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This is a sleeve note from my New World's Fair box set.
I've always been fascinated with tales of Ladbroke Grove and characters the likes of Michael Moorcock, Bob Calvert, Barney Bubbles, Dave Brock, Nik Turner, Lemmy, Vivian Stanshall, Stacia and the whole Hawkwind troupe. The sad thing is that I can only know what I read about it and have little geographical or historical knowledge of the area.
The tales of Ladbroke Grove in the late 60's and early 70's are completely enthralling. I would love to hear any reminiscences of those magical times from other members of this forum and especially (if possible) from Mike himself.
In the early 1970’s, Ladbroke Grove was and still is crammed with rock and roll people and it was almost impossible not to know at least half-a-dozen musicians who were either already famous or would soon become famous in this atmosphere , with Islands amazing studios ten minutes from my house and almost everyone you knew working in some capacity for the music business, it felt a little weird if you didn’t have a recording contract.
I was doing a lot of stuff with Hawkwind at the time, both writing and performing, and it revived my interest in music. I had begun in the mid 1950’s, doing rock and roll and bluegrass as well as R&B and what was known as “skiffle”- an American white and black folk music played up tempo for dancing and made commercially successful by the likes of Lonnie Donnegan, Chas MacDevitt and The Vipers. Those early years in the clubs of Soho, where British rock first began, were fairly similar to the 60’s in Ladbroke Grove- everybody knew everybody and it was quite often possible to be involved in a session with someone like Charlie Watts on drums, Long John Baldry doing vocals and Pete Green playing guitar.
I cut my first demo with EMI in 1957 and it was, even by the standards of the day, considered too dreadful to release. So it was perfectly natural , living as I did in Ladbroke Grove, to slide back into doing music. Also I was helping Jon Trux and others put on concerts under the motorway in Portobello Road – my first performance with Hawkwind was at one of these gigs , and at that first performance I did “SONIC ATTACK”. I think it was Dave Brock who encouraged me to do a demo of two songs I’d written, “Dodgem Dude” and “Starcruiser”, and I somehow found myself having lunch with an A&R man from Liberty records who casually asked me when I intended to schedule my first LP. Almost without realizing it, I had a record contract and “NEW WORLD’S FAIR” was the result. I was already doing some stuff with Steve Gilmore, who was performing solo, and Graham Charnock, although gigging with an R&B band while helping edit “New Worlds” magazine, agreed to play bass. Knowing that both Steve and Graham drew more of their living from music, I insisted that they be represented on the album, which is why you’ll hear several of their songs here. Steve was at the time working with Sam Shepard (now more famous as a film star, but then a writer who had scripted “Zabriski Point” and whose first collection of poems was called “Hawkmoon”) and it’s Sam’s lyrics you’ll hear on “Song For Marlene”.
It was a very small world , in many ways .The idea was mine and “Dodgem Dude”, in particular, set the theme for NWF. Ironically, Liberty never showed any great interest in taking it beyond the demo stage and the record wasn’t released until some seven years after the album.
“The Deep Fix” was formed in 1972 . By the time we made the album it consisted of myself, Steve, Graham, Pete Pavli (late of the Third Ear Band and High Tide) Snowy White and Kumo. Terry Ollis was our first drummer (ex Hawkwind) but Simon King is on most of the tracks you’ll hear here.
The original album was musically a bit more ambitious than it turned out, partly because some of the people weren’t happy with doing eccentric rhythms and bar lines, while some tracks were abandoned altogether. One of those, which you’ll hear for the first time on this album , was “Candy Floss Cowboy”, which I dropped off the album because I was disappointed in it, but which doesn’t sound too bad to me now! If you listen to “The Brothel In Rosenstrasse” or even “At The Time Center” you’ll have a better idea of the flavour I was aiming for. “Brothel In Rosenstrasse” is in many ways more typical of “The Deep fix”, who gave their final live performance (with Adrian Shaw on bass) at Nik Turner’s Bohemian Love Inn , the Roundhouse, Chalk Farm, in 1978-in many ways the Grand Finale of the alternative music scene as we had experienced and enjoyed it. After that our music got less and less commercial and times had changed so radically that nobody except occasionally Flicknife , actually wanted to produce it. The work Pete Pavli and I did on “Gloriana” and “The Entropy Tango” , two ambitious projects scarcely got beyond demo stage before we grew tired of the record industry’s increasing orthodoxy . Like many of our contemporaries who were not quite young enough to feel immortal and not old enough to have grown cynical, we gradually dropped out of doing music. “The Deep Fix” did a few numbers on Flicknife and then we went our different ways. Since then of course, there has been a lot of interest in this album and some of the other stuff we did, which is why there are some extra tracks included here as a kind of epilogue!
