw, with the rest of the tour cancelled to allow them some time to properly recuperate.

There was also the small matter of making their next album. In the UK and Europe, Hawkwind were in a state of record label limbo, the band’s contract with United Artists having ended after the recording of the Kings Of Speed single in January. Released in March, hopes had initially been high for it, with Simon King commenting at the time, “It’s the same as Silver Machine. Well, near enough, anyway.” But it failed to repeat the success of the original, with John Peel commenting in his review for Sounds, “Hawkwind exist in some curious time-warp in which no account is taken of what may be happening elsewhere.”

While this was the prevailing view among many in the press, it wasn’t entirely accurate. Kings Of Speed would end up on the album to come, but its stoned cosmic boogie wasn’t representative of the much more progressive direction the band were travelling in. Key to this new sound was keyboardist and violinist Simon House, a classically trained musician who had previously been in the brutally psychedelic High Tide and the avant-medieval Third Ear Band. Drafted in as a replacement for Hawkwind’s legendary electronics duo of DikMik and Del Dettmar, House’s Mellotron and synth work had significantly augmented the band’s sonic palette on Hall Of The Mountain Grill, and his playing on the next album would dramatically build on this foundation.

Alan Powell also played an important role. Hawkwind’s newest member, he’d joined the previous summer as a temporary replacement for an injured Simon King, and then remained in the line-up after King had recovered. Thus was born “the Drum Empire”, as bassist Lemmy would witheringly refer to the band’s double drummer configuration. Yet this wasn’t just an exercise in brute force. As well as being a seasoned session player, Powell was a skilled percussionist and budding songwriter, and would make a telling contribution on his first album with the band.

With the United Artists contract at an end, manager Doug Smith had wasted no time in securing a new US deal for the band with Atco, an imprint of Atlantic Records. But in combination with another American tour lined up for May, this added further pressure to the band’s schedule, with Atco stipulating that a new album had to be out to coincide with the tour.

It was fortunate, then, that Brock and the band had already started putting new material together, based around a rough concept suggested to them by leading fantasy author and regular collaborator Michael Moorcock. In fact, there had been talk for a while of mounting a full-scale theatrical rock show based around his Eternal Champion books, with Arthur Brown earmarked for a lead role. In the end, this didn’t come to fruition, but a couple of Moorcock’s spoken-word pieces – Standing At The Edge and Warriors – that had already been in the band’s live set for some time would appear on the new album. And the title that Moorcock gave them – Warrior On The Edge Of Time – positioned Hawkwind away from their science-fiction roots, aligning them instead with the burgeoning ‘sword & sorcery’ genre.

However, the band that entered Rockfield Studios in March 1975 were still suffering from the after effects of their relentless live work, and interpersonally wasn’t in the best place, to say the least.

Brock remembers, “We were doing very well, but there was friction within the band, and a lot of weird things going on at that time. We had two drummers, which Lemmy hated. And there were problems with Turner squawking on his saxophone…”

Brock had talked at length about this friction in his interview with Allan Jones in February ’75. Like the rest of the band, he was losing patience with Lemmy.

“At Hammersmith, Lemmy’s lead kept coming out of the amp, and he carried on playing. He’s so deaf he didn’t even realise. That’s what annoys Simon House, Lemmy plays so loud he can’t hear a thing we’re playing. And we’re all shouting to Lemmy, ‘Your fucking lead, man!’ and he still didn’t understand. Then somebody plugged it in and I told him, ‘If you do that again, I’ll fucking kill you.’ And sure enough he did it again. We were all freaking out about that.”

Lemmy’s amphetamine habit was identified as being at the root of the problem, with the band often at loggerheads with their speed-wired bassist. As Turner told Carol Clerk in The Saga Of Hawkwind, “Everybody had agreed that it was increasingly difficult to work with him because of the drug situation, and because he always had to be right.”

Turner expanded on this latter point in The Spirit Of Hawkwind, the book he wrote with Dave Thompson: “Lemmy would come up with these hare-brained schemes and then get upset and angry when the rest of the band said, ‘Well, no.’”

In his autobiography White Line Fever, Lemmy conceded, “I was just too forward for the rest of the guys.”

But his own personal ire was reserved for the Drum Empire: “Simon and Alan’s two drum kits were set at the centre of the stage in this huge semi-circle of percussive effects. It jolly well made sure that you knew your place! I’ve seen a lot of pompous drummers in my lifetime, but this pair were ridiculous. As far as I’m concerned, this was the end of Hawkwind because those two killed it between them.”

