Two-Fisted Tales: The Texts of Festival by Mick Farren (Mayflower, 1973)

Lurking somewhere to the left of Michael Butterworth’s Time of the Hawklords on my bookshelves, we find another example of the surprisingly fertile cross-over between paperback science fiction and underground rock in Britain during the 1970s, in the shape of Mick Farren’s debut novel, published by Mayflower as a paperback original in 1973.

After he first came to prominence as the frontman for ‘60s proto-punk troublemakers The Deviants, the late Mr Farren (who passed away in 2013) carved out a niche for himself as a key player in the UK’s underground press movement (an on-off editor at International Times, he successfully defended IT’s comix spin-off ‘Nasty Tales’ against obscenity charges in 1971) and subsequently as a writer for the NME, as well as serving variously as an organiser of everything from street protests to free festivals, a doorman at the UFO club, an occasional lyricist for Hawkwind and Mötorhead, and as the architect of a series of bizarre, Zappa-inspired freak-rock/spoken word concept albums, including the seminal ‘Vampires Stole My Lunch Money’. His 2001 memoir ‘Give the Anarchist a Cigarette’ remains essential reading for anyone with an interest in London’s ‘60s/’70s counter-culture.

Somewhere in the midst of all this activity, and perhaps inspired by the example of fellow Ladbroke Grove scenester Michael Moorcock, Farren also turned his hand to genre fiction, a field in which he achieved a reasonable amount of success, with over twenty novels seeing print between the mid-‘70s and early ‘00s, most of them broadly classifiable as science fiction.

As the first out of the gate, and with its intent as a kind of self-reflexive satire on the music world clearly signalled by Mayflower’s back cover copy (if not by Peter Jones’ disappointingly bland cover illustration), one might reasonably expect ‘The Texts of Festival’ to be a pretty wild n’ woolly affair, crackling with a brand of hipster jive and freak scene energy befitting Farren’s background.

That was certainly my expectation, and as such I was quite taken aback to find myself faced with a relatively conventional science fantasy / action-adventure yarn, executed in the accomplished, no nonsense prose style of a long-serving paperback/magazine fiction veteran. (At the risk of drifting into speculation, it’s possible that Farren’s need to turn his writing into a viable revenue stream may have trumped his natural inclination to freak out the squares, on this occasion at least.)

As you will probably have gathered from the back cover copy, ‘The Texts of Festival’ posits a sort of off-the-peg post-apocalyptic future Britain, wherein the scattered descendants of first generation survivors have regressed to a state of neo-medieval primitivism, and in which the flame of civilisation is (barely) kept alight only by the inhabitants of the walled city known as Festival.

Located somewhere adjacent to the ruins of ancient “N’donn”, we can presumably assume that Festival was first established in the aftermath of the unspecified disaster which brought the ‘Great Age’ to a close, instigated by a community whose initial response to the calamity was to head to the countryside and convene a never-ending, self-sustaining variation on a good ol’ hippie rock festival.

Generations later, the descendants of these pioneers battle to maintain the fidelity of an ancient PA system, and gather before the stage on feast days the observe the ritual play-back of their holy “texts” – in other words, the surviving rock records whose words comprise the scriptures of Festival’s embryonic faith. (Oddly, the ability to actually play musical instruments and thus perform the songs contained with these ‘texts’ seems meanwhile to have been lost – an issue Farren never addresses.)

Whereas Butterworth’s aforementioned Hawkwind book inexplicably singled out Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ as an example of the “square” music played by the villains to sap the power of the Hawklords, Farren by contrast was a life-long Dylan devotee, and as such it comes as no surprise that ol’ Bob holds a central place in the mythology of Festival, with numerous characters in the book – Frankie Lee the Gambler, Johanna etc – taking their names (and indeed professions) from Dylan songs;

“Group after group of mummers performed on the wide stage until, just before sunset, a reverent hush fell across the arena as a single figure in a mask with heavily sunken cheeks, a thin jutting nose and a mass of black curly wig walked slowly to the front of the stage as the first of the Great Texts was played. The symbolic figure of the prophet Dhillon swayed gently as the texts crackled from the ancient speakers.”

