Robert Calvert

Robert Calvert (9 March 1944 – 14 August 1988) was a South African born English writer, poet, and musician. He was best known as the lead singer, poet and frontman of Hawkwind.


 * "I think that LSD was a major influence on our generation in art and music. A lot of people, especially the New Wave enthusiasts have dismissed the whole psychedelic era as if it were totally insignificant which they are very wrong about. There was far more creativity than there is now. Punk music although it is very energetic and I find it a lot more refreshing to hear than what older bands are doing, doesn't have as much actual creativity as we had when we were that age and we were a new wave. I'm sure that very soon there's going to be a look back at that time and on our new album we've got a song about the period which is not making excuses for it, but holding it up as something we are actually proud to have been involved in, which is not a very fashionable view to take now. It was the most important era in rock and in another year or two, you're going to have nothing but people looking back on that time.


 * Rock and roll had started out as just an energy dance music, then it was influenced by the blues and then it started being influenced by a whole lot of things like poetry, eastern music, LSD, mystical experiences and S.F. suddenly coming into it and opening it up as an art form, which it maintained for quite a long period with bands like the Pink Floyd and us, who were really spearheading the movement and it splintered out in different ways. The Floyd became comfortable, bourgeois and settled and just professional studio musicians and then punks came along to smash apart that sort of complacency, but they are not doing anything creative. The psychedelic era will be revived, we've not dismissed it, we've not said right it's fucking over now we'll play funky music because that's the thing to do."
 * - Interview in issue 2 of a fanzine called Sniffin' Flowers, published in 1977. http://www.starfarer.net/dbrcint_77.html