And while Turner was wrestling with his conscience as the band became more of a business than a community project, his lack of discipline as a live musician was irking Brock, as he recounted to Jones: “Some nights I’ve unplugged my guitar and marched across the stage to sort Nik out. He keeps playing the saxophone when I’m singing and I’ve told him a thousand times not to do that.”

Overall, the picture he painted was far from pretty.

“You wouldn’t believe some of the scenes that go on backstage. All the fucking rows, people losing their temper when things go wrong or somebody’s not doing it right.”

Given the general level of unhappiness within the band, it would have come as no surprise if the Rockfield sessions had quickly descended into a mass brawl. But what the angry quotes above don’t capture is the fact that, despite the simmering resentments, all those months on the road had turned Hawkwind into an incredibly powerful musical entity with an intuitive sense of interplay between members. And despite the pressure they were under, Hawkwind went into Rockfield and, in just three and a half days, recorded the backing tracks for what many consider to be their finest studio album. They then returned to London, and spent another three days in Olympic Studios overdubbing and mixing the songs. Warrior On The Edge Of Time, a classic of progressive space rock, had taken less than a week to make.

The album begins with the two-fisted punch of Assault And Battery
and The Golden Void, segued to create a seamless, and mind-bendingly trippy, 10-minute track. Sonically, it’s one of Hawkwind’s most ambitious pieces of music, thanks largely to the free rein given to Simon House to embellish and illuminate it wherever possible. His blazing Mellotron, in tandem with Lemmy’s irresistibly propulsive bass line, immediately conjures visions of Moorcock’s fantastical worlds, Assault And Battery surging forward like an eldritch army about to engage in battle.

Brock is also in commanding voice, his opening lines, ‘Lives of great men all remind us/We may make our lives sublime’ taken from A Psalm Of Life by 19th-century American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Speaking to Malcolm Dome for the sleeve notes of WOTEOT’s 2013 reissue, Brock said, “I used to read a lot of poetry in the 1960s, and that’s probably where I came across it. But the notion of a rock musician taking a quote from a great poem wasn’t anything new. Bob Dylan had done it for years, and let’s face it, everyone is always borrowing from various sources.”

The Golden Void is even more dramatic, its brooding opening
section moving into an intense bolero-style summoning of the old gods, House’s synths weaving an incredible basket of light as Brock delivers another committed vocal. And if Turner wasn’t always the most reliable player live, his sax solo at the end of this song is just glorious, and arguably his finest performance on a Hawkwind record. Even Lemmy, who perhaps understandably didn’t have much time for WOTEOT, called it “a beautiful track”.

Next up is the first of the album’s three spoken-word pieces, The Wizard Blew His Horn, recited by Moorcock himself. Some critics have characterised these tracks as a misstep, and Moorcock has described his performance as: “Hasty. I was in a hurry to go and see a movie and did all the numbers too quickly. I didn’t like The Wizard… much and would rather have done something a little less ‘fantasy’, but Dave liked it.”

Yet these atmospheric interludes add to the album’s uncanny charge, the eerie backings created by Powell, King and House verging on the avant-garde.

The instrumental Opa-Loka begins with waves before locking into a mono-chordal hypnotic groove that strongly recalls the krautrock minimalism of Neu! (Brock wrote the sleeve notes for the UK release of their debut album). A Powell composition, he describes it as “a studio jam I’d made a demo of in my flat. Lemmy was unavailable, so Dave Brock played the bass on it. It’s basically trance rock… In the early 90s, when raves were the big thing in America and everybody was taking ecstasy, Opa-Loka was apparently played a lot.”

Fittingly, its title comes from Opa-Locka, a town in Florida with Arabic architecture inspired by One Thousand And One Nights.

Despite its stark title, The Demented Man is one of Brock’s loveliest acoustic-based songs, with a weathered warmth to both his finger-picking and voice. It’s a sympathetic and affecting portrayal of someone losing touch with sanity, although Brock suggests it can be interpreted in a number of ways:.

“It could be a lunatic asylum – ‘White walls stretching in the sun…’ Or
it could be about being born, a baby’s first experience of coming from the womb into a hospital. It’s up to the individual to work it out.”

