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@ Cozmicb, comme pour Winsterhand avec les Pretty Things si tu lis l'anglais je peux avoir accès a ces articles, si ça te branche (ou d'autres) un petit message et...

Rude and Banana Guitar Playing with Gong
Profile and Interview by Steve Turner, Beat Instrumental, December 1971

Gong: Mysticism Before Noon
Interview by Fred Dellar, NME, July 1974

Gong: Look! There's A Pothead Pixie Arriving
Report and Interview by Chris Salewicz, NME, October 1974

Gong: You See A Lot Of Frenchmen With Berets... But Not Too Many With
Fried Eggs On Their Heads
Report and Interview by Chris Salewicz, NME, December 1974

Gong: Imperial College, London
Live Review by Miles, NME, November 1975

Gong: Demise Of Teapot Heralds New Obscure Era
Interview by Chris Salewicz, NME, February 1976

Gong: Shamal
Review by Miles, NME, March 1976

Steve Hillage.... Electric Gipsy
Profile and Interview by Andy Childs, ZigZag, February 1977

Gong: Live Etc.
Review by Phil Sutcliffe, Sounds, August 1977

Gong: Magik Brother, Mystic Sister; Gong Est Mort — Vive Gong!
Review by Fred Dellar, NME, November 1977

Steve Hillage: Woggle Head
Profile and Interview by Nick Coleman, Independent on Sunday, January 2007


Eric

Grand Merci à toi Hardprog, en particulier pour les "Best".

Merci beaucoup pour les nouvelles archives (en particulier le Best de décembre 77 !)
J'ai dévoré celui de décembre 72 (Soft Machine, Hawkwind, Steve Miller Band...)

Merci aussi pour la proposition de cericpop, j'adorerais lire les articles du NME et des autres !!!

Rude and Banana Guitar Playing with Gong
Steve Turner, Beat Instrumental, December 1971

Someone once said that if Dylan Thomas was alive now he'd be writing for a rock group. Daevid Christopher Allen is the perfect example of the idea behind this statement coming true. Daevid is the literary eccentric of the rock age -- an age where the medium has switched from the printed page to the visual and aural and his talents are currently being unleashed through the amazing Gong.

Daevid began life in Melbourne, Australia, where he played in his own jazz group, The Daevid Allen Trio, at the end of the fifties. He became attached to the Australian underground of the time which was termed 'The Push', "That was such a great name," said Daevid. "It meant that we were always there pushing ahead." Even in the early sixties Daevid was growing his hair long which at this time was an automatic passport to rejection by the society.

After a few un-exciting jobs Daevid decided to leave Australia. "I left because of the heavy materialistic aspect and a couple of friends suicided at the same time. I just got this bug in my head that I should split." A couple of his friends stowed away on the boat with him as it left Australia and through devious means and a strange relationship with the ship's captain all arrived safely in Greece. After hitching around Greece and the surrounding islands Daevid turned up in London in mid-1960.

He found somewhere to live in Islington and remembers that the local children used to ride at him on their pushbikes shouting 'Beatniks! Beatniks!' They in turn would spend their time riding around the city on pushbikes "just drinking it all in."

As a writer and poet in addition to being a musician Daevid has always had a great appetite for experience. On being both a poet and musician Daevid explains, "It's all the same. It's the same energy but different techniques. A poem is something that comes through you — you're just a radar station to pick them up. Ideas are bigger than men."

After a short while in Britain Daevid put an advert in the New Statesman saying 'Writer/jazz musician looking for barn or woodshed to live in for £2 a week.’ The reply that came was from a family in Canterbury, Kent — the Wyatt family with son Robert. "I found Robert who was fifteen at the time and a real prodigy," says Daevid. He was a real influence to me. It was a great time of feeding each other. I'd just discovered Ornette Coleman and this whole period revolutionised me."

Around this point Soft Machine were formed in Canterbury with Kevin Ayers, Mike Ratledge, Robert and Daevid. Speaking of Daevid, Wyatt says, "We were all incredibly influenced just by the scope which he thought one musician could cover. He was very important to all of us. He was first musician that I knew who didn't feel that there was any area forbidden to him."

Cheese-Rock

Soft Machine soon became one of the most dominant forces on the London 'underground' and Daevid managed to combine his poetry with the music. However, circumstances seem to dictate that he should leave the group before they even made their first album. The most decisive factor was that the Home Office refused him a work permit but internal politics were equally responsible. "At the beginning," recalls Daevid, "I was very much involved with the musical side of Soft Machine, but at the end I had very little involvement — that's why I left. Also we all had big ego problems in those days and it was the survival of the fittest. It was more to do with my own lack of understanding of the cosmic laws. I cut a lot of heavy trips on everybody and they put a lot on me."

Somewhere in the midst of all these events Daevid took up residence in France where he and Gong still live. Here, he 'experienced' the existence of another planet — inhabited by the pothead pixies, a mysterious race of little beings. Through this he formed his own mythological world and one of the numbers he now performs is The National Anthem Of Planet Gong. "Gong was formed before the French revolution. It was completely freeform, no structure, no rhythm section, two girl singers a flute player and me playing glissando guitar," says Daevid.

Daevid describes the music of Gong as being 'Cheese-rock'. Asked what the definition of cheese-rock is, Daevid replies, "Rocks are hard and cheese is soft ... He adds that Gong features "rude and banana guitar playing." Bananas are another important part of the Daevid Allen mythology and are thrown into descriptions and conversations so as to inject a little absurdity. "Bananas are symbol of absurdity," says Daevid.

"It's the perfect antidote to seriousness. There's nothing worse than continual seriousness. Because of this leaning towards the pataphysical (science of the absurd) there have been comparisons made between Gong and Mothers. However, Daevid quite pleasingly points out, a French newspaper made the distinction by noting that, "Zappa is a businessman but Allen is f------ crazy."

As a guitarist Daevid says: "I had a total dislike for fashionable guitar playing. The result is either avantgarde or demoted guitar playing." On stage he uses a Gibson De-Luxe and an original Fender which was given to him by ex-Animal, Hilton Valentine. Captain Beefheart and Jeff Beck are two guitarist that Daevid admires although he has a lot of respect for Frank Zappa as an ideas man.

Gilli Smyth provides Gong with 'space whisper' which Daevid describes as being "a totally original form of singing. In the end Gilli is the only person in the band that is without precedent." Kevin Ayers is on bass guitar and vocals, contributing half of Gong's material. Pip Pyle is the drummer and is ex-Chicken Shack and Symbiosis. "Pip has a very strong and streaming style," says Daevid. "There's been a big difference since he joined." Alternating with Ayers on both bass and lead is Christian Tritsch. Daevid describes him as "an amazing cat. He's the earth of the group in every sense. He calms everybody in their freakiest moments." On saxophone is 'The great eccentric Blumido Bad De Grasse' -- in Daevid's own words. "He was only the sax player that Robert Wyatt said he could play with; He's the most lyrical reed player I've ever come across," he continues. Driving the van is the 'switch doctor' -- Venus De-Luxe, "the only de-luxe roadie in the world," as Daevid explains.

Elements of Surprise

To see Gong is to see possibly the most avant-garde rock group around. They make no attempt at being anything other than a rock band yet manage to destroy most of the pre-conceptions the average listener is likely to have regarding rock. "It's got a reputation of being the anarchy of absurdity," says Gilli. "It's the element of surprise and the unexpected."

The group make their stage entrance to the sound of pre-recorded tapes and at a carefully prepared moment in this recording Gong crash into action. Christian Tritsch looks something like the leader of the Gay Liberation Front dressed in ankle-length red coat and complete with matching lipstick and eye shadow. He plays bass while Kevin Ayers remains offstage for the first half of the act. A female juggler begins throwing balls around the equipment all evening.

The numbers which seem to have the most audience appeals are those on which Ayers take vocal and are presumably by him. One of these is entitled ‘Clearance In Wonderland’ and is an excellent reggae number with serious musical treatment. Ending the show is a 30-minute number which must be entitled ‘Do It Again’ for that was the phrase repeated over and over like a mantra throughout the song. Beginning with 'Je T'Aime ...'-type erotic space-whispers from Gilli it reaches its climax in an almost revolutionary exortation by Ayers to 'Do It Again'. Throughout the number Ayers proceed to act out a permissive version of Elvis Presley using the services of both his guitar and the mike.

Gong seem to reflect much of the attitude that pervaded the '66-'67 era. 'Under-ground' in its truest sense, the average age of its members must be in the late twenties and most of these musicians were original forces in the underground evolution. I have a distinct feeling that Daevid Allen is one of the few true geniuses that have been thrown up by the rock media. As rock seems to have substituted literature in many cases it is not hard to imagine that Allen is a Dylan Thomas of another age. Dylan Thomas died before his genius was fully realised but there's a chance that Daevid Allen can be spared that fate.


Gong: Mysticism Before Noon
Fred Dellar, NME, 13 July 1974

FRED DELLAR. Nothing strange about that name is there? It's sort of, well, homely, Comforting. And he lives in Badger's Walk, too. A far cry from the gruesome BERT CAMEMBERT and HI. T. MOONWEED, members of GONG, who do grotesque things as a matter of course. For example, they recorded an album amid the trees so as to utilise the psychic feedback from the arboreal atmosphere. Are they fakers? Will the Hercule Poirot of cassettes and cartridges sniff out their grisly secret? Read on.

IT WAS 11.30 a.m. at the Manor, and Yoni the Witch hadn't really been doing her stuff. Gong – or, at least, half a Gong – were at the studio but unable to finish their album or even rehearse for their next concert because of a power cut.

Hi. T. Moonweed stymied by the lack of an acoustic synthesiser, partook of some dubious black smoking mixture and went into one of his notoriously long raps.

"You shouldn't really have booked to talk to Daevid in the morning", he said, explaining the absence of Daevid Allen, a.k.a. Bert Camembert, Dingo Virgin and Christopher Longcock, "he's very much into mysticism before noon and I don't expect we'll see him until the power comes on at four."

The Manor's usual bevy of beauties were industriously engaged in throwing old chairs onto the open fire in an effort to heat the now uncentrally-heated building.

Moonweed, whose passport describes him as Tim Blake from Northwood, Middlesex, dodged some flying embers and enlightened me further.