Fellow prime innovators The Beatles meanwhile receive considerably less favourable treatment, with their work alluded to only in the following passage, in which a character recalls her family being terrorised by a cult of “Christies” when she was a child;

“She had been sitting in front of the cottage when they had stormed up the lane. The memory was so clear and vivid: the sunlight, the dusty earth in front of the cottage where the goat was tethered and the chickens scratched. Then suddenly they had flooded the lane, dozens of them in their dirty white robes, screaming their cursed text.
Screaming ‘All you need is love’, they had kicked her aside and pulled her mother from the cottage.”

Given that ‘The Texts of Festival’ was published in 1973 meanwhile, we must cop that Farren was at least *slightly* prophetic in his decision to posit the gaunt, psychopathic “Iggy” (no prizes for guessing, etc) as leader of the loose coalition of outlaws and barbarous, biker-descended tribesmen who, maddened by the effects of the toxic “crystal” the drug-crazed Ig has hooked them on, ride out to threaten the compromised hippie ideals of Festival.

Though little effort is made to really extend the novel’s pop cultural prognostications much beyond this, we could perhaps – again with specific reference to the publication date – stretch things slightly to include the figure of Lord Valentine, the depraved and despotic hereditary ruler of Festival, whose fey and dandy-ish ways are bitterly resented by the city’s stolid yeomanry.

Naturally it is Valentine’s incompetence that opens the gates (both literally and figuratively) to the incursion of Iggy’s barbarian hordes, perhaps reflecting Farren’s hoary-old-rocker suspicion of the Bowie-spearheaded glam movement, which he may already have perceived as the harbinger of the then-nameless new wave of hate-filled, smack-addled nihilism gathering to wipe out the compromised ideals of the preceding decade’s hippie dream.

(Any suspicion of homophobia regarding the effeminate Valentine character is meanwhile defused by means of making him even more enthusiastically heterosexual than the other characters in the novel – again perhaps reflecting the contemporary belief that Bowie, Lou Reed et al were merely “faking it” in regard to their queer/androgynous affectations.)

But, for the most part, Farren seems surprisingly disinterested in elaborating upon his tale’s SF-as-rock-criticism angle, instead seemingly relishing the opportunity to simply indulge in some good, ol’ fashioned pulp storytelling.

As it goes on therefore, it becomes increasingly clear that ‘The Texts of Festival’ is basically a western. And I don’t mean that in some spurious “Star Wars is really a western” kind of way either. I mean, there are wagon trains, and six-guns, and cavalry sorties dispatched to track down nomadic bands of raiders. There are gambling halls, whorehouses and gunfighters in wide-brimmed black hats, all located within frontier towns defended by makeshift wooden stockades. It’s a western. So much so in fact that there are entire chapters that read almost like they could have been taken from a Zane Grey potboiler, with the details altered a give proceedings a veneer of post-apocalyptic fantasy.

Though it may initially seem odd to see such elements employed in a story ostensibly set in the UK, as things progress it actually begins to make a cracked sort of sense – I mean, how else could a society whose foundation myth is based around the whimsical Americana of Dylan’s lyrics be expected to develop?

Farren meanwhile keeps his story-telling lively by means of rotating POV characters as often as possible. This technique that is established in striking fashion in the book’s opening chapters, each of which begins by introducing us to a prospective lone hero character, who, a few pages later, is unceremoniously killed by a somewhat less heroic character who becomes the protagonist of the following chapter – a neat narrative trick that serves to keep us on our toes, whilst also establishing the ruthless and violent nature of the fictional world.

And, violent it certainly is. Though ‘The Texts of Festival’ never descends into gory detail or hardcore sex, Farren dedicates a great deal of time to the assorted massacres, rapes, mass imprisonments and random incidents of wanton sadism that dot his storyline, expounding on such scenarios with a near unhealthy amount of gusto (again, perhaps commercial considerations were in play here to certain extent, reflecting the grittier, more exploitational turn taken by paperback fiction during the ‘70s).