Kicking off side two in a Hammer horror-style squall of wind and rain, Magnu features one of Brock’s most memorable stun guitar riffs, and another formidable sound clash between his roiling wah-wah, Turner’s bubbling sax and House’s banshee violin. This time, Brock borrows lines from The Invisible Knight by Polish writer Aleksander Chodz´ko and Hymn Of Apollo by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

“That was a major inspiration for the song. Shelley had taken the idea from ancient legends, so I was claiming it back,” he told Malcolm Dome.

The second spoken piece is the chilling Standing At The Edge, with Turner voicing the anger of a damned immortal army, ‘Veterans of a thousand psychic wars’. This is followed by House’s joyous Spiral Galaxy 28948, a glittering synth-drenched instrumental in jazzy 6/8 time, and further proof of Hawkwind’s desire to expand the boundaries of their music.

“Simon is a very clever musician,” Brock said to Dome. “This track is typical of the sort of thing he’d come up with, but it tends to confuse the rest of us poor chaps!”

The title is a not-quite-accurate reference to House’s date of birth: August 29, 1948.

Warriors is the final spoken track, delivered by Moorcock through a Dalek-style ring modulator, its words paraphrased from his 1970 novel, The Eternal Champion. It leads into Turner’s songwriting contribution to the album, Dying Seas, Lemmy’s querulous bass line underpinning a quirky but appealing song with a mysterious syntax-mangling lyric. With the band unable to recreate the vibe of the original demo at Rockfield, they decided to include it as was, though in Brock’s opinion, “I don’t think that detracts at all from the quality.”

The album was rounded off with the inclusion of Kings Of Speed. Often assumed to have been tacked onto the end at Atco’s request, Brock had already suggested to Allan Jones that it was in fact part of the WOTEOT concept. Closer inspection of the Moorcock-penned lyric bears this out with its references to the world of Jerry Cornelius, the writer’s anarchic, androgynous character who offered a modern spin on the eternal champion trope.

Not only did WOTEOT feature a strong and varied selection of material, it also sounded distinctly fantastical, the mix a thing of shape-shifting magic, somehow both murky yet startlingly present.

Brock told Dome, “I sat up all night sometimes working on the album… someone had to take responsibility for the way it was sounding, and it usually ended up being just me.”

However, not everyone was impressed, Alan Powell in particular: “The sound and production was at best amateurish – it sounds like it was recorded on a Sony cassette player. But Dave wanted it ragged and messy, it’s just the way he liked to hear it.”

Warrior On The Edge Of Time was released on May 9, 1975, just eight months after Hall Of The Mountain Grill. With contractual negotiations still ongoing, United Artists had to license it from Atco in order to release it in the UK and Europe – ongoing licensing issues were the reason why the album would be officially unavailable during the 90s and 00s, only rectified in 2013 with a box set reissue from Atomhenge that included a Steven Wilson remix.

Reaching No.13 in the UK charts, it would be Hawkwind’s highest-placed studio album, and also their last to make the US Billboard chart, at No.150. It was a bitter irony, then, that the American tour they had rushed to complete the album for finally led to a decisive break in their ranks.

Crossing the border into Canada on May 11 for a show in Toronto, Lemmy was arrested for the possession of a suspicious white powder. Released the following day when it turned out, of course, to be amphetamine sulphate rather than cocaine, Lemmy made it to the show. But it had proved to be one headache too many for the rest of the band, and in a meeting afterwards, their talismanic bassist was fired. This would be just the first of a series of ructions that would knock the band off course for the next few years – and for many fans, it’s the point at which ‘classic’ Hawkwind ends.

Warrior On The Edge Of Time remains Hawkwind’s most prog-friendly album, but as with all their output, it’s uniquely their own take on the idea, assimilating the sonic adventurism of the progressive bands into their dark rhythmic churn. And in Assault And Battery, The Golden Void and Magnu, it gave the band three of their most loved and long-standing live tracks. As Brock said to Dome, “It is a genuine Hawkwind classic – there’s some really great stuff on it.”

It’s possible that the friction within the band was at least partly responsible for the album’s strident, often fierce sound – as Hawkwind fan John Lydon would point out a decade later, ‘Anger is an energy.’ But as Brock ruefully concludes, “Probably if we’d persevered and kept things together and stopped arguing, we could have all been multi-millionaires – but we didn’t!”