"Daevid and Gillie Smyth are still at the house – but they'll be over when we can get rehearsals going.

"We're resident in Britain now and we've got this place just a few miles from Kiddington... as you know, we used have a place in France, it was huge and had marvellous grounds and only cost a hundred pounds a month. But the landlord wanted to sell it and wanted us out – so now we're over here!"

Other Gong-ites appeared and warmed themselves around the burning chairlegs. It was left to guitarist Steve Hillage to become self-elected Gong historian.

"Daevid first came to England in 1961 having been a wandering Australian beatnik – which he still is – and he placed an ad with The Times in an effort to find somewhere to live.

"This was answered by Robert Wyatt's mother, so Daevid became the part of the Canterbury scene, from which Soft Machine emerged. These people came together with musicians from Bishops Stortford like Lol Coxhill, Steve Miller and Pip Pyle, who had a band called Bruno's Blues Band (later to become Delivery)."

Then follows a hazy part of the Allen story but what is certain is that he went to France as one of Soft Machine's two guitarists (the other being an American named Larry Nolan) and was not re-admitted to this country at the end of the tour.

"Daevid originated a style of guitar-playing in which he produced sounds with the aid of a metal bow. He arrived in Paris with Gillie who was already doing her 'space-whisper', which is really cosmic woman speaking. More musicians joined in and together they came up with an album called Magick Brother, Mystick Sister which BYG put out in 1970 – this is my favourite record, clear and full of air.

"They did a festival in 1968 and it was an amazing success. '68 was the year of the student revolution and everybody was getting freaked-out about that time.

"At one stage the gendamerie were lined up one side of a square, facing a crowd of students who were getting ready to attack them from the other. Suddenly Daevid appeared in a crazy costume and proceeded to walk between the two factions, playing guitar and singing silly songs. He got black-listed because of that and had to take a trip to Spain for a while... when he got back, things were cool again."

This was the time of the first Gong, the floating Gong – before Allen did his Banana Moon album.

Pip Pyle came in to play drums and hung on during the Camembert era, leaving about the time the band did its first British tour. He was replaced by Laurie Allen a jazz drummer who usually works with Lol Coxhill.

You can get an idea of how Gong sounded at this time on the Glastonbury triple-album which came out on Revelation, although Hillage states that the original recording didn't work out too well so what you hear on disc came from a later gig.

*

IN 1972 GONG quit for a while and Daevid Allen went on a long holiday.

Then came the possibility of the Virgin contract, so the band reformed and made Flying Teapot, using the bass player from Magma. This was the first album on which Hillage ("Stevie Hillside") appeared with the band.

He has vivid memories of how he came to join the band.

"I was running a band called Kahn, which recorded for Decca, broke it up and then reformed it once more with the help of Dave Stewart of Egg. We began to practice really weird music and then I heard Camembert Electrique and Banana Moon – this was in 1972 – and, though the records were quite rough in a way, they seemed to be coming from the right direction. I felt a strong affinity and later met Daevid.

"Later I toured France with Kevin Ayers and we met Gong at Fontainbleau on the 19th December, 1972, at full moon. Also around were Creme Delirium, a total laughing gypsy band, and everyone was playing.

"Suddenly a strange gentleman appeared out of the dressing-room, playing saxophone. It was Didier Malherbe ('Bloom-dido Band De Grasse') and he went to one side of the stage while I went to the other. Suddenly a spark of electricity seemed to join us – it was like an hallucination – and everyone seemed to know that I was going to join Gong.

"Apparently Gillie had already predicted that I would become a member... everyone in Gong has a similar tale of how they came to play with the band."

Didier Malherbe makes an odd rock musician. He's well in to his thirties and still plays bebop licks – the name "Bloomdido" coming from a Charlie Parker recording. ‘Eat That Phonebook’ from Gong's Angel Egg album is a typical piece of late 'forties music from the saxophonist – a task in which he's assisted by Allen, a lover of scat-vocals and one time Charlie Mingus freak.

Malherbe has been through all the changes – he played in jazz cellars, did studio work, studied classical flute, went to India for a while (where he became interested in Tibetan mysticism – one of his initial links to Allen) and also became a cave-dweller, selling his sax and playing on bamboo flute in an effort to achieve what he felt was a natural sound.

Moonweed declares that the likeable Malherbe really yearns to be a suited lounge lizard and Hillage says that he's a French Lol Coxhill, so French that he really ought to have a beret, a striped shirt and a bag of onions.

The amiable sax-man smiles at it all and moves out of the room in order to shoot a game of billiards next-door. Luckily for him the table and cues have not been attacked by the firewatchers.

*

IT'S AROUND 4 p.m. now and the electricity has been switched on. Still no Bert and Yoni arrive but Moonweed's rapping on.

He says that the new album, the third part of the Radio Gnome Invisible trilogy (which is probably to be titled You), sounds fine so far. It's more instrumental than previous affairs and there'll be far less over-dubbing.

Everyone is trying to record at the same time, unlike on Angle's Egg and Camembert, which are described as "overdubberama" by Hillage. Strangely, being-together means being-quite-a-way-apart in the manner Gong record, for while Gillie space-whispers in the studio, Didier Malherbe is being miked in the billiards room, where he likes the sound.

On Angels Egg the band recorded in the woods surrounding their French home and Moonweed declares that he received tree echo, especially from one tree which reacted sharply to a D played on the piano.

He reflects, sadly, that this self-same lump of stage-struck wood later became lightning-struck and narrowly missed Gong's cosmic roadie.

Any talk with Gong inevitably turns to the subject of the Pot-Head Pixies and the Octave Doctors who inhabit the planet Gong. Do the band actually believe in the outpourings of Radio Gnome? Didier explains.

"It began as a game, an imaginative game to explain the rapport that Daevid, Gillie and I felt. Everybody is driven by some unexplainable force and we tried to explain the almost telepathic understanding we had. But it reached the point that the thing in our imagination was in reality the thing that was imagining us!

"Legends often become real. The great British legends ... Glastonbury... King Arthur... Robin Hood... all these legends were perpetuated in the middle ages by the troubadours who in some uncanny way relate to modern rock musicians in their life style and also in that they tried to express inner truths in easy and witty parlance."

So there you have it... Gong are your actual sonic minstrels, merging their belief in the mystical, the magical and the musical in order to provide folk legends for the future.


Gong: Look! There's A Pothead Pixie Arriving
Chris Salewicz, NME, 26 October 1974

THERE'S A lot of musicians around that are going to be kissing Mike Oldfield's dirty underpants. The success of Tubular Bells has almost certainly uncovered a new area of the record market.

The colossal British sales of Dark Side Of The Moon, (which is, after all, only a very average Floyd album) are almost certainly the result of the initial Oldfield aficionados discovering just how much better their prawns and avocados tasted with the seventies equivalent of light classical music tinkling away on the hi-fi; and then looking around the record store for something a little more weighty, shall we say, to go with the veal escalope.

Now whether it's purely a question of the right time and the right place is hard to tell but – although bands on other labels like Isotope and Fruupp are almost certainly about to feel a rather pleasing wind of change – several of Oldfield's Virgin stable mates have provided slightly more esoteric variants on the theme and would appear to be riding the commercially viable slipstream established by the Crown Prince of Overdubs.

There's Hatfield And The North – definitely the Guardian reader's progressive band, the Hatfields.

And then there was Faust who blended in so nicely with the Athena proto-Dada posters on the walls and the bottle of Tuinol by the bed.

And then there is, of course, Gong.

Now Gong really are mavericks within this scope of rock music, and are loathed as zealously by some as they are adored by others.

Their greatest barrier to full public acceptance is without doubt the Gong mythology (the Planet Gong, Radio Gnome Invisible, the Pothead Pixies and a considerable amount of references to mildly prurient matters that all seem to have a rather pungent aroma serving as a nasal backdrop) which is frequently dismissed as being just that little bit too passé to be worth even considering. After all, good vibes and whimsical, hippie story lines are really not on in 1974. So it all tends to detract from the more relevant reality of Gong's immaculate musicianship which even Mike Howlitt, the Gong bassist, would have described as "lightly surreal jazz rock".

IN THE CORRIDOR to the rear of the stage of the distinctly tacky Hammersmith Palais there's little sign of the voile shirts and waisted jackets that at least a third of Gong's three thousand strong audience had been wearing.

It's hardcore Gong fan territory here – although the Gong fan will frequently be seen to wear something on his head that suggests an upturned tea cosy, he is generally indistinguishable from a standard model Round House hippy – with authentic French speaking groupies, an occasional record company man, and – would you believe? – autograph hunters.

The Gong person is epitomised by Zid who told me that he will very definitely be reading this feature.

Zid hasn't bought NME since it last had a piece written in it on Gong. Every Thursday he goes to a newsagent's close to where he lives and looks through every music paper that he can find. He will only buy if he sees Gong's name.

Zid not only doesn't like any other band of musicians – he doesn't know anything about any other band or musicians.

Steve Hillage, the band's guitarist, wanders about backstage sporting a glassy Garcia Grin. He's concerned about the imbalance between the bass and drums and the other instruments that resulted in the phasing on his guitar becoming the victim of sound obliteration.

The problem is ultimately solved with a shrug of the shoulders and a further flexing of the facial muscles.

"Places like Huddersfield and Bradford...They don't seem to like us very much there," he beams, before returning to more apt Gong matter with a lengthy monologue on the mental state of being stranded in Wreck City.

Later I discover that after a gig at Bradford University fighting had actually broken out between rival factions who felt that the set had either been "incredibly wonderful" or "incredibly dreadful".

For this to happen to any other band would seem slightly distasteful.

For Gong – whose spirit of '67 is filtered through a strongly Absurdist view of France from the standpoint of May, 1968 – it seems totally in keeping.

After all, what should you expect from an outfit that puts out odd little booklets about Radio Gnome Invisible with their Angels Egg album, uses song titles like 'Wet Cheese Delirium', and has a penchant for wearing propellers on their heads on stage?

An eccentricity that appears born of a time warp is actually only a manifestation of the band's genteel homeliness. The next day I was discouraged from arriving too early at the Gong communal farmhouse near Oxford. There would be a danger, apparently, of my disturbing the meditations of Daevid Allen.

