White Line Fever: The Autobiography

by Janiss Garza

I’d seen Hawkwind before – not at the beginning, when they were known as Group X, though. The entire audience looked like they were having an epileptic fit, all six hundred of ’em doing the same move. I remember thinking, ‘Well, I have to join them – I can’t watch them!’ I wanted to get a spot playing guitar. Their lead guitarist, Huw Lloyd Langton, had just left the band – disappeared, really. They had been doing a gig at the Isle of Wight festival. They weren’t really playing at the festival, though; they played outside of the festival – how’s that for being alternative? Anyway, a bunch of them were sitting around a campfire and Huw had done something like eight tabs of acid. ‘I’m going for a walk, lads,’ he told the others, went over a hill and nobody saw him again for something like five years! That’s the way things were in Hawkwind – loose, very loose. Huw did re-emerge a few years later, in a band called Widowmaker (not Dee Schneider’s 1990s project, which we’ll come to later).