In 1981, Robert Calvert, the poet who wanted to be a fighter pilot and became, for a while, the figurehead of the spaceship Hawkwind, published his only novel, Hype, about upcoming rock star Tom Mahler and the promotional shenanigans surrounding the release of his make-or-break third album. In 1982, Calvert released an accompanying LP, Hype: Songs of Tom Mahler, featuring the songs referred to in the novel. It’s an excellent record, and one of the more polished and commercially accessible of Calvert’s solo albums, but it created, in me, a feeling that, as Calvert effectively took the part of Mahler (by singing his songs) on the album, he would naturally identify with him in the novel. The novel’s actual protagonist is Tony Cahn, the Mahawat-smoking APR Records exec who sees the success of Tom Mahler as his route to the top.

I’ve loved Calvert’s witty, incisive lyrics for years. The Charisma-era records he did with Hawkwind (Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music, Quark, Strangeness and Charm, PXR5, 25 Years On) contain some of my all-time favourite lyrics, not to mention songs, period: the brooding “Steppenwolf” still gives me the chills whenever I really listen to it, as Calvert’s Hermann Hesse-inspired misanthropic rant achieves such a height of intensity it slips into German, like a darkly religious ecstasy of speaking in tongues. Calvert’s poetry lies in the cool, precise choice of words, and his novel’s prose is no exception. Everything is succinctly and exactly described, leaving you with a feeling that here is a writer who is really seeing the scene he’s describing:

“Cahn moved his chair forward for Sammy to get by as she went to her usual place at the table. She undid and slid out of the green parachute-silk coat and settled it over the back of her chair. Finger by finger she began pulling off her gloves, revealing long vermillion nails which she combed through the glossy black of her hair.”

This sort of crystal-clear description of little details focuses the reader’s imagination. Its commanding, confident tone leaves you in no doubt about the writer’s authority. But its downside is that, if the writer keeps to the same tone, you can end up feeling detached from the characters, as if you’re watching them on a big cinema screen, rather than being (as in the best fiction) transported to a spot just behind their eyes, connected to their feelings as much as their actions. Throughout Hype, although you spend a lot of time in Tony Cahn’s company, and a lesser but still significant amount in Tom Mahler’s, you don’t really get close to either. You never really understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. You can’t quite tell if, for instance, Tony Cahn is nothing but a cynical manipulator simply in it for his own gain, or if Tom Mahler has any substance as an artist beyond a manufactured cultish appeal. (And I think that, in a novel of any length, the main characters need to have a bit more dimension than that.) Another downside is that such monotone prose, beautiful and precise though it is, prevents any variation in pacing. It wasn’t till right near the end that the story started to rear its head towards a climax, and that, interestingly, is when Calvert loosens up and uses (in the last three or four chapters) different narrative styles (an excerpt from Mahler’s ghostwritten autobiography, for instance, which, because it’s brief and close to the end, doesn’t have much of an effect). The most interesting chapter, “The Evolution of Rock’n’Roll” has Calvert sounding most like himself (or, at least, as he sounds in a series of self-interview tapes he made in response to a fan’s questionnaire — available online as Ramblings at Dawn), as he launches into a non-fictional account of how the British chart system (as it existed back then) could be, and most probably was, easily manipulated.

In some interview quotes on Knut Gerwers’ excellent Calvert resource, Calvert says he was aiming, in Hype, for something like P G Wodehouse’s satires on 1920s Hollywood, but my biggest disappointment with the book was just how unsatirical, how unscathing, it was of the characters it portrays, and often how unwitty it is compared to Calvert’s pithy lyrics (“Quark, Strangeness and Charm”, for instance, or “Over My Head” from the Hype album). Mahler comes across as too uninteresting to be the artist-hero crushed by an uncaring recording industry — he contributes too much to his own downfall, and seems to have no real principles, just a fashionable, and quickly lost, for-the-people attitude. Cahn, on the other hand, is built too much into a hero to be the object of satire, coming up trumps in his one fist fight (against a woman, though — there’s a nasty undertone of misogyny throughout the book, particularly in its numerous, rather shoehorned-in sex scenes), but unrealistically winning through on business deals through nothing but mouthy chutzpah.

Aside from these faults, I found it quite a readable book, but perhaps more because I was interested in the man who wrote it than what he was writing. The scenes featuring Mahler’s band rehearsing and recording were the highlights, both because they must have echeod Calvert’s own experience of such situations, and because their portrayal of the sort of micro-politics that come to bear on creative, collaborative situations was spot on.