EARLY THAT evening I find myself sitting in the village green pub at Whitney just down the road from the farm with Mike Howlitt, Gong's bass player, who sips in a quiet quaintly academic manner at a schooner of Amontillado sherry.

Howlitt, who initially came to this country as a result of the group with whom he was playing in Australia winning a trip to London (and not using the return part of the ticket) has a thought or two about playing in this country.

"English gigs have a certain quality about them which probably could be associated with sausage, egg and chips, you know."

It is, of course, only recently that Gong left France, the land of their conception.

So perhaps a little garlic on the breath is necessary to fully appreciate the Gong?

"Right. Well, I take garlic tablets daily to keep my spirits up."

Possibly what Howlitt feels is a reflection of the generally dour appearance of English audiences: "The cynicism of England and the apathy and that stodginess and the way English people are unlikely to get their rocks off and leap about," he mutters with a twang that evokes thoughts of South Africa rather than of Fiji, his birthplace.

"Except that young people aren't like that. Young people are always leaping about and jumping up and down. They've got a certain energy – at a certain age you have an innocence and a naivety and a spontaneity, you know. From about nought to about a hundred you go through these amazing sets of experiences which produce something else.

"They don't even have a good reputation in bed, the English."

Quite so.

"The East is coming into England even if it's only through the Indians and Pakistanis who are here," Howlitt continues "I think it's fine. I think it's part of a world melting. Which is why the reaction from the sort of stolid, native English person who for various misguided reasons wants to defend his territory and homeland..." – (a gurgle at the sherry) – "Cultures expanding, the mixtures of philosophies, the blending, is a result of the media becoming so developed and not a global village idea et cetera."

Yes, I see. What, though, of the possible accusation that Gong has a slightly sexist aura about it? You know, all those rather odd little journeys through rather...umm...rather unusual parts of ladies' anatomies. Well, unusual for flying teapots anyway.

"Tantric, mate. Tantric.

"The trouble with the conventional understanding of the spiritual path is that it involves denial of the world, right?

"I regard that as an interesting idea. And for a while to develop my senses I developed abstinence from all pleasures. My personality became very withdrawn and introverted. I'd find a plain boiled carrot to have an exquisite flavour.

"If you then go back into life...into experiencing life in all its Bacchanalian sense...Well, then you have heightened senses and it enables you to appreciate a lot more the little things of life.

"Which is part of the European tradition and has been for a long time.

"And I mean our show is.

"But where were we? Ah. Sexist.

"The biggest challenge in life is love, you know. Learning how to have a working love relationship. I think finally that if you can't love one person you can't love everybody and if you can't love everybody you can't love one person.

"Love ends up being simply joy."

What brought about this line of thought?

"Oh. Emotional pain largely."

Okay. Another sherry, perhaps?

"One aspect, I suppose, of what we're doing is...uhh...Eastern nodes. I have this vision of the world's folk songs. And I think rock'n'roll music is really folk music, but it's folk music of the twentieth century.

"The music that is completely native to all people...It's very much a mingling of the black and white races and now the Eastern influence has very much: entered into Western music and Western music is now affecting the Eastern music.

"So musically...this idea of a world music is one of the Gong ideals which we are, I suppose, very conscious of in a sort of way."

The Essential Question, then. Gong equals Rock?

"Oh yeah. That's very much part of it. Because I, for example, come from a rock background. Steve the guitarist is very much into rock." – (Steve Hillage, like Daevid Allen, the proverbial guiding light behind Gong, is yet another graduate of "The Canterbury Scene") – "The strong feeling of keeping what was amazing about rock'n'roll...Jimi Hendrix...the essence of rock'n'roll which is always in danger of being lost. There's an essence about it that has to be kept alive and brought forward.

"It's just the essence of life, you know."

There do, however, appear to be certain other essences possibly present in the Gong concept: "I Have a theory about all drugs...all narcotics that relieve emotional stress...is that they act on your libido – on your sex drive – and they tend to negate it. Morphine, heroin...if you remove the problem's direction you remove a large part of human and emotional crises. And in that way I regard them as particularly destructive and evil because part of the lesson of life is learning to cope with that thing, that emotion, of love.

"I think acid and dope are genuine aphrodisiacs in the sense that they heighten tactile sensation.

"The only trouble with all of these things is that the coke state of mind and the heroin state of mind is very high. You can go as high as you like but you also have to go as low as that."

"EH BRIGITTE. Pourquoi vous cachez mon stash comme meme?" a voice asks querulously across the flow of the conversation in the upstairs room at the farmhouse.

"Myself and this gentleman here," says Tim Blake, the synthesizer player, putting his arm around Didier Malherbe before losing his balance yet again and sliding onto the mattress strewn floor, "We are from another planet."

The central heating is out of order in the sixteenth century farmhouse and it's being proposed that everyone present takes a ride over to the nearby Manor to use its showers.

Didier, however, feels it imperative that the suggestion be rejected as my presence requires that "we must get to ze 'eart of ze subject."

The Charlie Parker influenced sax and flute player has been a member of Gong since its first days in France five years ago.

"I started performing as a player, I think, in my mother's womb."

A little like Salvador Dali who once claimed that the greatest experience of his life was being born, I suppose?

"No, no. Earlier than this," Didier corrects me, "I noticed that the first time I played music was with my fingers and feet. I was tapping inside the womb of my mother like this."

Alright. But do tell me why Gong uprooted itself from France and moved over here?

Didier once again: "You know the band stayed for three or four years in France. Since the beginning we have been into the idea of the Planet Gong and the ties between nations, you know.

"Also, as regards our base...Our base was not in France – it was just the planet Gong.

"Our place in France was in the woods, in the forest, and that's, you know, the Planet Gong. That house could look English or French or maybe even Polish – it's a weird house. And people there were speaking you know, French and English.

"And there is something beyond, you know, which you can call the Planet Gong thing."

Tim Blake, whose angular features look like the result of a half-finished cosmetic urban renewal programme, carries much more of the demeanour of a proselytizer: "Our house in France had this strange quality so that when you were there at the house you were nowhere else, you know.

"There was no kind of realisation of the other world. It's very good for the developing of a philosophy like that of the Planet Gong because one's deadly serious and one's not at all serious.

"If a togetherness of two people is real then in other words it's also a place."

OVER ON THE other side of the room Mike Howlitt looks a trifle sceptical. "What we really want to talk about," he grins through the smoky atmosphere "is the idea that we're expressing through the idea of extreme electronics in our music of the blenders' science and philosophy in the united life-style and union of the Aquarian age of art."

Blake nods and becomes a little less intense: "In the Gong we've got rather an interesting case because on the one hand we've got something like synthesizers. On the other hand," he says, pointing to Didier, "We've got something like this which is virtually an organic instrument given a small brass extension."

"It's like the animal having to deal with the machine. I'm the animal. He's the machine," adds the subject with appropriate Gallic laconicism.

Questions and answers about the Gong ethos collapse into a more civilised conversational style.

"But do you think it helps," the saxophonist demands of the synthesizer player, "If, for example, we lay down to the people the mythology...All these funny things? Do you think it helps them? Because a lot of people don't like it, you know."

He looks in my direction: "A lot of people say 'Come on, man. Don't bullshit me. If you want to do something to help me tell me something about my everyday life...My real life and everything.' So instead we are using this thing which is perhaps parabolic or symbolic. But it's not really because if you do a parable or a symbol you are referring to reality – a parable, a symbol...it's just dealing in a different way with reality.

"But there is an attraction about the symbology itself which is particular to Gong because a lot of bands are using symbology.

"The pothead pixies, the flying teapot, the planet Gong – are all symbols but there is also something which we look for which is just a sort of thrill, you know, like dope, you know. Which gives you a special kind of sensation.

"Just the fantastic for the fantastic."

Eric

Gong: You See A Lot Of Frenchmen With Berets... But Not Too Many With Fried Eggs On Their Heads
Chris Salewicz, NME, 21 December 1974

GONG'S HOTEL in the Avenue de Wagram in Paris is directly opposite the Salle Wagram where they are due to gig tonight. It should take about 30 seconds from bedroom to dressing-room. All in all, quite handy.

It's not necessarily going to be that handy for Daevid Allen, however. A couple of days previously, you see, he'd realised how pleasant it would be to fly down to visit a chateau in the Balearic Islands. And he obviously hadn't thought it terribly necessary to bother anyone with the trivia of his whereabouts.

Now the thing is, the various members of Gong do rather have this tendency to...to wander, would perhaps be a reasonable way of putting it.

Steve Hillage, for example, handed his key into reception immediately after checking into the hotel. Didier Malherbe has also gone missing, although it's generally believed he's visiting an uncle whose pornographic books and mistress he had once been so fond of.

The lampshade-skinned face of Tim Blake, however, has been located peering over the edge of his bedspread at a battery of ingeniously oriental mind destroyers.

Eventually he and Mike Howlitt emerge to join manager and record label owner Richard Branson – out checking on the troops as it were – and tour manager Didy Brooks and myself over a late lunch in a nearby brasserie.

As the wine is being poured a certain Mr and Mrs Bill Bruford are noticed ambling down from the direction of the Etoile Metro. Bill Bruford, late of King Crimson and Yes, is, as you are possibly aware, currently the Gong drummer.

Confusion is indubitably regnant and whether it's Gallic or Gong reasoning it's been decided that the new arrivals should stay at the Hotel MacMahon some four blocks away.

It all takes a while to sink in. But ultimately I begin to really appreciate that the initial moving spirit of the band, Daevid Allen, is currently waiting on Stand By at some Spanish air terminal over a thousand kilometres away.

So I inquire of tour promoter Georges Luton, a shade hesitantly, if there is a possibility that the gig may have to be pulled out.

How fatuous of me. Not only has it not yet been decided what time the gig will begin but there is still the minor problem that Eric Clapton is also playing Paris that night.

And this crazy Anglais thinks that just because one member of Gong might not turn up then it will be necessary to scrap the concert!

Yes, Gong and Paris blend well.

They blend with France's almost feudal, hierarchical rationale that was epitomised for history in a Reuter report to the London Times some months ago, stating that, "A man was today sent to prison for eight years for Killing his second wife – as he did his first – because her cooking was not up to cordon bleu standard.

