Hawkwind at Cardiff Castle, 24 July 1976

In the sweltering summer of 1976, Hawkwind played a memorable open air show at Cardiff Castle, where they were special guests on a bill headlined by Status Quo. This is the concert where Robert Calvert menaced the audience with a dummy Sten gun, and Mick Farren wrote this famous pocket portrait of him in his review for NME: “In black leather jodhpurs, riding boots, head scarf and flying helmet, he comes on like a cross between Biggles and Lawrence of Arabia with definite S&M undertones.”

In January 2025, I came across a B&W picture of Robert Calvert backstage at this show, taken by Yuji Kaida, journalist and photographer for the Japanese publication Rock Magazine.

I contacted Rock Magazine's archivist Satoru Higashiseto, who kindly shared the rest of Yuji's B&W contact sheets with me, plus a box of 36 colour slides. These amazing images - presented here in the order they were taken - have remained unseen for nearly 50 years... until now.

(The full credit for all of these images is: Rock Magazine/Yuzuru Agi Archive. Photos by Yuji Kaida, provided by Satoru Higashiseto.)

These are the surviving B&W prints that Yuji took, plus his contact sheets from the show...

Robert Calvert with Yuzuru Agi, publisher of Rock Magazine

During his time at Rock Magazine, Yuji Kaida photographed bands including Queen, Todd Rundgren, Supertramp, 801, Eno, Kevin Ayers, Daevid Allen, Gong, Van der Graaf Generator (some of which will appear in my forthcoming book Rock And Role: The Visionary Songs Of Peter Hammill And Van der Graaf Generator), Pretty Things, Doctors Of Madness, Television, Talking Heads and Ramones. He's since gone on to become one of the leading artists of paintings/posters featuring Godzilla and other Japanese movie monsters!