As part of this seeming attempt to assert himself as a Peckinpah-style bad-ass, double standards of a particular ‘70s vintage are very much in evidence when it comes to the novel’s treatment of women. For much of the book’s length, the only noteworthy female characters are voluptuous whores of one kind of another, and their brutish treatment at the hands of the post-apocalyptic world’s decidedly unenlightened menfolk is outlined by the author so extensively, and with such lusty enthusiasm, that acknowledgement of such concepts as consent soon goes out of the window, even when Farren grants temporary POV status to one of his harried strumpets.

Apparently realising midway through that this isn’t quite cricket (perhaps some post-counter-culture idealist guilt kicking in?), there are some attempts to remedy things in this regard in the book’s closing stretch, as someone makes a comment about “women being reduced again to objects” as a consequence of Lord Valentine’s corrupt regime, and as steadfast figures such as ‘Nasty Elaine’ arise to defend Festival’s stockade on equal terms with the blokes. But, it’s too little too late really to get the book anywhere within throwing distance of what you might term “acceptable 21st century reading”, instead simply placing it in the kind of “have yr cake and eat it” slipstream all too familiar to fans of the era’s exploitation cinema (or indeed, rock music).

Beyond this, the final, epic siege of Festival features few surprises, almost no wink-nod references to the music world whatsoever, and a great deal of rousing, dirt n’ blood soaked, six-gun blasting action. Overall, the book is a fine pulp yarn. Executed in almost militantly unpretentious terms, it represents an extremely confident start to Farren’s literary career, and, though there’s nothing here that will seem remotely innovative to a 21st century SF reader, it must at its time have been fairly unique; if nothing else, it succeeds in prefiguring much of the post-apocalyptic aesthetic forever cemented by George Miller’s ‘The Road Warrior’ by the best part of a decade.

As a final note, as much as I respect Farren’s life and work (Dhillon rest his soul), even his most dedicated fans must admit he was never short on ego, and as such I was amused to note the brief sub-plot in ‘The Texts of Festival’ that sees an obscure, supressed “text” predicting apocalyptic devastation gaining popularity amongst Festival’s citizenship as the barbarian armies approach;

“‘Well, my lord, there is an obscure text which we have come across; unfortunately both author and title are unknown, but the fragments that remain seem to relate very closely to the situation which we are dealing with.’
‘Don’t you think we are takin’ your precious texts a little too seriously?’
Phelge pressed his lips together in a pious scowl.
‘My lord, all matters relating to the..’
‘I know, I know. Just tell me what it says. I don’t need a lecture on my lack of belief.’
‘Well lord, basically we only have a few lines we can pick out. I had them transcribed from the tape.’ He produced a sheet of paper from under his robe. ‘They read:

“The outlaws come flying, out of the west
On their pale lips are framed words of death”,

Then there’s a break an’ it continues:

“Come on everybody, gather round friends,
This is the day civilisation ends.
Let's get together and do death’s dance
And go loot”

The rest of the line is indecipherable.’”

The source of this “obscure text”? ‘Let’s Loot The Supermarket’, track # 6 on The Deviants’ 1968 album ‘Disposable’. Composer: M. Farren.

Random Paperbacks: All Night Stand by Thom Keyes (Mayflower/Dell, 1967)

Ah, we haven’t had any beatniks on this blog for a while, have we? Yeah, THE BEAT SCENE! Mercurial, untamed, straight from the fridge, da… hang on a minute, a pop group? That doesn’t sound like the sort of endeavour any self-respecting beatniks would get involved in. What year was this thing published again? 1967!? Oh my.

I don’t suppose young Thom Keyes had any aspirations to become the next Hemingway, but he must at least have thought he’d made a solid early entry in the inevitable paisley shirt / groupie rampage “rise and fall of a rock group” paperback sub-genre… and as such, we can only imagine the sheer level of face-palm he must have experienced when he saw what the design team at Mayflower/Dell did to it.

Still, the physics students and the pub stripper they roped in for the photo shoot look like they’re having fun. (Check the upside down painting in the background – because life in our society is, like, UPSIDE DOWN, man!)

Seemingly slightly better known for his SF work, Thom Keyes (1949-1995) is “mainly remembered as the writer of the ‘Space: 1999’ episode ‘The Taybor’”, it says here, and he also contributed to New Worlds.