"The judge told Noel Carriou, aged 54, in passing sentence, that he understood good cooking was an important part of married life."

It's probably true that Paris and France – and quite possibly the world, actually – really do have a need for the Gong.

PARIS IS depressed and grey and, most of all, enervating. A freak heat-wave lifting the temperature into the lower 60s coincides with the band's stay in the capital.

For the meantime the strikes are over – but a cab driver tells me authoritatively of impending revolution – though sinister bus-loads of CRS riot police can be seen on the move everywhere.

No-one seems to know exactly why.

The next day Bill and Carolyn Bruford and myself play at tourists, and come across 500 police guarding the front of the Ministere des Finances. Some seem merely impatient, others are rammed full of uprightness, while a few seem genuinely scared as they stand around waiting for a demo that, in fact, never was.

While Gong are actually on stage – yes, the gig does happen – the dressing-rooms are rifled by a ratpack of switchblade carrying blousons noirs – the French version of Hell's Angels who are, in reality, closer to a bunch of Puerto Rican extras from West Side Story.

Two hundred police arrive in full battle gear to deal with them.

And Gong arrive in France and sell out all their gigs and play numbers which incorporate mime and lyrics about the mythology of the Planet Gong. And the suspension of disbelief in their audiences is immediate.

"I WOULD like to go upstairs in my bathroom," smiles Didier Malherbe benignly. "Because in my bathroom I 'ave fantastic sound, you know. I would like to bring all the people who are in the Salle Wagram in my bathroom.

"Just for the solo. Because it has the perfect sound, man, for the perfect solo."

Sandwiched between the Salle Wagram and the chintzy pomposity of the Paris Habitat the Gong saxophonist and flautist is holding court in a cafe. His presence does not go unobserved by the rest of the customers. It is, one supposes, not unusual to see a Frenchman wearing a black beret. It is, though, perhaps a little odd that on top of the beret there should be two plastic fried eggs and a rasher of equally plastic bacon.

"The beret is a part of a face. It's a plane, you know?" I am told somewhat obliquely. "And if you take a swim with your beret you can pick up lots of jelly-fishes.

"And if you have a beret that is solid enough you can also have some tea-pots landing, obviously..."

Good, good, good. We're there already. This obsession with tea-pots... Umm, why?

"I don't know...It's a nice one, isn't it?" And Didier points to a tea-pot out of which another customer has been drinking. The customer, who looks as if he should live close to Guild-ford, settles his bill and departs. Didier adjusts his frock coat and silk scarf and places the bacon and eggs beret at an even more rakish angles.

However, while we're on the subject of tea-pots perhaps I could ask how long Gong will be associated with pot-head pixies?

In fact, perhaps we could discuss the whole question of the Gong mythology as it has been whispered in my ear that one or two of the younger members of the band sincerely believe that it is becoming something of a hindrance; that not only can the music stand on its own without the mythology but that as far as the more reactionary elements of English audiences are concerned – which probably means most of them – the adventures of Radio Gnome Invisible are a positive hindrance.

Didier shrugs his shoulders: "Well, as soon as there was a Gong mentioned there were the pot-head Pixies.

"It all depends on how you look at it...If you look at it in a sort of realistic way you can say that the Gong people set up that fantasy and chose..."

But what about it interfering with the music?

"Well, you can look at it the other way around. You can say that it's actually the Planet Gong people who are actually producing the music.

"If you think that the idea comes before the real – like Plato used to think, for example – you could say that pot-head Pixies come before Gong. Or they created Gong and not Gong creating the pot-head Pixies."

Yes, yes, yes. But does the music actually need the pot-head Pixies?

"Well. Pot-head Pixies are green and for me, in my very subjective associations, green is associated with music...And I never thought of that before I met a guy called Burton Green with whom I have recorded the first album that has my name on it.

"But to tell you a more widespread idea about ze whole thing concerning that...Is that Daevid himself – you know, Dingo? – suggested that the next album would be completely empty of pot-head pixies. And no more relation to the mythology.

"A lot of people have been putting him down for that. I was very surprised when he said that...But maybe the next Gong album," states Didier with a sage smile, "No more pot-head pixies...No more anything of that.

"I can see that there is a need for a cleaning up, you know. But I think that in a few years time the pot-head pixies will make a re-appearance.

"They help us a lot."

"AT 11.20 Daevid Allen ("aluminium croon and banana guitar") is trailing Spanish flu germs around the dressing rooms of the Salle Wagram as he shares the porcelain jar of luminous facial cream with Tim Blake and Didier Malherbe.

He mentions – in passing, as it were – how lucky he had been to get on a flight, though even after the gig Daevid appears to feel discussion of his possible non-appearance to be both unnecessary and inconsequential.

Which is almost certainly correct as it soon transpires that the concert was most in danger from guitarist Steve Hillage, who'd been almost indecently keen for Gong to knock the Paris date on the head altogether so that he could have gone off to the Parc des Expositions to see Slow Hand.

Somehow, though, the gig is totally sold out, with some 300 people outside trying to blag their way in.

Bill Bruford strolls through the tatty backstage curtaining looking a little more dapper in his coney skin coat than your standard Gong member.

He strips down to his white T-shirt and jeans as the sound of Tim Blake's synthesizer slides into the backstage area. 'Masterbuilder' – aka The Om riff – builds and builds as the rest of the Gong join Blake on stage.

The recent King Crimson percussionist immediately makes his presence felt with some splashes of clashing cymbals that Malherbe duets with in some organismic sax swirls that filter about Blake's sounds.

And then Steve Hillage and Mike Howlitt take off on their respective guitars and basses as Allen adds some fairly perfunctory rhythm guitar.

And you know what? The Gong are really rocking. I mean in no way had I ever previously thought of their music as more than impeccable jazz rock. But this is raunch of the first order with Hillage playing mental acrobats with his guitar before virtually disembowelling it on 'Perfect Mystery', the second number.

Bruford's niche in the band is quite perfect, and obviously a permanent place within the band could benefit Gong immensely. Indeed, if only on a more ephemeral level Bruford himself has obviously gained in freedom of drumming expression as his onstage confidence tells.

However, from conversations with him it would appear that Bill Bruford's future is still very much in the open; that he genuinely doesn't know whether to remain with the Gong beyond the end of their European tour on December 18.

It also does seem on the cards that life with the band could prove to be a little too much at the opposite end of the psychic spectrum to the more Calvinistic existence he was used to leading with Robert Fripp and King Crimson.

The band plays for a solid two hours, with perhaps the true piece de resistance being the seguing of 'Flute Salad' into 'Oily Way': Didier Malherbe mimes flute playing with a loaf of French bread before picking up the real instrument and creating molton squelches of mini-volcanic eruptions until the audience clap and sway with the anarchic rhythm that begins to emerge from Blake's synthesizer.

The rest of Gong pick up the flow and 'Oily Way' drifts into a thrusting mass of Zappa-esque high-grade steel power.

Daevid Allen, the man who nearly wasn't there on the purely musical level of the gig needn't have turned up.

Allen, however, it emerges from both his activity on stage and from post-gig conversation, is an essential to Gong more in the function of catalyst – as the only representative of the band still totally at one with its ideal of absurdity, and thereby welding together into a (non) corporate module the diversified insanities of ability that have evolved through individual growth.

Despite his personal lacklustre performance – due almost certainly to his illness and his rather unrealistic voyage to the Mediterranean – the presence of Daevid Allen hovers over Gong as an essential constant.

Or, as they say, "Gong is one and one is you".


Gong: Imperial College, London
Miles, NME, 22 November 1975

THE HALL was packed. It was the kind of audience that likes to jostle like mad for the first half of the set, blast a couple of huge joints and then stretch out on the floor.

Yes, the atmosphere was so thick you could cut it with a hash knife. People were going on beer runs and henna-haired Frenchmen were searching for "zee place with zee best vibrations". And we had to sit on the floor. There was even some incense and a flash or two of strobe light to give that final touch of 1967 deja-vu.

Clearlight Orchestra opened and were very competent and well structured. Some dramatic drum rolls and a good saw at the violin got people going nicely. Their sound was very clear and well separated, something that cannot be said for Gong.

With Daevid Allen no longer with them, Mike Howlett fronts on bass which was too loud and, when echoed by Pierre Moerlin's explosive drums, came over like someone beating an airplane wing with a sledge-hammer. Pierre Moerlin can be heavy, even in knee-socks and sandals, and his extended solo really elevated the proceedings, though, like most drum solos, it had little to do with the number they were playing and so had the character of an insert.

All the same it was high spot, among several.

Gilly Smith looked cool and detached, staying well away from the lights even when dueting on xylophone with Didier Malherbe on flute. Her ability was proved by the movie soundtrack for Continental Circus which she wrote and which Gong recorded with Daevid Allen. I wish she featured more in their work.

Didier Malherbe was brilliant, prancing quietly in the corner and playing exceptional eccentric solos on soprano, alto and baritone saxophones. He had a kind of Maestro-box equipped with echo for use with his flute but couldn't use it very well.

Steve Hillage was the perpetrator of an annoying hum which plagued the set and at one point he came unplugged. A witty chap behind me commented, "That's alright Steve, you can play for half-an-hour with your guitar unplugged if you want to. He's so stoned that guy!" Steve played some genuine 1960s psychedelic solos and I'm sure he's got lots more under his woolly hat. He was good, though hard to hear.

What else is there to say? They had a mystical dancer on stage sometimes. The leapers at the side of the stage enjoyed themselves. I would have enjoyed it more if the sound had been better and if we hadn't had to sit on the floor. Oh yes, they mentioned something called the Planet Gong.


Gong: Demise Of Teapot Heralds New Obscure Era
Chris Salewicz, NME, 21 February 1976

We proudly present GONG Now, in which assorted Gauls and other Foreigners explain (sort of) certain radical changes and new concepts which may extend the boundaries of culture as we know it.

THE RECEPTION for the "playback" of Shamal, the first new Gong album for 18 months, appears to have been a success. Not allowing even the Tottenham Court Road Sundown's architecture – all Benidorm niterie aluminium and smoked glass – to dissipate the vibe spun by the album and the accompanying film, members of the press and assorted music business and Virgin liggers chew the meat loaf and chocolate eclairs, look happy and point at Floyd's Nick Mason, the album's producer.

