Stacia Blake: the beating heart and topless soul of Hawkwind
I don’t want to blow your mind or anything, but Hawkwind weren’t exactly known for their feminine energy.
As with any band that ever counted the one and only Lemmy Kilmister as one of its members, they were a band with all the unreconstructed masculinity of an episode of Men Behaving Badly, but, like, 25 years earlier.
They were prog but without all the nerd shit. Taking that movement’s tendency to go into ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, then turbo-charging the volume and speed before adding some bonkers heavy riffs as the final cherry on top. They were a home away from home for a specific kind of teenage boy in the early 1970s, perhaps the kind that wanted the atmosphere of a football match but found the game boring as sin. Forming in 1969, they were arguably one of the bands that showed the direction that rock was going to go in over the next decade.
Yet something was missing.
True, they had the instrumental chops, the songs and the chemistry as a live act, but at the time, that wasn’t quite enough. Nobody wanted to admit it, but image is important even in the world of hard rock, and Hawkwind had all the sex appeal of a Magic: The Gathering tournament. This was until the brand’s flautist (yup, flautist) Nik Turner met a fan of theirs at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival. A statuesque young woman, hugely ambitious and, to be blunt about it, absolutely stunning. Her name was Stacia Blake.
Stacia stayed on Turner’s mind. Which checks out; she had that effect on most people. However, she wouldn’t become a member of the band until a year later. She’d stayed in touch with Turner, on and off, then hitched down to see them in Cornwall at the Flamingo Ballroom in 1971. This time, when hanging out with the band, she asked if she could dance with the band on stage. Remember the unreconstructed masculinity part of this band? Yeah, they said, “Sure, so long as you take all your clothes off and paint your body.”
To the shock of absolutely everyone in the band, she said yes.
How did Stacia take Hawkwind to the next level?
Put simply, Stacia added the glamour that made Hawkwind one of the best live acts of their generation.
Not just because she was a beautiful young woman who’d end most Hawkwind shows sans knickers, but because she was just as much a part of the band’s anarchic, creative spirit as anything else. In an excellent interview she conducted with Louder, she talked through one of the routines she broke out onstage, all of them choreographed by her with no input from the band.
In this routine, she played “a robot who’s given a pill and comes to life, then at the end of the sequence the pill starts to wear off, and he begins to turn back into a robot and becomes frantic, because he doesn’t want to return”. For the next four years, she was arguably the most famous non-Lemmy member of the band. Not just a dancer, but a genuine icon as Hawkwind evolved from just another bunch of ’60s burnouts to one of the biggest cult bands in the UK of the time.
Which makes the question of why she was suddenly cut from the band in 1975 such a tough one. It was very much that way around, to be clear. Stacia is a famously private person who never, ever talks in any detail about her departure from the band, but one thing is clear from the way she talks about the departure. It was absolutely not her idea. She picked up work where she could, married her partner, Roy Dyke of Ashton, Gardner and Dyke and disappeared from the spotlight.
Despite the acrimony of her departure, it’s clear she has endless love for the experience of being in Hawkwind and especially for the fans, who she calls her “Hawkwind Family”. So much so that in 2019, she made a surprise return to the stage during Nik Turner’s set at the Kozfest Psych Festival in full hippy goddess getup and owning the stage as she’d never been away.
To many, she was “just the dancer”, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Stacia Blake was the heart and soul of Hawkwind, and they were never the same after she left.