In and of themselves, the sections of ‘All Night Stand’ I read prior to this post are no great shakes, but for a novel published before its author’s eighteenth birthday it’s a reasonably impressive achievement, I think it’s fair to say.

Two-Fisted Tales: The Time of the Hawklordsby Michael Butterworth & Michael Moorcock (Star Books, 1976)

In view of my nationality, cultural interests and taste in music, it should come as no surprise that I greatly enjoy the work of Hawkwind. Perhaps only marginally less predictable is the fact that a special corner has formed within my ever-growing hoard of paperback fiction specifically devoted to literature inspired by, or to some degree relevant to, the ‘70s UK free festival rock milieu from which Hawkwind emerged. Within that corner, my recently acquired copy of ‘The Time of the Hawklords’ naturally now takes pride of place.

Given that Michael Moorcock knocked about with Hawkwind quite a bit on the Ladbroke Grove freak-scene of the early ‘70s (contributing spoken word recitations and slightly more nebulous ‘concepts’ to their ‘Space Ritual’ and ‘Warrior At The Edge of Time’ albums, amongst other things), it must have seemed splendidly inevitable that the prolific scribe should choose to immortalise his rock n’ roll mates in fiction at some point. However, the co-billing here of Michael Butterworth (a latter-day New Worlds contributor who went on to co-found the controversial Manchester imprint Savoy Books), together with the book’s absence from most Moorcock bibliographies, tells a slightly different story.

Indeed, a meager quantity of googling turns up the following quote from Moorcock, writing on the messageboards of his Multiverse website in 2004:

“I think I wrote the opening paragraph of the first book.
The publisher insisted on putting my name on it bigger than Mike's and that annoyed me, since one of the objects was to promote Mike's own work. That's since been rectified.
But I never had any intention of writing the books and essentially see the entire project as being between Mike Butterworth and Hawkwind.”

So, there we go. Given that ‘Time of the Hawklords’ was Butterworth’s first novel, it may seem cruel to characterise it as a rather blunt and hastily bashed out pastiche of various aspects of Moorcock’s style, executed with little of the wit and lightness of touch that the more experienced of the two Michaels might have brought to proceedings, but, under the circumstances, I’m just going to have to live with being cruel I suppose.

Which is not to say that ‘Time of the Hawklords’ is really *bad* as such. Taken on a pure comic book level, it’s thoroughly readable – think a feature length version of a text story from a 2000AD annual or something - and, if we take it that it’s primary purpose was to provide a good laugh for Hawkwind fans and maybe introduce a few curious outsiders to the band’s legend, I’d say it succeeds admirably, presenting a motherlode of chest-beating myth-making and galactic-scale in-jokery purpose-built to flesh out the evocative liner notes and album artwork of its subject into a cohesive, if somewhat ham-fisted, pulp fiction narrative.

Basically, open to any random page, and the chances are you’ll find something a bit like this;

“Simultaneously there stepped from behind the vast mixer unit the powerful figure of that brave and sagacious champion who, with Thunder Rider, had first conceived, with noble ideals, the Company of the Hawk, Baron Brock, Lord of the Westland. He held a jackplug in one hand, trailing yards of coiled black flex behind it. He walked, keeping his own counsel, towards his stacks, the sleek and tawny guitar Godblaster held at his side. As he reached his stacks, he swung Godblaster lazily over his powerful shoulders and the light flashed on his muscular, tattooed arms, his pale gold hair. He plugged in his jack and began, instinctively to play a short A minor progression.

Then came Lemmy, Count Motorhead, almost slipping down the front of the high stage, but regaining his jack-booted footing at the last moment and hauling himself up. He arose and looked around him, apparently dazed by the spectacle of the yelling, sheering biomass plastered against the skyline. With a grin of self-mockery he drew his heels together soundlessly and raised his arm in a salute, turning the shrieks to the friendly jeers he seemed to find more tolerable. But the enthusiastic roar returned as he bent down to retrieve his trusty Rickenbacker bass, Gutsplitter, from the blood-red paneling.