Virgin Records are treating Shamal as a major release, Gong manager Steve Lewis tells me. Treating it as if it's right up there in the same league as an Oldfield record. Which presumably reads: Big Money-maker. One also has the impression that, perhaps for the first time, Virgin are taking Gong as seriously as they oughtta.

Getting Nick Mason to produce the record ("Tell me, Nick, how did you come to produce Shamal?" "I was up at Virgin and Richard Branson asked me. That's how.") appears to be some final affirmation of the record company's faith in the band and an acknowledgement that every Gong gig sells out and that You (the last – and pretty abortive – album) cleared over 100,000 units.

At the Hyde Park West Hotel in Notting Hill Gate it's getting on for 11.00 in the evening and we've just got back (that's the band and me) from the Sundown. Gong are staying here – "corralled" might be a more apt verb – rather than at their Oxfordshire cottage so that they can get an early start for Dover and a French and Dutch tour tomorrow morning.

I end up in reedsman Didier Malherbe's room. We order tea and talk about naturopathy – well, what else? – for a while. Niquette, his lady, sits on the floor.

Ah well, I suppose you should tell me what the current position of Gong is?

"'Position'?"

Situation.

"Is big difference between position and situation."

All right then. Perhaps you can tell me what situation has the current position of Gong put the band into?

"What you mean? The situation or the people in it?"

Both in fact. With founder Daevid Allen having quit the band a year ago maybe you can tell me why guitarist Steve Hillage has now flown the fold.

"Well, there is many angles to see the thing," replies Didier, crossing his legs underneath him on his chair. "Let's say we came to a point of separation. That's more like it, right?

"I give you an example. He bought a lot of material – an enormous amount of gear for the stage, so it was more or less in the way of working with Gong, you know? When he bought it he did not know that he would leave Gong. He did not intend to leave Gong at all, I know.

"Supposedly it was meant to make Gong have, you know, a bigger sound. And at the same time this isolated him a lot because he started to be more than ever and in fact almost exclusively interested in his own researches and experiments.

"Wiz zat gear he can get the stereo echo, you know. And he is very interested in that because it's never really been done before in his style, you know.

"With the group it created a problem because it's a one-man trip. It's the extension of one man and in a group you are only one man. You see, the extension of one musician in a group is the other musicians, you see, whereas the extension of his own thing was the machine echo. He thought he could melt it with the group, but it appeared not to be possible."

What Didier is telling me is an extension of what we'd discussed earlier in the evening.

M. Malherbe reckons – and it seems a reasonable reckoning – that the ultimate striving of any musician is the successful jam, for only in that situation can the musician fully realise himself: the lack of ego required to jam successfully can only be derived from the ultimate control over himself, which he has attained through being a musician. Logically, therefore, a successfully artistic band it also an ego-less band.

"Also," Didier continues, "Steve is a kind of leader. And Gong is kind of democratic. Steve has got very much a leader personality.

"When he did this solo album he thought that it would allow him to participate more thoroughly in Gong. But it didn't because he got more interested in his own work. And also he was not very satisfied with Fish Rising and he thought he could do better.

"And that was a kind of duality that he was maybe not consciously aware himself – the fact that he wanted to stay with Gong and participate in the adventures of Gong, but at the same time he wanted to have his own thing, you know.

"So when he left it was a relief for the group."

PIERRE MOERLEN, the new drummer, has come into the room and sat down next to Niquette while Didier and I have been talking. He speaks for the first time: "More space 'coz wiz ze echo seestem all the time if you stop straight the echo never stop wiz uz.

"Steve was playing nearly everyzing in echo. Wiz ze repeat echo in stereo. One speaker here and one speaker here, on each side of ze stage. Zat was like being slave all the time to the echo. Impossible to play freely. It's good alone for him. Or with a rhythm box."

Didier nods: "It's a special trip on its own. Interesting but not group-wise."

Yeah. Steve Hillage once said to me that because of all his onstage equipment he used to go into a mental tape-loop...

Didier: "Yeah. Right. Mental tape-loop. Tu sais un loop? Une boucle?

It appears likely that Hillage is considering the possibilities of working with a synthesizer player or two. Indeed, he is turning up at gigs played by Zorch, the synthesizer band who jammed with Gong at the Meigan Fayre last year.

Also, the two Zorch members were both with Hillage backstage at London's Roundhouse after he played his last gig with Gong the Sunday before Christmas.

Last summer, with much urging from M. Malherbe (aka Badagrasse) Gong gained a keyboards player, Patrice Lemoine. So Hillage's onstage stretching-out was now being severely pulled in,

"Also," adds Didier, "Steve very much took the succession of Daevid, and he chose also the same science in a spiritual way. Daevid has gone very far into that now...into meditation" – he looks at me for a moment – "And even to Christianity!" he exclaims confusedly.

"And we are not particularly adequate to that extent.

"There is that saying: 'If God is so great, doesn't need publicity'. That's why we thought it was better to cool off anything on religion, you know, and to leave The Man just like silently face-to-face with the metaphysical question," he laughs.

"You know, it's a more humanistic Gong now. Humanism, you know, man. Working with as few symbols as possible. I believe you eventually reach the same point whether you're a spiritualist or a materialist. But we do not think it is particularly important to use the stuff...the stucco. Because symbols often mask the reality. It takes a long time to get rid of them."

Like the teapots?

A Gallic chuckle emerges from Didier's lips: "Well...Huh. The teapot!...Well, it was very deep, you know, the teapot. I personally like enormously that literature of Daevid Allen but the only problem with Gong is that it's not necessarily a good idea to melt it with music.

"That's the whole thing. If you melt literature with music both are going to suffer for it.

"Like with the You album. The music was really like a very strong entity, you know" – hits himself on the chest – "there. And the literature was there trying to put the thing in, you know, and it was a little unnatural."

NOW I was talking to Nick Mason earlier on and I asked him what he'd thought of Gong before he'd been involved with the band. And he said he'd thought it was "woolly hats with maybe equally woolly heads" – which I did feel summed up rather well all the misconceptions about the band...

M. Malherbe: "Yeah. Yeah. Woolly heads means confused, isn't it?"

...Which I think stems very much from how confused your audiences possibly are about the Pothead Pixies and the Flying Teapots and all the constant changes in the band – although as far as I can see Gong is almost synonymous with constant change anyway.

"Well, I think Nick helped us quite a lot. Personally I know he helped me a lot, you know, by cutting out things that...Because I'm not very ordered myself. (Laughs) I am a bit woolly inside I must say.

"Pierre is not that woolly. He's rather ordered and clear. Still, Nick helped him as well, although I don't know exactly how."

NOW, WHAT should people expect from the new Gong? Remember, bassist Mike Howlett's tonsils are now taking the vocals, and I'm told that Jorges Pinchevsky has become a permanent member.

Jorges is a violinist, half Argentinian Indian and half Romanian. Based for several years in Buenos Aires, he alternated between a steady gig with the. Buenos Aires Philharmonic and moonlighting with a tango band.

Then there's Shamal, the album: apart from just the reproduction, why does that record sound so good? There's a lot of freshness, a lot of vitality about it.

Let's talk about what Gong IS.

Didier: "Daevid found the name.

"Sometimes, you know, you buy a jacket and you think it's going to be your jacket but in fact you don't buy it for you, you buy it for someone else. You realise that later. (Laughs) It happens all the time. And someone gives you a jacket that's exactly made for you.

"And it's what happened with Daevid, I think. He has created something which was not exactly his thing. And it survives after him. And probably now he gets things back. He gets a good kharma back too because now he's got a good share.

"He's got an ideal situation for a man like him to realise his things: he's got a contract with Virgin, and machines, time, money, calm, peace, a house.

"So in fact by giving up and giving away – making present of that name of Gong and everything – he got himself lots of good things back.

"That's why also I think there's a kind of freshness in the Gong now. It's because there's been a complete regeneration because we came to the conclusion after the last French tour that it would be a silly idea to want to perpetrate the old ideas of Gong.

"So that's why we decided to completely abandon the ideas of the Planet Gong and everything – even if personally dig them and they've influenced me and I still like them. We just took the decision of CUT with the old thing and to do a completely new group – a new conception.

"Some of the people were the same and the thing was still the same, but to do a completely new idea of it where the music has much more importance than literature."

"And Daevid," adds Pierre, "doesn't want us to continue the story. Doesn't want. It's finished for him too."

Eric

Feeling N°1
Contenu valable, du punk, de la new wave et du rock français.
Un article sur Factory entre autres.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=OG0OXX7E
Remerciements à la source : Doume de Millau

Merci beaucoup cericpop pour tous les articles sur Gong en anglais !!!

Merci Algernon pour le Feeling !!!

Le n°2 va suivre, je le prépare.

Suite et fin des articles sur Gong car j'ai du partir précipitamment de chez moi hier soir,

Gong: Shamal
Miles, NME, 6 March 1976

THE LINEUP CHANGES have been so substantial and the musical direction has altered so drastically since their last album (You), that Gong might have changed its name as well.

Certainly Planet Gong is dead and with it have gone the teapots and pixies, mysticism, spacewhispers and the endless guitar and synthesizer notes which turned their music into a modulated wash of colours and textures.

Hi T Moonweed (Tim Blake) and his moog have gone and so has Steve Hillage, though he guests on a couple of tracks here.

Gong is still Gong though, for the very reason that Steve left: Gong is a completely democratic group, playing group music which in order to be artistically successful requires that the group be egoless. Steve with his stereo echo, his mounds of equipment and "leader personality" was dominating the group.

The most noticeable thing about Steve's departure is the space. Gong have gone from being a linear group to a fully three-dimensional one – enormous separation between instruments and phrases – a stark new formalism.

But of course that's what you get if you let an architect produce you. It is a Nick Mason production and I suppose it would be unfair of me to suggest that on first listening the opening track 'Wingful Of Eyes' sounds a lot more like a new Pink Floyd album than a new one from Gong, particularly the drum fades and Mike Hewlett's vocal.

The production is very Floyd-like, an incredible presence to everything, really true and so clear and crisp. For the first time Gong are in focus.