Joe is a regular contributor to Prog. He also writes for Electronic Sound, The Quietus, and Shindig!, specialising in leftfield psych/prog/rock, retro futurism, and the underground sounds of the 1970s. His work has also appeared in The Guardian, MOJO, and Rock & Folk. Joe is the author of the acclaimed Hawkwind biographyDays Of The Underground (2020). He’s on Twitter and Facebook, and his website is https://www.daysoftheunderground.com/. 

“I recommend anyone reading this who’s a psycho and can buy a gun to shoot George Bush. I’m serious. l would consider it myself. I live in a country that I hate! I live in a country where I wanna shoot politicians, where the only way you can make a real dent is not voting, it’s murder.”

It’s October 1988, and speaking to Melody Maker writer Steve Sutherland ahead of the forthcoming US presidential election, R.E.M.’s Peter Buck is delivering a somewhat provocative state-of-the-nation address. The guitarist is in a Athens, Georgia drinking den named the GA Bar, and, by his own admission, he’s “a little tipsy”, drinking Bloody Marys in an attempt to battle the jetlag he’s feeling having flown home from London the previous day.

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne’s private jet, played Angus Young’s Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.

Metallica lead guitarist Kirk Hammett thinks he “should be a lot better” at playing his instrument.

The 62-year-old, who joined Metallica in 1983, makes the admission during an exclusive interview with Metal Hammer, when asked how he feels about the state of modern guitar playing.

“I see a lot of [people on YouTube] and I’m frigging impressed,” he answers. “There are some amazing players out there, where I’m just shaking my head like, ‘Why aren’t these guys working? Why aren’t they recording?’ But then I think… maybe they can’t. Maybe they have jobs, or families, or something they can’t leave behind.”

The guitarist then turns to his own talents. “I should be a lot better than I am,” he admits. “I see some of these younger guitar players and I’m like, ‘Where did I go wrong?’ Ha ha!”

He continues, explaining that his approach to playing is based more on feel than music theory: “It’s hard for me to be objective or subjective for where I stand in all of this. I just know that I like playing the way I do; I know if I keep on playing from my cajónes, somebody is going to be able to relate to that.

“I don’t need to show off or get egotistical by being like, ‘Hey, check out this three-octave arpeggio with tapping in the middle.’ I can’t be fucking bothered! I have a bombastic way of playing – I’ve always been that way, even when I was just in my room.”

Despite Hammett’s self-deprecating take on his ability, he’s frequently featured on ‘best guitarists in metal’ lists. Hammer ranked the lead player and his bandmate James Hetfield as the genre’s joint third-best guitarists in 2019. Interviewed for the piece, Phil Demmel (Kerry King, ex-Machine Head) called Hammett “the master of the memorable solo”.

Hammett released a coffee table book based on his extensive guitar collection, The Collection: Kirk Hammett, last month via Gibson Publishing. He’s currently touring North America with Metallica. See the remaining dates below.

May 01: Nashville Nissan Stadium, TN*
May 03: Nashville Nissan Stadium, TN+
May 07: Blacksburg Lane Stadium, VA*
May 09: Columbus Sonic Temple, OH
May 11: Columbus Sonic Temple, OH
May 23: Philadelphia Lincoln Financial Field, PA+
May 25: Philadelphia Lincoln Financial Field, PA*
May 28: Landover Northwest Stadium, MD*
May 31: Charlotte Bank Of America Stadium, NC*
Jun 3: Atlanta Mercedes-Benz Stadium, GA*
Jun 6: Tampa Raymond James Stadium, FL+
Jun 8: Tampa Raymond James Stadium, FL*
Jun 14: Houston NRG Stadium, TX*
Jun 20: Santa Clara Levi’s Stadium, CA+
Jun 22: Santa Clara Levi’s Stadium, CA*
Jun 27: Denver Empower Field at Mile High, CO+
Jun 29: Denver Empower Field at Mile High, CO*

* Pantera and Suicidal Tendencies support
+ Limp Bizkit and Ice Nine Kills support

Louder’s resident Gojira obsessive was still at uni when he joined the team in 2017. Since then, Matt’s become a regular in Metal Hammer and Prog, at his happiest when interviewing the most forward-thinking artists heavy music can muster. He’s got bylines in The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, NME and many others, too. When he’s not writing, you’ll probably find him skydiving, scuba diving or coasteering.

Taking inspiration from the rainbow-hungry goblin protagonists of a 1970s children’s book, Primus released The Desaturating Seven in 2017. Les Claypool told Prog about the band’s seventh album, another madcap concept work designed to spook and spellbind in equal measure.