In the electric silence that followed, Thunder Rider’s free-form sax burst out once more, almost inaudibly at first, but gradually rising in volume, climbing up and down in the air. When the squealing noise reached an unbearable pitch, he allowed it to fade away. Before it could vanish altogether, the rest of the group let out a sudden, frightening crash of blurred notes and drum rolls from which snaked low, vibrant synth sounds prolonging the roll and the ethereal high pitch of the melatron. Just as suddenly, these sounds too faded away – this time into the echoing, clipped voice of Lemmy, who started to chant the old Calvert number ‘Welcome to the Future’.

‘Welcome to the dehydrated land,
Welcome to the south police parade,
Welcome to the neo-golden age,
Welcome to the days you’ve made you
Welcome

You are welcome
You are welcome
Welcome
Welcome
You are Welcome
Welcome to the future’

The introductory poem ended in a mighty, rising din of drum, gongs and synth that strained the stacks and almost rent the five thousand shuddering rib cages. Then, after a full, torturous minute the sound gradually subsided and the group began playing their first, mind-blasting number, ‘Psychedelic Warlords’.”

Great stuff, needless to say.

Despite the pomp and circumstance of the novel’s presentation of Hawkwind as mighty cosmic music lords and planetary saviours though, it’s hard to overlook the fact that the band were actually heading into a pretty shaky transitional period by the time ‘Time of the Hawklords’ saw publication in 1976.

For one thing, the primitive ‘sonic generators’ of resident mad scientists Del Dettmar and Dik Mik – a key component of the band’s ‘classic’ sound - were already long out of the picture by this point, with the rather more refined sound of ‘Sonic Prince’ Simon House’s mellotron instead predominating on the divisive ‘Warrior on the Edge of Time’ album. For another, despite having assumed the somewhat grander title of ‘Count Motorhead’ since his listing as “Lemmy the Lurch” on the sleevenotes to 1972’s ‘Doremi Fasol Latido’ album, bassist Lemmy was also ancient history by the time ‘Time of the Hawklords’ hit shelves, having been unceremoniously sacked in ’75.

Apparently no one mentioned this to Butterworth though, as, in one of ‘Time of the Hawklords’ more curious anomalies, Lemmy here stands shoulder to shoulder with his replacement, Paul Rudolph of The Pink Fairies (described by Butterworth as wielding “..his great bass, Boneshaker, which all men feared and all women loved”), in a line-up of Hawkwind that never actually existed, insofar as I can tell.

In view of this, indomitable drummer Simon King – rechristened ‘Hound Master’ for reasons that continue to elude to me – might well have felt pretty wary pounding the skins alongside recently appointed second drummer ‘Astral’ Alan Powell (his “white cotton suit, dark hat and shades” contrasting somewhat with the Hound Master’s “stick-quiver [and] bare, tattooed back”), but as it turned out, Powell was actually the first to get the boot in this case, his services being deemed “surplus to requirements” by the all-powerful Baron Brock before the year was out, in a cull that also saw Rudolph leaving the group, and founding member Nik ‘Thunder Rider’ Turner following shortly thereafter.

Given this internal discord, the all-for-one-and-one-for-all cosmic unity with which Butterworth portrays the band must have struck an odd note, to say the least. I’m not sure how much time Butterworth actually spent with Hawkwind, but despite the endless cavalcade of in-jokes and extended tributes to just about every member of their touring retinue, it is disappointing to note that, despite the lively range of personalities within the group, most of the time the members and their entourage behave like one undifferentiated hive-mind, with bland lines of expository dialogue being placed in the mouths of different characters seemingly by rota, and little attempt to build individual personas.

Admittedly, this was perhaps a necessary courtesy when placing a large number of real people into a fictional story, but for better or worse, the overall effect is far more Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park than ‘A Hard Day’s Night’.

In an attempt to counteract this problem, many band members are given their own mini-adventures and points of interest in the second half of the book, which helps to make things at least a bit more interesting – Sonic Prince takes the lead on building the ‘Deltron’ devices that help the Hawklords fight back against the ‘death music’ of their enemies, Baron Brock gets the disembodied consciousness of a dead scientist downloaded in his head, and Captain Calvert returns from afar in his ‘silver machine’, to much rejoicing. Meanwhile, poor old Stacia, in her role as the sole ‘Hawklady’ (yes, they call her that), is lumbered with responsibility for cooking all the food, caring for the sick and undertaking a mission of sexual blackmail – which perhaps tells us all we need to know about the true nature of Butterworth and Hawkwind’s vision for a free and idyllic new society.