Also like the Floyd the album has been structured architecturally like building a house. First the framework built, good and strong, then the frills and solos added like putting in the plumbing and plastering the walls.

Zappa's ubiquitous influence still presides over a little one ('Chandra') but they strike new musical areas with 'Bambooji' which is Eastern-flavoured, a bit cliched but employing some beautiful flute from Didier Malherbe (which sounds like improvisation, but for the fact that Mirelle Bauer is playing the same notes on xylophone much of the time). Then it gets like Mikis Theodorakis (particularly his State of Siege soundtrack), but that's OK.

'Cat In Clark's Shoes', an uptempo jazz-rock number with hissing cymbals and everything, could have been written by any one of a dozen different New York outfits – at least until the end of the first section.

Then the first indications of Gong's madness show in a weird arrangement and mixture of musical styles which get more and more bizarre until they finally turn into a formal 11/8 tango complete with Jorge Pinchevsky giving a voice-over chat-up in broken Argentinian Spanish – the French got the tango from Argentina – and fiddling away violently.

It turns into an all-out jam of course, Pinchevsky being the hero of the piece. Though he only appears as a guest on the album I understand that he's now a group member. Don't blame them.

'Mandrake' is a highly scored, very melodic, rock-orchestral piece with an unusually bare and economic soprano sax solo from Didier. A repeating bass figure builds the tension with distant voices chanting the lyrics, then it suddenly breaks into a fierce gutsy, almost angry xylophone solo from Mirelle Bauer which is very effective. Jorge continues the feeling on violin and everyone else comes in.

They would never before have taken the time to build a track this slowly. By the time everything is going full blast the listener has been carefully introduced to all of the elements and is right in there with them.

But is it any good?

Oh yes, it's great. Easily the best-ever Gong album.


Steve Hillage....Electric Gipsy
Andy Childs, ZigZag, February 1977

AS I RECALL, it was the "livin' jukebox" himself, Andy Dunkley, who first assailed my ears with Steve Hillage's album Fish Rising.

At the time we were both employed on the mammoth and exhausting Dr. Feelgood tour of Autumn 1975, and were about to trundle over a few hundred more miles of the nation's motorways, when Dunkley, no doubt smitten with the same inspired madness that moves him to play so many excellent records at the Roundhouse and such places, suddenly whisked a cassette of Fish Rising from the murky depths of his stash-bag and slammed it into the makeshift cassette stereo system that he had so skilfully installed in the cabin of our truck.

Highly melodic music of a suspiciously psychedelic nature then proceeded to make our travels to Bradford or wherever we were going considerably less tedious and by the time I'd heard the album a few times I had made up my mind to investigate Steve Hillage and his music in more detail at some future point.

Well, you know how it is. A man has to do what a man has to do, and then there were those long evenings spent drinking "real ale" at the King's Head in Harrow-on-the-Hill, and all the sleeping I had to catch up on, and that unfinished manuscript...oh how time flies. The months fairly streaked past without me noticing them at all. Then before I even had a chance to say "Rip van Winkle", someone attracted my attention and informed me that Hillage had released yet another album, mystically titled L.

Discarding my by now thoroughly shabby cloak of uncertainty and lethargy, I acted like the utterly responsible human being of character and purpose I really am, and listened to the new album, interviewed Steve Hillage, and attended one of his concerts...all in the space of a month or so! Such expenditure of energy very nearly saw me to an early grave I'll have you know, but happily here I am, just about recovered, and scribbling out these notes like a reckless crackpot for the enlightenment of all you dear readers. In case you are thinking that this article will unfold into another of my mini treatises on the beneficial, humane and intellectual possibilities of popular music in the wonderful 20th century, allow me to terminate your feverish expectations here and now. This is an article about Steve Hillage (but is no less interesting for all that).

Those of you who have actually been to Stonehenge and attach great importance to pyramids and the like will obviously know that Steve Hillage was once a member of Gong, and indeed we shall talk of this period in his career at greater length later on. But first let us interrogate the man about his background and his early days as a supremo psychedelic guitarist.

"I started playing guitar when I was very young. Some unseen force inspired me to pester my parents to get me a guitar when I was nine, and I started twiddling about. After a few years I discovered I could play so I started playing with the other guys at school who were into music, and from this we evolved a group called Uriel. That was in '67/'68 with Dave Stewart and Mont Campbell...we got our drummer, Clive Brooks, through a Melody Maker advertisement. We started in 1967 and were obviously very influenced by the prevailing musical tide at the time. We were the school's psychedelic band. Eventually there came a certain point when the rest of the group decided to quit school and concentrate on the group full-time; but being the kind of serious guy in the group, I didn't want to leave school. I wanted to go to university, so I left Uriel, although I continued to play with them on a part-time basis. I also did a few concerts with a 12-string guitar.

"On leaving school I went to university at Canterbury – and I had no idea that the city had its own music scene; it was purely by chance that I happened to choose that University. It's funny, but a lot of chance things have happened to me like that. Anyway, I went off to Canterbury University, and the day I arrived I saw the Soft Machine's van parked there! I thought "What, are they playing here?"...and then I found out that Hugh Hopper's parents lived on the university campus, and I eventually sussed the whole thing out. When I met them all I really got involved in the whole scene. There was a band called Spirogyra formed at the university, and I was very friendly with them...I used to live with the girl singer. Anyway, after a while I decided that university life wasn't for me for various reasons – mainly philosophical. Also I'd got so into playing the guitar that I decided to do it full-time. I thought I’d be wasting my time if I stayed on at university, not to mention my talents. Just think: if I'd stayed on at Canterbury and evolved my philosophical outlook, I could have been a lecturer by now, in some forgotten university in Ghana or somewhere...but I decided against that, and packed it in.

"I started playing around with various musicians from Caravan and I got into jamming with people again, but because all the Canterbury musicians were already in groups I had to go to London to find people to form a group. To be honest I originally wanted to make a solo record (in fact, I always wanted to make a solo record because for a long time I've been into studio technology, but it's taken me a long time to actually learn how to use if), so I went to London, and Caravan got me a deal with their management and record company (Decca), which was very kind of them – but the deal was to the effect that they wanted me to form a group rather than make solo records. So I met various musicians and we formed a group called Khan: Nick Greenwood (who used to be in The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown) on bass, a drummer called Eric Peachey (who was in Doc.K's Blues Band), and on organ, a guy called Dick Henningham (who also played in The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown for a time as an understudy for Vincent Crane when he was ill)".

Excuse me for butting in here, but I thought it might be a good place to inform you that the aforementioned Uriel, whom Steve forsook in order to further his education, eventually became a curious but excellent little band called Egg. Unfortunately they never attained any great degree of popularity, and their forever meagre gig-sheet left them a lot of free time, time which Dave Stewart used to spend guesting at Khan gigs, so much so that he somewhat inevitably ended up playing on Khan's debut album Space Shanties, which was recorded in 1971. Back to Mr. Hillage.

"There's some good music on that record, although my whole kind of vision of what I was doing hadn't solidified by then...I was still kind of searching. My lyrics were less confident – they were more kind of surrealistic imagery, strung together subconsciously, which is alright in a way – I kind of like those dream sort of lyrics as opposed to more carefully worked out statements. Obviously it had less power than the recent stuff I've done, but it was the first record I did and it takes a while to learn the craft".

Khan lasted nearly two years. It started around the Spring of 1971 and ended in the Autumn of 1972. "After the release of Sea Shanties I became dissatisfied and decided to change the group completely in preparation for the next album. I got Dave Stewart to join permanently because Egg had gone into a decline, and I changed bass players...got in a guy called Nigel Smith. Eric was still on drums, he's a very good drummer actually. I also wrote a whole lot of new music which was much more powerful than the stuff on Space Shanties, and most of that eventually turned up on Fish Rising".

At this point the highly eccentric aggregation of cosmic loonies known as Gong entered into the life of Mr.Hillage, with quite significant results.

"While I was doing this new music, Gong did a tour of England (this was in 1971), and I got to hear of them as a result of that. They really knocked me out because they seemed to be the sole bearers of a torch that seemed to have been extinguished practically everywhere by about 1968, and they were still going on with this fantastic mixture of psychedelic music and French dadaism. I really fell in love with the group and I was quite influenced by their records while I was writing my new music. In a way I felt as if I met them on some kind of creative plane.

"At the same time as all this the Khan situation was getting very bad. The manager thought my music was becoming very uncommercial, too Soft Machiney, so the money dried up. I got a bit down in the dumps and eventually blew the whole thing out. The day after I disbanded the group, Kevin Ayers asked me to join his band (Decadence) because I'd got friendly with him as well. So I never really stopped working". (See Canterbury Family Tree in ZZ28 which, so Steve tells me, Daevid Allen has proudly displayed on his bedroom wall).

"The day after Khan's last gig I did a rehearsal with Kevin Ayers and went on the road with him three days later, which was good. It was good to play with someone else and play someone else's music; it was good training for me. I didn't really change my guitar style although Kevin's got his own idiosyncratic approach to songwriting – which, as it happens, I really like. So I had a great affection for Kevin's songs, and at the time I needed a break from the responsibilities of looking after Khan – I wanted to hang loose for a bit, I think the term is."

Before we move on, let us just side-step for one moment and mention another of Hillage's pioneering musical activities, the Ottawa Company. (See also ZZ51).

"That was really a subsidiary project while I was doing Khan. It was basically got together by Chris Cutler and Dave Stewart and the idea was simply to allow people to write rock music for unusual line-ups. It was a very exciting thing, and there was a lot of music written for it which was really what I'd call "new music"...it didn't owe very much to American jazz-rock, or English jazz, or blues, or anything...it was just a very original event. It was very enjoyable as well. We were able to write music for up to fourteen musicians and in a way I suppose it was a precursor of Centipede. It was just a one-off thing of about three concerts, and we were always planning Ottawa Part 2, but that never happened. It was very difficult to get together because you had to fit it in to all the schedules of all the different groups involved".

Right, back to the main gist of the story, where Hillage has just joined Kevin Ayers' band and gets to play on the album Banamour (highly recommended).