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In 1978, Italian illustrator Ulderico Conte Gropplero di Troppenburg published a children’s book. The Rainbow Goblins was a vivid affair that told the story of seven evil characters named after the colours of the spectrum: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet. They traverse the land, stealing the colour from rainbows with their lassos, filling their bellies with its kaleidoscopic goodness. It all comes to a surprisingly violent conclusion for the miniature protagonists, but the story doesn’t end there.

While Ul de Rico – as he’s more commonly known – went on to publish a sequel (The White Goblin, in 1996) and work as a designer on Hollywood blockbusters The NeverEnding Story and Flash Gordon, the goblins have made something of a comeback: their story is retold in new Primus album The Desaturating Seven.

“I’m getting older,” says Primus mainman Les Claypool, speaking to Prog from his home in Sonoma County, California, punctuating his conversation with suitably maniacal cackles. “I’m figuring I need to pull some of the pots off the stove, and this is something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time.

”My wife used to read The Rainbow Goblins to my kids a lot when they were little. I remember going through it and thinking how amazing it was: the artwork, the colours, the beauty… and yet the darkness, and the creepiness, and the message. It was just an amazing piece of art.

“It was inspiring to me and I wanted to supplement it with my obscure interpretation and perspective. Obviously it’s also fairly relevant to what’s going on today. It just seemed like the right time.”

Thinly veiled political sentiments aside, the album manages to capture the book’s prismatic yet black-hearted vibrance perfectly. The ominous spoken-word introduction is read by Tool bass player Justin Chancellor (“the champion goblin,” says Claypool) to the chilling denouement, it’s an album that conjures up images of peculiar lands, epic journeys and dark, sinister activity with some considerable degree of skill.

From the stumbling lurch of The Valley, with its spookily disembodied vocals that sound as if they were recorded underwater, via the stuttering The Seven – a song with a cadence that makes it feel like a demented, foreboding sequel to John Walter Bratton’s Teddy Bear’s Picnic – to the off-kilter, racing drama of the climactic The Storm, it’s full of squirting rhythms, lolloping basslines and enormous mischief.

It’s like a nursery rhyme set to some form of alien, disjointed jazz, but it somehow succeeds in breathing life into Ul de Rico’s deviant story.

“That’s what I’ve always tried to do with Primus stuff,” says Claypool. “We’ve never been about dance floor lyrics. It’s always been about visuals and trying to evoke some interesting pictures through music. The visual element has always been a very strong part of what we do live, given the parameters of what we can afford.

“We’re not Radiohead, who have a little bigger production budget than we do, but we come up with some pretty cool stuff. For me, the images Ul de Rico painted for this thing are so spectacular and so strong I just really wanted to support that as best I could and not detract. At times it was incredibly easy, and at times it was difficult.

I don’t want to hear 20 songs by my favourite artist. I’d rather hear 10 songs and get to suck them in

“The biggest challenge was to write lyrics about goblins and rainbows and it not to come off like a Tenacious D song. It could easily be interpreted as some form of parody, and if you look through the lyrics I don’t often mention goblins and very rarely mention rainbows. Instead I use the notion of the metaphors that are implied in the story.”

Given the epic nature of the tale, it’s something of a triumph that in an age where attention spans are lower than ever and yet 70-minute albums are the norm, Primus managed to bring the album to a frothing climax in just over half an hour. “That, to me, is the folly of CDs,” says Claypool. “I don’t want to hear 20 songs by my favourite artist. I’d rather hear 10 songs and get to suck them in. For me, one of my all-time favourite records as a kid – it was also my first concert – was Hemispheres by Rush, and this record is either a minute or 40 seconds shorter than that.

“Of course, part of the reason that albums were shorter back in the day was that the more information you put on a disc, the more you included, the more the quality dropped. The grooves got closer together, and you lost the bottom end. So I wanted to make sure it sounded great on a single album.”

Rush aren’t the only band referenced by Claypool as he talks about the album. Lead single The Seven, with its corrugated rhythms and wobbling bass, definitely has an air of Discipline-era King Crimson about it. “There are different eras of Crimson,” says Claypool, “but when I discovered them it was 80s Crimson, the Adrian Belew, Tony Levin Crimson era. That, to me, was Crimson. So when I heard the earlier stuff, I was like, ‘Woah! This is quite a different chapter!’ But those 80s Crimson songs are just spectacular.

