Liftoff
On 12 May 1967, Pink Floyd played a concert called “Games for May” at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. It was the first concert in Britain to combine a light show with quadraphonic surround sound, routing audio through a custom device called the Azimuth Co-ordinator that panned signals across four speaker stacks. A man dressed as an admiral handed out daffodils. A bubble machine stained the venue’s upholstery so badly that the band were banned from ever returning.
Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd had already been pushing boundaries at the UFO Club on Tottenham Court Road, performing Interstellar Overdrive, a ten-minute group improvisation built on Barrett’s fractured guitar riffs and Rick Wright’s organ drones. Their debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967), opened with Astronomy Domine, Barrett and Wright trading vocals over tremolo and reverb while a voice read planet names through a megaphone. These were not songs about space so much as attempts to sonically reproduce the sensation of leaving Earth. Barrett’s mental decline removed him from the band by early 1968, but the template was set: long-form structures, electronic texture, cosmic subject matter, and a refusal to respect the three-minute pop single.
The Ladbroke Grove Engine
Space rock’s true engine was Hawkwind, and Hawkwind came from a completely different world. In August 1969, guitarist Dave Brock and saxophonist Nik Turner played their first gig as Group X at the All Saints Hall in Notting Hill, performing a twenty-minute jam on the Byrds’ Eight Miles High because they had no songs. BBC DJ John Peel was in the audience and told event organizer Douglas Smith to keep an eye on them.
By 1971, the band had two electronics players, Dik Mik Davies and Del Dettmar, both operating EMS VCS3 synthesizers. The VCS3, a portable semi-modular unit costing about 350 pounds, became the defining instrument of British space rock. Its three oscillators, noise generator, ring modulator, and pin-matrix patchboard let players produce sweeping, disorienting textures without any keyboard training. Hawkwind ran their VCS3s through everything, surrounding Brock’s power chords with oscillators slowly cranked up in pitch to achieve a sensation of sonic “lift off.” On In Search of Space (1971), with its Barney Bubbles die-cut gatefold sleeve, the twin electronics attack gave the band a sound no one could replicate.
The live show became something larger. Stacia Blake, a six-foot-tall bookbinder, joined in 1971 as a dancer, her body painted in luminescent paint, moving through a light show by Liquid Len that projected astronomical and electronic images onto a screen behind the stage. Robert Calvert, a South African-born poet who had formed the street theatre group Street Dada Nihilismus in 1967, directed performances with spoken-word interludes. Lemmy Kilmister joined on bass. The full package, a continuous two-hour multimedia assault of improvised rock, dual-synthesizer noise, projected visuals, dance, and poetry, was documented on Space Ritual (1973), recorded on the December 1972 UK tour. It reached the Top Ten.
Science fiction novelist Michael Moorcock deepened the connection between pulp literature and space rock by collaborating directly with the band. His spoken-word pieces Standing at the Edge of Time and Warriors appeared on Warrior on the Edge of Time (1975), loosely based on his Eternal Champion mythology. Moorcock earned a gold disc. The collaboration peaked with The Chronicle of the Black Sword (1985), a theatrical staging of his Elric saga, fusing live rock performance with narrative science fiction in a way no other band attempted.
The Radio Gnome
Across the Channel, Daevid Allen, an Australian beatnik and former Soft Machine guitarist, formed Gong in Paris. Allen played glissando guitar using a metal bow for ethereal slides; his partner Gilli Smyth contributed “space whispering,” half-sung vocal textures layered into the mix. Synthesizer player Tim Blake joined in late 1972, adding bubbling electronic swoops, and guitarist Steve Hillage arrived in January 1973 with wah-wah leads that spiraled through Allen’s absurdist compositions.
The Radio Gnome Invisible trilogy, Flying Teapot (1973), Angel’s Egg (1973), and You (1974), was the result. Flying Teapot was recorded at The Manor, Richard Branson’s studio in Oxfordshire, and became the second release in the Virgin Records catalogue, issued the same day as Tubular Bells. The trilogy’s narrative involved little green men from the Planet Gong on a quest for enlightenment. The plot was deliberately ridiculous; the music was not, blending Canterbury-scene jazz chops with space-rock electronics and real compositional ambition.
Drone and Devotion
Space rock went underground in the 1980s, then resurfaced from Rugby, Warwickshire. In 1982, art students Peter Kember and Jason Pierce formed Spacemen 3 with one governing principle: “Taking drugs to make music to take drugs to.” They drew on the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, and Suicide, stripping the genre to droning repetition, distorted guitars through Vox amplifiers, and as few chords as possible. The Perfect Prescription (1987), recorded as a trio without a drummer, used the absence of percussion as a structural feature, opening vast narcotic spaces in arrangements that barely moved. Playing with Fire (1989) pushed the minimalism further while the relationship between Kember and Pierce disintegrated.
After Spacemen 3 dissolved in 1991, Pierce formed Spiritualized and expanded the palette dramatically. Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (1997) was recorded after his breakup with keyboardist Kate Radley, who had secretly married the Verve’s Richard Ashcroft. Pierce layered gospel choirs, the Balanescu Quartet’s strings, free jazz from Dr. John, and orchestral minimalism over a space-rock foundation. It remains one of the most emotionally concentrated records in any genre adjacent to rock.
Festival Circuits and American Mutations
Ozric Tentacles formed at a campfire during the Stonehenge Free Festival in 1983, when Ed Wynne and a group of fellow campers discussed imaginary breakfast cereal names, launched into a six-hour jam, and randomly chose the band name. They became a fixture of the UK festival circuit, selling over a million albums without a major label. Their instrumental sound fused driving basslines, intricate guitar, and banks of synthesizers (Roland D-50, Korg Wavestation, Access Virus B) into something that owed as much to Gong as to electronic dance music.
In New Jersey, Dave Wyndorf’s Monster Magnet brought space rock into collision with heavy metal. Spine of God (1991) piled acid-damaged riffs over Hawkwind-derived drones; the EP Tab (1991) contained jams stretching past thirty minutes. By Dopes to Infinity (1995), Wyndorf had refined the attack into heavy psych-pop, scoring a minor hit with Negasonic Teenage Warhead.
Failure’s Fantastic Planet (1996) went another direction. Ken Andrews and Greg Edwards recorded seventeen tracks of layered, melancholy guitar architecture at Lita Ford’s home in Tujunga, California. Slash Records lost its distribution deal with Warner Bros., shelving the album for nearly a year. It sold poorly but became, over two decades, one of the most cited cult records in alternative rock.
Essential Listening
- Pink Floyd – The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967)
- Hawkwind – In Search of Space (1971)
- Hawkwind – Space Ritual (1973)
- Gong – Flying Teapot (1973)
- Spacemen 3 – The Perfect Prescription (1987)
- Ozric Tentacles – Erpland (1990)
- Monster Magnet – Spine of God (1991)
- Failure – Fantastic Planet (1996)
- Spiritualized – Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (1997)
- Spacemen 3 – Playing with Fire (1989)
- Gong – You (1974)
- Hawkwind – Warrior on the Edge of Time (1975)