"Decadence only lasted a couple of months. Kevin had already recorded most of Banamour by the time I joined him, but he had a few tracks he wanted to do with me. I did 'Shouting In A Bucket Blues' which I was very pleased with – I like my guitar playing or that – and I did a few bits on other tracks. But it was all over very quickly and I went on to become involved with Gong. As I said before, I got to know them through their tour in 1971, principally because Pip Pyle was in the group and I'd known Pip since 1970 at Canterbury. When I was forming Khan he was deciding whether to join Khan or Gong, and he joined Gang because he wanted to go to France and Gong was a more appealing project all round. Anyway, I gradually met all the other people in Gong and built up a very strong relationship with them. In fact it was so strong that when it actually came to the moment when I decided to join Gong they knew it, like it was written in the sky. There was no question about it. I joined them when they were making the Radio Gnome Invisible Part 1 album and I distinctly remember the first time I worked with them.

"I drove down to The Manor, it was on New Year's Eve 1972 and very foggy and my car broke down, but I eventually got there at about 3.30 in the morning. I found the group in a slightly disintegrated state: people were on the verge of leaving, and Francis Bacon and Laurie Allan were behaving very eccentrically. It was really funny. I had a good time, though I didn't play much on the album...just mainly helped the group get it together. Giorgio Gomelski was there of course. Also known Tim Blake for quite a while before I joined Gong. I got to know him briefly when he was working with Hawkwind and then got to know him properly through Lady June. I did a lot of work as well for Lady June before I joined Gong. Anyway, Tim joined Gong just before I did and we did a lot of jamming together, which laid the foundations for future albums like Angels Egg and You. A lot of that we started off at The Manor".

Now I've only seen Gong a couple of times (although one of those occasions was at the Lyceum, where they were quite superb), and I don't possess all their records (I haven't got Banana Moon, Continental Circus or the last one), but I must admit that I've always had a soft spot for their particular brand of stoned whimsical lunacy, not to mention their sporadically excellent music...and I'll never forget the first time I met Daevid Allen. He'd obviously just finished a lightning trip round the universe and was looking slightly dishevelled and somewhat knackered, but he spoke in such a commanding and awe-inspiring manner, and with such poise and dignity that I began to think that here was no mere mortal, no common or garden space cadet. Here was a true astral traveller and one of the only real hippies in the world. I was just about to ask him if he really was 200 years old when he suddenly hooked himself onto a passing moonbeam and disappeared into the cosmos. I never spoke to him again. However, he went on to play many more gigs with Gong, as did Steve Hillage, who remembers it all thus:

"The best thing about Gong was that at its height you had like seven different people all into completely different trips, all of them with the potential of having their own bands. In a way there was too much energy there for it to be a lasting group; at certain gigs it was unbelievable because everybody was on their own trip and somehow or other it all seemed to fit together and this amazing force seemed to flow through us all. In many ways Gong, musically, represented some of the best things I'll ever do. Some of the improvisations we did were so telepathic it was incredible. Obviously we had bad nights when we played rather boring psychedelic music – you can't guarantee an A1 quality every night with that degree of improvisation, but that was part of the fun of it really.

"I played on the albums Angels Egg and You and I eventually left the group around October 1975, but by amicable agreement with record company and group I stayed with them, did a tour and played a bit on the next album Shamal. But there was a certain moment when I decided that the group as a whole were going in one direction, and I was going in another direction, and unless I left them then and there, I would be committed to making another album and doing another tour for the next six months. So I decided to leave".

And so began Steve Hillage's solo career and his subsequent rise to guitar hero status. No artist ever embarked on a solo career more prepared and more full of optimism than Steve, as he already had his first album Fish Rising in the can and loads of ideas for future projects.

"I recorded Fish Rising at the same time as Gong recorded You. In fact Virgin had offered me a solo album deal before Angels Egg. They'd heard about me and Khan and were interested, and also there was a time when we did a lot of gigs in France without Daevid Allen who'd gone off for a kind of rest in Spain, and Virgin heard some tapes of that which were called Paragong, and they liked that a lot. So it was just a question of finding time to do my own album, and in the end I decided to do it concurrently with the record You. In fact I overestimated my reserves of energy to a certain extent – I got really tired. I did most of Fish Rising in the summer of 1974, but I didn't have time to finish it until January and February of the next year, which in some ways was nice because it gave me time to consider it, but in other ways it was a bit of a drag because it broke the organic flow".

Although it isn't as powerful or inventive as the subsequent L, Fish Rising (Virgin V2031) is nevertheless and extraordinarily imaginative and accomplished album. Released from the rather communistic restrictions of Gong, Hillage's guitar work takes on a more expansive mood and is altogether a complete revelation. His sense of melody is also most appealing as is the albums preoccupation, inferred by the title, with fish.

"When I was a young lad I was a nature freak. I was into collecting all sorts of things, and eventually I graduated from grasshoppers and slow-worms into the aquatic realm, and I got into water beetles, dragonflies, sticklebacks and then gudgeon. I really got into big fish...I wanted to see them and communicate with them, and I became a very keen angler because although angling to a certain extent is a bit cruel, the only people who seem to know fish backwards are anglers. So I decided to concentrate my nature-loving tendencies on fish. And then after I got into music and started playing through echo boxes, which I started doing at university, I became involved with this idea of playing sort of "fishy music", underwater music. I started getting into creating this imaginary underwater world. So when I joined Gong I achieved the distinction of being the successor to the role of the Submarine Captain. I kept chatting about all these underwater things, so Daevid said "Right, you must be the new Submarine Captain", which is part of his whole mythology – I think it's based on Captain Nemo.

"And at that time I'd always been interested in what I call esoteric philosophy – symbolism and occultism and all that. I group that all together under the word 'esoterics'. I discovered that fish have a lot of symbolic importance – they represent sexual energy, the Piscean Age, the early Christians, and all kinds of things. So I decided to try and blend it all together on three levels: me as an artist with a deep interest in fish; the technology and mechanical act of playing "fishy music"; and the symbolic importance of fish. Although Fish Rising isn't all watery music, that's the basic element."

I don't think that an inordinate amount of copies were sold (not as many as there should have been anyway), but Fish Rising did definitely "create a buzz", as a lot of trendy pratts in the music business would say. This "buzz" was further amplified when, in order to record his next album, Steve went to Woodstock and started work with that other great optimist of our time, Todd Rundgren. Although their collaboration yielded nothing but total success, both artistically and commercially, their introduction to each other was slightly less than orthodox.

"Well obviously I'd heard the fellow's name, but I thought he was a pop singer because all I'd heard was 'I Saw The Light', which is a great song, but it's a pop song. Then while I was doing some Gong gigs a few of our more enthusiastic followers brought us a load of Todd Rundgren records and said "This is the American equivalent to what you're doing. You really ought to get into them". And then Todd Rundgren did a tour over here in '75, and they went up to him and gave him all the Gong records and said "Here's the European equivalent to what you're doing. You really ought to get into them". And previous to that Roger Powell (Utopia's computer, synthesiser and keyboard player) had really liked Angels Egg and was very fond of Gong – he'd known about them for years. So eventually I wrote to Todd Rundgren, told him I'd like to meet him and said I thought we were on a similar kind of trip. Also I'd heard the record Initiation which I really liked. Then Virgin, seizing the opportunity, asked Todd Rundgren if he'd like to produce me.

"I hadn't even spoken to him, and I thought he only produced people in order to buy more video gear, and he wanted a lot of money. Which is in fact the truth. He's totally wrapped up in his own work. He works incredibly hard, and he basically works for Utopia. He enjoys producing but he really only does it in order to finance Utopia. Anyway, it all fell together because he'd just moved his studio out to the country and he was looking for somebody to kind of test it out for him. So he worked out a very cheap deal with Virgin and I toddled over there with a few songs and we got the record together. It was a great experience and it all happened very smoothly without any fuss. I really think Todd's production work is so great. I'd say he's got the psychedelic ear, definitely".

I seem to be the only one on the Zigzag staff, besides probably Kendall, who holds any great affection for Todd Rundgren's music (Ed: this might be true), and the same no doubt goes for Steve Hillage (Ed: categorically not so). However, after careful consideration I would venture to suggest that only retarded plankton of the very lowest intellect and a few nameless pop music journalists could conceivably fail to appreciate the considerable merit of Hillage's second album L. Apart from four exhilarating original compositions,, including the monumental 'Lunar Musick Suite' there are also quite stunningly impressive interpretations of Donovan's 'Hurdy Gurdy Man' and George Harrison’s 'It's All To Much'...all embellished and beautifully engraved with Todd Rundgren's unique production work. 'It's All Too Much' in particular will, I'm sure, be eventually regarded as an indestructuble classic and the supreme example of 1970s psychedelic music.

Coincidental with his visit to America, Steve also rediscovered the urge to form a band and do some more live work.

"When I left Gong I still wanted to do some live gigs, but I didn't intend to form a band. I was thinking of borrowing National Health for a bit. But then when I was in America I went to see some Utopia gigs, enjoyed them so much, and it got me back in the mood to go out on the road again...so when I got back home, I began to toy with the idea of forming a group and eventually I decided to. And then, having made that decision, things started happening very quickly".

The band which Steve formed and which gigged remorselessly and so successfully throughout the last three months of last year consists of Colin Bass on bass (ex-Clancy), drummer Clive Bunker (ex-Jethro Tull), Basil Brooks on synthesiser (ex-Zorch), guitarist Christian Boule (ex-Clear Light Symphony), Phil Hodge on keyboards, and Steve's lady Miquette Giraudy on synthesiser and percussion. Quite a varied bunch, I think you'll agree!

"I had a vague feeling that everyone was kind of guided together. Like when we started rehearsing it all felt right and very friendly. We've got a very good astrological balance in the group: the keyboards, bass and drums are all earth signs, and the synthesiser and glissando guitar are all air signs, and I'm fire and water so it mixes very well. In a way it allows me to be in the forefront without stepping on anyone's toes".

What's glissando guitar?
"Glissando is an extension of bottleneck, I suppose, but you actually rub the strings with a roughed-up metal rod and it sets them oscillating, and you get all these wonderful resonances coming out. You never quite know what kind of harmonics are going to come out – it's a very magical sound. Daevid Allen actually worked it out from rough beginnings and Syd Barrett also used to do something like that. Daevid applied the Gong mythology to it and called it a Radio Gnome Transmitter. It's also a way of getting the optimum out of echo boxes and phase boxes. The ultimate glissando I suppose is when every resistor in your electric circuit is singing. Daevid and I have this project where we want to make the glissando orchestra with six or even eight guitarists playing in glissando harmony".

