Alan Davey

Alan Davey first gained notice through his longtime role in the pioneering space rock ensemble Hawkwind, where his bass and keyboard work helped shape the group’s sound across multiple eras. Since the late 1970s he has remained a fixture in Britain’s progressive, hard-rock, and experimental circles, recognized for striking the bass strings in guitar fashion to generate a thick, weighty timbre. That approach appears across an array of projects: the straightforward hard rock of Gunslinger on their 2008 album Earthquake in E Minor, the Middle Eastern-tinged metal of Bedouin captured on 2006’s Extremely Live 2003, the psychedelic electronica of Psychedelic Warriors documented by 1995’s White Zone, and the dense space-rock attack of Alan Davey’s Psychedelic Warlords heard on 2017’s Disappear In Smoke.

Born in Ipswich, Suffolk, on September 11, 1963, Davey received his first bass—a Rickenbacker copy—at age fifteen. Untrained in conventional plucking technique, he strummed the instrument instead, producing a tone reminiscent of Lemmy Kilmister’s playing on Hawkwind’s Doremi Fasol Latido, an album Davey admired intensely. He therefore immersed himself in studying Lemmy’s distinctive approach, and the two musicians later became close friends. In 1979 Davey launched the hard-rock band Gunslinger, which built a loyal local audience yet dissolved without securing a recording contract. Four years later he mailed a demo to Hawkwind co-founder Dave Brock, who immediately asked him to join; Davey remained with the group through recording and touring until 1996, departing after a Greek tour. He next assembled Bedouin, merging hard rock with Middle Eastern elements, and also issued a 2003 solo album under the same name while fronting the Motörhead tribute act Ace of Spades.

Davey’s debut solo record, Captured Rotation, appeared in 1997, followed by Chaos Delight in 2000. That same year he took part in Hawkwind’s thirtieth-anniversary concert, prompting his return to the lineup from 2001 through 2007. During this period he also contributed to the black-metal outfit Meads of Asphodel, staying until 2014. In 2008 he reconvened Gunslinger for their first album, Earthquake in E Minor. Two years afterward he joined Hawklords, a collective of former Hawkwind members, and in 2012 helped establish the Psychedelic Warlords, another Hawkwind-rooted ensemble devoted to performing classic Hawkwind albums live in full. The solo outing Cybertooth emerged in 2013 and reached American listeners only in 2017, the same year Sputnik Stan, Vol. 1: A Fistful of Junk was released. A 2019 Psychedelic Warlords concert document, Hall of the Mountain Grill Live (London 2014), followed, while 2020 brought the four-disc archival set Four Track Mind, compiling home-recorded demos from throughout Davey’s career.