“They were very powerful for a young man to hear: Tony Levin and Bill Bruford playing those rhythms together, just the whole package. They’re one of the greatest bands ever. They’re all monsters and they have this chemistry together. When you get a group of individuals – no matter how strong they are separately – and they don’t have that chemistry when they come together, it can be quite interesting. But if they do have that chemistry, it just takes it beyond.”

Sean Lennon has this incredible ability to form vocal melodies and harmonies… that was very helpful for me

In August, Claypool and Sean Lennon released the four-track EP Lime And Limpid Green, the follow-up to The Claypool Lennon Delirium’s whimsical debut album of last year, Monolith Of Phobos. Alongside covers of Flower Travellin’ Band’s Satori, Pink Floyd’s Astronomy Domine and The Who’s Boris The Spider was a faithful version of Crimson’s The Court Of The Crimson King. “It’s a phenomenal song to play, record and perform,” says Claypool.

“Any time you do a project with other people, you grow, hopefully. Working with Sean, he and I pushed each other in directions that we probably wouldn’t go on our own. He has this incredible ability to form vocal melodies and harmonies, and that was very helpful for me on The Desaturated Seven.”

Another different approach Claypool brought to the recording of the album was by creating a storyboard to lay out the goblins’ tale for the other members of the band, guitarist Larry “Ler” LaLonde and drummer Tim “Herb” Alexander, before they came up with their parts. Aside from that, it was business as usual.

“We do everything in my house,” says Claypool, “where I’ve assembled all this old vintage gear. Every now and then I need to kick things to keep them going, but I’m the only one who knows exactly where to kick them, so I’m the only guy who can run it.”

Maybe I’ll start telling people I play Beatles music… but sideways

Have his kids heard the album? “They’re adults now,” says Claypool. “And like everything else I do, my daughter thinks it’s incredibly weird, whereas with my son, it’s right up his alley. When I played The Residents in the car when they were little, my daughter would cry and say it was scary, while he loved it and wanted to hear it again.”

The band have been in touch with Ul de Rico, (“a thoroughly eccentric fellow,” says Claypool) to licence the artwork. “My manager was emailing with him there for a while because we needed his permission. To me, a huge part of the pie is utilising all those images. He painted all that stuff on these wood panels, and we’ve had a couple of people do some reproductions of some of it, and it just doesn’t look nearly as good as what he came up with.”

The fruits of the collaboration will be seen when Primus take the goblins on the road, and if all goes according to plan, it’s going to be spectacular. After all, the band set the bar high with the tour for the Primus & The Chocolate Factory album, which reimagined the soundtrack to the classic children’s film Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory.

“We have a pretty amazing team that have been part of our visual world for a while,” says Claypool, “and when we did the Wonka thing, we put together a pretty interesting stage show. It started off with us going out and doing the stripped-down production version of Primus, before we opened the curtains of this magical world that was Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory, with Oompa Loompas jumping around and lots of video visuals. We’re going to do something similar to that on this. Obviously there’s going to be a lot of rainbows and lots of goblins. Not a lot of helicopters on this one.”

Prog asks if Claypool is familiar with synaesthesia, the neurological condition in which real-world stimulation is experienced by more senses than would normally be the case. Those affected might see a picture of the sea and immediately taste apricots, or unfailingly think of January as being yellow. One variant, chromaesthesia, results in different musical notes provoking the listener into visualising involuntary, simultaneous bursts of colour.

It sounds like the kind of thing Claypool might have a theory or two about, given the visual impact of Primus’s new album and the brilliance of Ul de Rico’s images, but he’s not biting. “I see music in the form of sandwiches,” he chortles, before asking how to spell synaesthesia and writing it down. Don’t be surprised if it shows up on the next album.

Or maybe it won’t. Primus are nothing if not unpredictable. “I’ve no idea what kind of music I play,” says Claypool. “Maybe I’ll start telling people I play Beatles music… but sideways.”

Online Editor at Louder/Classic Rock magazine since 2014. 39 years in music industry, online for 26. Also bylines for: Metal Hammer, Prog Magazine, The Word Magazine, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Saga, Music365. Former Head of Music at Xfm Radio, A&R at Fiction Records, early blogger, ex-roadie, published author. Once appeared in a Cure video dressed as a cowboy, and thinks any situation can be improved by the introduction of cats. Favourite Serbian trumpeter: Dejan Petrović.