Speaking of which, another unfortunate drawback of ‘Time of the Hawklords’ is Butterworth’s insistence on propagating a brand of garrulous hippie idealism must have seemed an embarrassing throwback to readers in 1976.

Indeed, with the remnants of the ‘60s counter-culture that birthed Hawkwind shattered into a thousand pieces and the new Year Zero of punk just around the corner, the book’s simplistic, Manichean vision of an eternal conflict between peaceful ‘freaks’ and blood-thirsty ‘straights’ must have seemed excruciatingly tiresome. By the time Butterworth brings in some mind-bending Scientology-esque bullshit about the human race being seeded from two opposing alien races whose descendants can apparently be identified according to whether they are soothed or sickened by Hawkwind’s music, even the most ardent peaceniks must have been choking on their [insert your own cheap hippie joke here to complete the sentence].

Despite the author’s determination to fly his freak-flag for all it’s worth, another irksome element of the book is it’s tendency to get stuff *just a little bit wrong*, in a manner that suggests that, whilst Butterworth is working hard to appear hip to the demands of both the underground rock world and to that of esoteric science fiction, he is only a hairs-breadth away from revealing a chronic unfamiliarity with either.

One element of the book for instance concerns Hawkwind undertaking a kind of ‘music battle’, in which the positive force of their own recordings and live performances is pitted against the ‘death music’ broadcast by their militaristic / authoritarian enemies, with the latter allowing Butterworth the opportunity to humorously mock various more mainstream songs and artists, encouraging his readers to join him in deriding their squareness.

Whilst it will no doubt stick in the craw of us modern, open-minded listeners to see such varied performers as Frank Sinatra, 10cc, The Carpenters and Ray Charles (on the basis of his later, more schmaltzy stuff, presumably) casually dismissed as ‘Death Music’, I suppose it is at least understandable that the kind of audience who followed Hawkwind in 1976 may not have thought highly of them. However, one addition to the list that struck me as being entirely off-message is that of Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, which at one point is broadcast by the villains to their zombie soldiers to shield them from the benevolent effects of the Hawk-music.

Now, it’s not a personal favourite of mine by any means, but surely by anyone’s estimation, Dylan’s song is closer to the hippie/idealist spirit that Hawkwind stand for than it is to authoritarian blandness of their opponents? In fact, I’m sure there are many who would make the argument that this very song, with its questioning lyrics and pleas for freedom, actually represents the very genesis of the kind of independently minded musical culture that gave birth to Hawkwind a decade later. To push the point further, couldn’t you go so far as to say that Dave Brock’s acoustic songs, as heard regularly on early Hawkwind records, betray a distinctly Dylan-ish influence here and there..?

I’m not sure whether Dylan’s inclusion amid the musical baddies represents a personal dislike or instance of cultural ignorance on Butterworth’s part, or whether it is systematic of the wider forgetfulness and prejudice of ‘70s heavy rock fans in general, but either way, it strikes me as a pretty definitive blunder.

Equally unfortunate is the book’s claim that the departed Del Dettmar took inspiration for the transformative ‘Deltron’ devices he gifted to Hawkwind from ancient techno-occult secrets gleaned from studying the Malleus Maleficarum – clearly an utter absurdity to anyone who has so much as glanced at a synopsis of Kramer & Sprenger’s puritanical 15th century witch-hunting manual.

Meanwhile, another reason I’m glad to discover Michael Moorcock didn’t write ‘The Time of the Hawklords’ is that he actually appears as a character in the book, celebrated rather broadly in the guise of ‘The Moorlock’, Acid Sorcerer of Blenheim Crescent, who lurks, garbed in silks of Eastern finery, in his impenetrable, electronically customised townhouse, from whence he offers psychic and spiritual guidance to the Hawklords, and apparently enjoys a curious sexual relationship with a computer named ‘Victoria’.

