STACIA BLAKE
“My story has written itself,” Stacia Blake tells Prog. “It’s been written by people who’ve never met me or spoken to me. Then when I say something people say, ‘Oh, that can’t be true, because I’ve read it somewhere else.’ And I go, ‘Well I was there!’”
There are many stories about Stacia, Hawkwind’s dancer and performance artist during their golden era of the early 1970s. According to some reports, she joined the band at the behest of lyricist Robert Calvert. Other accounts state that she first saw Hawkwind at the Isle Of Wight Festival, that she made her live debut with them at Glastonbury in ’71, that she was romantically involved with Nik Turner and had once been booted out of ballet school for being too tall. Her Wikipedia entry still lists Ireland as her place of birth. None of these things are true.
The second-hand mythology surrounding Stacia is partly down to her wariness of the music press. An intensely private person, she kept a low profile during her downtime with Hawkwind, preferring, for the most part, to shun interviews. After parting company with the band in 1975, she relocated to Germany with her husband Roy Dyke (of Ashton, Gardner & Dyke fame) and more or less disappeared from public view. Stacia eventually settled in Ireland, studied at various art colleges in the 90s and has since exhibited her work in Asia and across Europe.
For diehard Hawkwind fans – whom she calls “Hawkwind family” – she remains an iconic figure, the statuesque presence whose interpretive moves (either semi-naked or nude) formed an essential part of the band’s audio-visual experience. “We were all a vital part of the live show,” she says today, pushing back her mane of grey hair. “It was all about free expression.”
It was, too, a challenging role for a woman in the
