Hawkwind's Warriors on the Edge of Time & Lost BÖC/Moorcock Collaboration

A recent cover story in Prog magazine delivered a deep dive into the classic Warrior on the Edge of Time album by Hawkwind.

I covered this album in a previous newsletter, and it’s a favorite of fantasy and sci-fi literature fans because of the deep involvement of author Michael Moorcock. Here is an excerpt of the album origin story from the Prog article:

…the band had already started putting new material together, based around a rough concept suggested to them by leading fantasy author and regular collaborator Michael Moorcock. In fact, there had been talk for a while of mounting a full-scale theatrical rock show based around his Eternal Champion books, with Arthur Brown earmarked for a lead role. In the end, this didn’t come to fruition, but a couple of Moorcock’s spoken-word pieces - Standing at the Edge of Time and Warriors - that had already been in the band’s live set for some time would appear on the new album. And the title that Moorcock gave them - Warrior on the Edge of Time - positioned Hawkwind away from their science-fiction roots, aligning them instead with the burgeoning ‘sword & sorcery’ genre.

Can you imagine if they had pulled off the Eternal Champion theatrical rock show?** The article also provided a sidebar overview of Moorcock’s involvement with the band. Here’s an excerpt:

Moorcock and his band The Deep Fix had their debut (and only) album New Worlds Fair, which featured members of Hawkwind, released on United Artists at the same time as WOTEOT (matt: “Warrior on the Edge of Time”). Moorcock’s original version of Kings of Speed was demoed for this album, but didn’t make the final cut. Another Moorcock-initiated project relating to Hawkwind also began in 1975 - the writing (by Michael Butter worth)of notorious SF pulp The Time of the Hawklords, wherein Hawkwind fight the forces of darkness in a post-apocalyptic London.

The Time of the Hawklords has had some very cool music-themed book covers

A couple of years ago, I explored writing an RPG adventure based on Warrior on the Edge of Time as you can see from these fragments from my notebook:

My attention turned to other projects so the adventure never got past the research stage. I was especially inspired by Michael Moorcock’s distinctive spoken word pieces for Warrior on the Edge of Time, which you can hear below:

The Lost BÖC/Moorcock Collaboration

“Standing at the Edge” from Warrior on the Edge of Time includes the phrase “The veterans of a thousand psychic wars,” which Michael Moorcock would repurpose for his lyrical contribution to the Blue Öyster Cult classic song “Veteran of the Psychic Wars.” In the BÖC song, the lyric is “You see me now a veteran of a thousand psychic wars.”

Enjoy Buck Dharma ripping it up on guitar in this live version of the tune:

“Veteran of the Psychic Wars” was famously one of three Moorcock/BÖC collaborations, along with “The Great Sun Jester” and “Black Blade.” Many BÖC fans, however, are unaware that there was almost a fourth Moorcock collaboration in the band’s catalog. Their 1983 album The Revolution By Night included a song called “Feel the Thunder.” whose lyrics tell a biker ghost story. The words and music were written by BÖC vocalist Eric Bloom. Bloom first presented it to the band, however, with a Michael Moorcock lyric. Here is how he explained it in issue 56 of Kerrang magazine from 1983:

“Feel Like Thunder” (sic) happened that way. It was originally called “Sleep of a Thousand Tears” and had lyrics by Mike Moorcock, whom I’ve regularly worked with for some years. But the other guys didn’t like Moorcock’s storyline, so I changed it around.

The title “Sleep of a Thousand Tears” was later used for a track on Hawkwind’s The Chronicle of the Black Sword album.

I presume the lyrics that Bloom used for the potential BÖC song were the same or similar to what was used in the Hawkwind song (although BÖC often rearranged and cut the words of their lyrical collaborators to better suit the music). Each couplet of “Sleep of a Thousand Tears” matches up well with the melody of the verses for “Feel the Thunder.” The Hawkwind lyrics, however, are sparse. Here is the full song:

With your white arms wrapped around me
And locked in embrace so cold
We slept a thousand years or more
To awake in a land of gold
Where the king of the world was a creature
Both man and woman and beast
Under landscape boiled with a million strange flowers
And the sun set in the east
And we were heroes, you and I
By virtue of age and skill
And we rode to the land at the edge of the skies
To an emerald tower on a hill

The Hawkwind lyrics provide enough lines for one and a quarter verses when mapped to the BÖC song, which has two verses. And there is nothing in “Sleep of a Thousand Tears” that would line up with the intro, chorus, or outro lyrics of “Feel the Thunder.” Moorcock mailed his lyrical contributions to Eric Bloom, so they never collaborated on song creation in person. Like other outside lyricists for BOC (e.g., Sandy Pearlman, Richard Meltzer, John Shirley, etc.), he likely provided more lyrics than what were ever used. I was unaware of this lost Moorcock collaboration when I visited the Museum of Cult in the 1990s, and so did not ask the wise Bolle Gregmar¹ if a demo existed that we could listen to. Therefore, I must leave what BÖC’s “Sleep of a Thousand Years” could have sounded like to your and my imagination.

** Remember when I rhetorically asked what if Hawkwind had “pulled off the Eternal Champion theatrical rock show?” Well, they had a second chance to add visual elements to support their Moorcock-inspired music when they toured to support The Chronicle of the Black Sword album. Dave Brock talked about the tour plans in the 1985 issue #108 of Kerrang, and here is how the show was described:

“…Hawkwind fanatics may well be aware of the intricacies involved - backdrops and four separate projections creating a 3-D effect including flying dragons…a mammoth undertaking indeed!”

I would have loved to have seen that tour! To top it off, check out the amazing outfits and shield featuring the symbol of Chaos in the picture below from the Kerrang article:

1. Sending healing wishes to Bolle; I think of you often, my friend