Back when I was just getting into music, and my record collection could have been played in its entirety on a lazy Sunday afternoon (now, according to iTunes, it would take 26 days, 8 hours and 9 minutes), Garen went up to London one day and I asked if he could buy me a couple of records — anything by Hawkwind and the Blue Öyster Cult. He brought back two of the best albums I’ve ever heard. The Hawkwind LP was Angels of Death (1986), a compilation of the rockier numbers from their early-80s RCA releases, and it was pretty stonking, but Secret Treaties (1974) by BÖC just blew me away, and is still one of my favourite albums. I’d already heard most of the songs, as the first BÖC record I bought was their fourth, the live double On Your Feet Or On Your Knees (1975), which as well as providing a sort of coda to their first (and, to me, best) era, was responsible for me deciding to learn to play the guitar — I just had to play the riff to Harvester of Eyes, which sounded impossibly complex to my then-untrained ears, but which is actually made up of two separate but simple, rhythmically different, guitar parts.

That riff, though, is the key to what I love about early BÖC. With two, sometimes three, guitars going off at once, there’s the manic feel of a musical explosion barely contained by its song structure, as if five wild musos are ricocheting off in separate directions, but have been captured on vinyl just at that moment before they leave each other’s gravitational influence. Contained power. That’s what good rock music is all about. Add to that the weirdness of the lyrics (sometimes a little too obscure for my tastes, but often surreally suggestive enough to attain a sort of dark poetry), plus those bizarre covers by Gawlick, and the early BÖC seems to exist in a world of its own — so much so that, with their most famous album, Agents of Fortune (1976), which of course contains (Don’t Fear) The Reaper, and all the following albums seem to be to by a separate band. And in a sense they were, as, with the proceeds of On Your Feet the band members each bought a four-track recorder and went off to make song demos on their own. No longer having to contain the electrical explosion of five colliding talents, subsequent albums did still have their finely-crafted highs with some excellent songs, but never again had that raw power where the band’s talents were forcibly, and alchemically, mixed.

Spectres (1977) and the live album Some Enchanted Evening (1978) have just been remastered and re-released. Both have some great moments (Godzilla, Golden Age of Leather and Nosferatu on Spectres, Astronomy on Some Enchanted Evening), but the main thing I remember from when I first bought Spectres (from Beanos in Crodyon) — aside from the lead singer Eric Bloom on the cover looking like a well-suited hamster with cheek pouches full — was that the LP, when I first put it on, must be playing at the wrong speed. But no, that’s the start of Godzilla! Some Enchanted Evening, which always seemed rather like a half-measure as a single live album after the incredible double of On Your Feet, has been boosted to double-album length, and now comes with a bonus live DVD!

Not really meaning to, I seem to have given myself a themed, mini film festival these last two nights by watching a pair of films, both of which were about the secret, inner lives of children.

The first was The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), set in a rural nowhere in Civil War era Spain. I’d put it on my Amazon list after seeing it mentioned as a possible influence on Pan’s Labyrinth, but this was my second watching, because after getting it on rental, I liked it enough to buy it. In the film, six-year-old Ana is deeply affected by a showing of the old Universal Frankenstein at her village cinema (where the screen is a rectangle painted on the wall, and everyone brings their own chair), and when her sister tells her that Frankenstein’s monster wasn’t actually killed because he is a spirit that lives in a nearby abandoned house, Ana starts visiting, and talking to, this gentle, invisible monster. But, rather than characterising her as a child, this seems, in the film’s world, to be putting her on her first step to adulthood, individuality, and isolation: Ana’s father, spending all his time in his study with his glass beehive, seems to live in a world of his own; her mother cycles regularly into town to post letters to a man (a brother? a former boyfriend?) who never replies. One day a wounded soldier, fleeing the Civil War, turns up in the abandoned house, almost like a realisation of the spirit of Frankenstein’s monster, and Ana starts to take care of him.

The other film was Kes (1969), which I put on my Amazon list after hearing Mark Kermode praise it, and realising it was another one of those films I’d heard so much about but hadn’t seen. Set in a pretty grim Barnsley, Kes is about a fatherless boy, Billy, pretty much a loner, ignored by his teachers and bullied by his much older brother. Resigned to getting nothing out of life, he’s nevertheless passionate, almost poetic, about a young kestrel he trains to feed from his hand.

Both films encase their young leads in private imaginative worlds, and both get remarkable performances in return. It’s amazing to think Ana in the first film is just six — in some of the later scenes her face seems ageless, almost ancient — while Billy in Kes looks already hardened against all that the adult world can throw at him. (Almost, but not quite.) In both films the kids find an intensely private focus for their burgeoning individuality and imagination, only to have it broken by the cruel harshness of an uncaring world. The difference is that, with Spirit of the Beehive, because Ana’s world was so much of the imagination to start with, even when events in the real world take it away from her, she’s still left with something. Kes is far more brutal and hopeless, but all the same I felt there was hope for Billy despite his obviously grim prospects, simply because he at least had something he felt strongly about, something that would always be there as a refuge against his unremittingly bleak world, which is more than can be said of his endlessly bickering, selfish, mother and brother.