I hope you enjoy it. If I had my time over again, I think I’d have done it a bit differently , but there’s enough stuff on this album for everyone to find something they like. And maybe, who knows, we’ll find enough tracks knocking about to do a follow-up album sometime.
I hope you enjoy this
Keep on rocking!
Yours,
Michael Moorcock
Lost Pines, Texas
August 1994.
I was doing a lot of stuff with Hawkwind at the time, both writing and performing, and it revived my interest in music. I had begun in the mid 1950’s, doing rock and roll and bluegrass as well as R&B and what was known as “skiffle”- an American white and black folk music played up tempo for dancing and made commercially successful by the likes of Lonnie Donnegan, Chas MacDevitt and The Vipers. Those early years in the clubs of Soho, where British rock first began, were fairly similar to the 60’s in Ladbroke Grove- everybody knew everybody and it was quite often possible to be involved in a session with someone like Charlie Watts on drums, Long John Baldry doing vocals and Pete Green playing guitar.
I cut my first demo with EMI in 1957 and it was, even by the standards of the day, considered too dreadful to release. So it was perfectly natural , living as I did in Ladbroke Grove, to slide back into doing music. Also I was helping Jon Trux and others put on concerts under the motorway in Portobello Road – my first performance with Hawkwind was at one of these gigs , and at that first performance I did “SONIC ATTACK”. I think it was Dave Brock who encouraged me to do a demo of two songs I’d written, “Dodgem Dude” and “Starcruiser”, and I somehow found myself having lunch with an A&R man from Liberty records who casually asked me when I intended to schedule my first LP. Almost without realizing it, I had a record contract and “NEW WORLD’S FAIR” was the result. I was already doing some stuff with Steve Gilmore, who was performing solo, and Graham Charnock, although gigging with an R&B band while helping edit “New Worlds” magazine, agreed to play bass. Knowing that both Steve and Graham drew more of their living from music, I insisted that they be represented on the album, which is why you’ll hear several of their songs here. Steve was at the time working with Sam Shepard (now more famous as a film star, but then a writer who had scripted “Zabriski Point” and whose first collection of poems was called “Hawkmoon”) and it’s Sam’s lyrics you’ll hear on “Song For Marlene”.
It was a very small world , in many ways .The idea was mine and “Dodgem Dude”, in particular, set the theme for NWF. Ironically, Liberty never showed any great interest in taking it beyond the demo stage and the record wasn’t released until some seven years after the album.
“The Deep Fix” was formed in 1972 . By the time we made the album it consisted of myself, Steve, Graham, Pete Pavli (late of the Third Ear Band and High Tide) Snowy White and Kumo. Terry Ollis was our first drummer (ex Hawkwind) but Simon King is on most of the tracks you’ll hear here.
The original album was musically a bit more ambitious than it turned out, partly because some of the people weren’t happy with doing eccentric rhythms and bar lines, while some tracks were abandoned altogether. One of those, which you’ll hear for the first time on this album , was “Candy Floss Cowboy”, which I dropped off the album because I was disappointed in it, but which doesn’t sound too bad to me now! If you listen to “The Brothel In Rosenstrasse” or even “At The Time Center” you’ll have a better idea of the flavour I was aiming for. “Brothel In Rosenstrasse” is in many ways more typical of “The Deep fix”, who gave their final live performance (with Adrian Shaw on bass) at Nik Turner’s Bohemian Love Inn , the Roundhouse, Chalk Farm, in 1978-in many ways the Grand Finale of the alternative music scene as we had experienced and enjoyed it. After that our music got less and less commercial and times had changed so radically that nobody except occasionally Flicknife , actually wanted to produce it. The work Pete Pavli and I did on “Gloriana” and “The Entropy Tango” , two ambitious projects scarcely got beyond demo stage before we grew tired of the record industry’s increasing orthodoxy . Like many of our contemporaries who were not quite young enough to feel immortal and not old enough to have grown cynical, we gradually dropped out of doing music. “The Deep Fix” did a few numbers on Flicknife and then we went our different ways. Since then of course, there has been a lot of interest in this album and some of the other stuff we did, which is why there are some extra tracks included here as a kind of epilogue!
I hope you enjoy it. If I had my time over again, I think I’d have done it a bit differently , but there’s enough stuff on this album for everyone to find something they like. And maybe, who knows, we’ll find enough tracks knocking about to do a follow-up album sometime.
I hope you enjoy this
Keep on rocking!
Yours,
Michael Moorcock
Lost Pines, Texas
August 1994.
The tales of Ladbroke Grove in the late 60's and early 70's are completely enthralling. I would love to hear any reminiscences of those magical times from other members of this forum and especially (if possible) from Mike himself.
I've always got a kick out of this recollection of Bob Calvert by Arthur Brown:
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