“Long before the final collapse, the Moorlock had known what could happen to humanity. His peculiar sensitivity had seen in advance the outcome of the recklessness and the greed. He had seen the cities collapsing, and the men running like frightened ants across the wasted deserts. He had seen the bombs dropping. He had seen the children of the future lying battered and dead in their cots. He had tried to warn of the silent holocaust, and the bitter fighting and rioting, as the saviors fought for control of the last remaining pieces of greenery. He had written books about it. He had spoken on television about it. Finally, he had sung about it. He had formed his own group, The Deep Fix, and played at concerts and outdoor festivals. But no-one had listened. The game of death had blindly continued. Gradually, the prophecies had come true. Prophesies that not only he predicted, but also the ancient books of law.

Disillusioned, and scornful of his selfish fellow men, he had decided that the outside world and all it contained was no more than a grisly cosmic joke perpetrated by sick-minded Gods. He built a thick, protective shell about him, and locked himself away.

For months he brooded, absorbing the knowledge from his books. Even inside his electronic fortress, he was unable to escape the events outside. Man’s follies haunted him – he was of the same race, he could never escape. Many times he had almost given up, and opened the doors to the marauding gangs and self-styled militia. But he had held out, Now, after the final death, they had come in from outside to tell him that a new race of Man was being born out of the ruins.

Now, he stared through the shadows of his cell at the two intent figures sitting on the sofa opposite him. They were man and woman. They were Stacia and Thunder Rider. They were a part of the new men he dared not belong to. Finally he spoke. ‘You came at the right time,’ he told them. ‘I’ll help you.’”

No wonder the real life Moorcock was so pissed off that Star Books had put his name alongside Butterworth on the book’s cover. Imagine his embarrassment at the thought of readers assuming he was writing this rubbish about *himself*!

Amongst other curious detours in ‘Time of the Hawklords’, we are also treated to section in which the band unaccountably go on holiday to Brighton, and subsequently undergo a metaphysical transformation into the super-human “Hawklords” in a haunted pub in Rottingdean in East Sussex (your guess is as good as mine), whilst another interesting sub-plot concerns a tower in North London wherein the disembodied spirits of England’s middle-classes have been uploaded to a vast computer network in which they enjoy a kind of illusory freedom whilst simultaneously being persecuted by a team of tabloid journalists who enter the network via pre-virtual reality headsets to publically shame them should they contemplate having sex.

A further boon for Butterworth meanwhile comes via the convincing characterisation of the book’s villains. A British Army battalion charged before the apocalypse with defending oil reserves in Saudi Arabia, this crew are gradually transformed into a truly nightmarish force of demonic, horror movie fascists whose atrocities, whether by accident or design, seem to preempt the tone of some of the publications that would prove so controversial for Butterworth’s Savoy imprint during the ‘80s and ‘90s.

All of these are good (or at least, strange) ideas that, whilst they inevitably go somewhat underdeveloped amid ‘Time of the Hawklords’ finished-as-fast-as-i-can-type-the-bloody-thing pulp romping, nonetheless suggest that Michael Butterworth had at least a few aces up his sleeve as a producer of satirical sci-fi.

If little of that comes through in this book's muddled trudge to the finish line, I’m nonetheless glad I persevered with it – even as my attention level gradually dropped toward ‘skim’ level, it never failed to provide a good laugh and a bit of random weirdness every few pages, and, if nothing else, a book in which Michael Moorcock stands on stage playing deafening glissandos of slide guitar whilst Lemmy battles zombies with an adjustable spanner certainly deserves a place on my bookshelves.

In 1977, Star Books dutifully published ‘Queens of Deliria’, the second volume in Butterworth’s trilogy (the cover now stating “..based on an idea by Michael Moorcock”), and, according to the synopsis on this page, it sounds absolutely bananas. Presumably these books weren’t as successful as the publisher had hoped though, as the concluding volume – ‘Ledge of Darkness’ – was shelved, eventually seeing publication as a comic adaptation drawn by Bob Walker, which appeared as part of a Hawkwind box set in 1994.