Having seen them in action at the Hammersmith Odeon shortly before Christmas, I can vouch for the group's excellence, and it looks as though they'll be undertaking more live work in the months to come, so go and see for yourself. Also in the pipeline of course, is a new album.

"I've got lots of ideas for things to do and I won't decide what to do on my next record until I get down to it. I'd quite like to connect my next album in some way to the mystical traditions of Britain. Eventually somebody's going to do that, so I might as well do it...and do it in an adult way. I found Rick Wakeman's King Arthur thing a little...well, I suppose it was entertainment, but it wasn't really art."

The incurable cynics and (Gawd 'elp us) p*nks among you may well have been misled before now into believing that Steve Hillage's music and his "esoteric philosophies" are just a load of dope-inspired hippie nonsense that belong back in 1967, when it was a lot cooler to walk around wearing velvet loons, beads and a tea cosy on your head. But frankly, I don't believe that his attitudes could ever have been any more relevant than they are today. While most other art forms, and popular music in particular, seem to be increasingly fascinated by the idea of unimaginable violence and destruction, I personally find it rather reassuring when someone as genuine and talented as Steve Hillage chooses to extol the good old fashioned ideas of peace, love and understanding.

"I try not to go over the top; I try not to be daft. Obviously there's a lot of shit in the world, and there always will be until the Golden Age, if the Golden Age ever comes. It's a kind of optimistic pessimism...you know that things aren't going to work out the way you want them to, but nevertheless you aren't going to mind".


Gong: Live Etc.
Phil Sutcliffe, Sounds, 27 August 1977

THIS IS a double album of many distinctions. For instance, I've never known a record feature the line 'have a cup of tea' so often. Very hospitable.

Then there's the polital philosophy behind it. In 'Ooby-Scooby Doomsday' David Allen reflects on the left wing and the right and sums it all up with a chorus of 'knees up mother brown'. Earlier, he asks the vital question 'Est-ceque je suis?' ('Am I?') and concludes the debate with a huge orchestrated 'Ah-tishoo!', Perhaps adumbrating the hypothesis 'I sneeze, therefore I am'. Can't help laughing, can you? Ah. Well you never were a Gong fan, were you? And this isn't the record to convert you.

In typical Gong fashion, their 'live' is not a highly sophisticated recording of a well prepared showcase gig. The venues are such sweatboxes as the Roanne Club Arc-En-Ciel, the Paris Salle Rataclan and the London Marquee and the gear includes an eight track mobile and an ordinary stereo tape recorder plugged into the mixer (no, not the man, the desk), Considering which, the quality is pretty high though the vocals are a bit faint or echoey at times. To pull in the collectors, there are two tracks previously unreleased: 'Ooby-Scooby' and 'Where Have All The Flowers Gone?' featuring Tim Blake on R'n'B mouthharp.

The overall effect is often entertaining though frivolous. It concentrates on their loony larkabout side and makes me think that the hard core of Radio Gnome freaks had a far more reverential attitude to the whole crazy Planet Gong myth than the band themselves. Still, Live Etc. is hardly evidence that they really should have been accessible to a much wider audience. It does emerge that nearly everything they play is based on jazz funk. Pierre Moerlen and Mike Howlett are a superb rhythm duo, making sure that however bizarre the frontline vocals and solos, somewhere in there they are boogying.

Their music certainly is weird. In this selection it makes contact with me when it's farcical and when it's aggressively political. The opening song 'You Can't Kill Me', full of post '68 defiance, has a Velvet Undergroundish relentlessness, and there's some of the same anger-which-can't-hide-behind-fantasy in 'Ooby-Scooby'. For the rest, it's that unusual planet and flying teapots. That means a fair deal of cosmic swirling on synthesisers and mystic chanting – strictly for the pixie hat fanatics though it's intermingled with flights of imagination from Didier Malgerbe. Steve Hlllage's emergence from the shadow of Allen registers on 'Flying Teapot' with a fluent sitar-tone solo and on the dull fourth side which is only elevated by his majestic playing, demanding leadership.

Live Etc. is as uneven an album as I've ever heard and in that a true reflection of an endearing, annoying, funny, solemn band.


Gong: Magik Brother, Mystic Sister; Gong Est Mort — Vive Gong!
Fred Dellar, NME, 12 November 1977

TWO CHAPTERS in the life of Daevid Allen, space dingo and nomad of nonsense.

Magik Brother is not really a Gong album, being a recording that Allen and his wife Gilli Smyth concocted for the French Byg label back in September '69, just a couple of months before Gong played their first ever gig. But reed man Didier Malherbe and Rachid Houari, one of the band's myriad drummers, both played on the sessions and the album can therefore be considered as a preface to Allen's Radio Gnome trilogy, sharing this distinction with that eminent chunk of cheap cheese known as Camembert Electrique.

Though Allen lists many of his influences on the album sleeve — crediting such as Erik Satie, George Formby, Terry Riley, Charlie Mingus and Soft Machine — he omits to mention Syd Barrett, of whom one is constantly reminded by such melodic but half-formed songs as the album's strumalong title track or the heavily phased 'Hope You Feel OK'. Nothing is allowed to wend its way with complete normality, so 'Ego', which is basically a 3/4 time, bar-room singalong, comes decked out with an array of Gilli Smyth's galactic giggles. But schizophrenic as it may be, Magik Brother, now eight years on, has retained a patina of distinct charm that's bound to endear it to all who don't take life all that seriously.

So while Magik Brother is your actual starter for one, Gong Est Mort is offered as a possible final statement, a double-album celebrating the end of an era. The wonder is that the band kept going as long as it did. Created originally as a musical backdrop for Allen's contribution to the Theatre Of The Absurd, it soon became blatantly obvious that however amusing and diverting the upfront antics proved to be, it was that which was happening all around that caught the ears of the pundits and seemed most likely to edge Gong out of the cult category. Following the making of Angel's Egg, the second part of the Gnome saga, some of the band's members formed an anti-vocal element, Allen accusing them of bowing down in the heels of Weather Report and other jazz-rockers, thus relinquishing Gong's own individuality.

Faced with the problem of completing his trilogy, he decided to soldier on through the traumatic sessions that produced You, the final part, then headed off to his hideout in Deya, Majorca to cut a solo album. Allen re-emerged in May this year to lead a reunion of the pre-Shamal Gong at the Hippodrome, Paris, the results of which are documented on the Tapioca album. Though this release arguably fails to match the allround excellence of Virgin's recent Gong Live bargain pack, it is nevertheless an extremely worthwhile proposition on which the band provides a fresh insight on much of the material that comprised the trilogy, also adding earlier songs such as the defiant 'Can't Kill Me' and the acid-slurred 'I've Been Stoned Before'.

The band sounds vibrant and remarkably fresh, Hewlett and drummer Pierre Moerlen once more demonstrating what a superb and totally under-rated a rhythm section they've always been, pushing the band mightily through a super-charged version of 'From The Isle Of Everywhere', Didier Malherbe contributing his Bird-cum-Barbary hornwork in satisfying proportions and Tim Blake doing his Kaleidoscope Kid bit, filling any ensuing spaces with a multitude of electronically created colours.

Add the sound of Steve Hillage, glissing his way to further glory and bear in mind a final mix of Christian Gence and Allen himself and you have plenty of reasons for enduring the Aussie's often amusing but sometimes exasperating vocal excesses.

Gong the alternative band may be dead, but this album indicates they held one hell of a wake.


Steve Hillage: Woggle Head
Nick Coleman, Independent on Sunday, 14 January 2007

Steve Hillage was a prime groover on the Canterbury psychedelic scene of the Seventies and still makes far-out trance music today. So why do people insist on calling him a prog-rocker? And did he really see a UFO when he was five? Nick Coleman enters his techno-lair to find out

HOW DO you make the trip from Seventies hippie space-rock to Nineties techno, in three pixie steps? Two rules: you have to go through the worm-hole marked "Stevie Wonder" and you need to begin in 1975 and work outwards in concentric circles. It's easy if you have the mind for it, one that works in ripples.

In 1975, everything in music was up for grabs, pretty much. Which is another way of saying that the music world was in recession, both economically and creatively. Old vinyl was being recycled to make new records while most of the ideas rock had ever had were being tortured to death. To generalise: denim-clad Los Angelenos with puffy hair set one creative agenda, puffball English prog-rockers set the other. Popular music had no edge at all, other than the sort you fall off.

The following autumn, a toothy hippie in a woolly hat released a second album under his own name and toured the English provinces. The Steve Hillage Band reached my East Anglian home town in November and the usual regiment of middle-class wastrels and fen grebos sloped off to the local Corn Exchange to lie down on the floor in their rancid greatcoats. As we lay there, wondering what it would take, sonically speaking, to cause the filthy glass roof, 50 feet above, to loosen in its soft lead moorings and drop like a thousand guillotine blades into our supine bodies, the Hillage Band did their thing.

Their thing was hard to nail. Their songs were long and large and rejoiced in such titles as 'Solar Musick Suite'. Like Boschian fish, they enclosed within themselves smaller songs, entitled 'Hiram Afterglid Meets the Dervish' and 'Glidding'. These were often elaborately arranged: ornate yet not weighty, complicated but not grand. Quite the opposite, in fact. If anything, they were light and floaty, like passing clouds. The songs seemed to work their way through your system without touching the sides. This was neither music of the body nor of suffering – it depended for what poke it had on Hillage's effects-drenched Stratocaster, which he would play in loopy bursts. He even did a version of Donovan's 'Hurdy Gurdy Man' which was psychedelic pop of the purest kind. The only appropriate response to it all seemed to be to lie back and go woooo!

Hillage was good that night and the glass ceiling did not fall. Two weeks later, Anarchy in the UK came out and one felt obliged to buy it and cut one's hair.

"I am very uncomfortable with being called 'prog rock'," says Hillage, almost exactly 30 years later in his Ladbroke Grove techno-lair, fixing his interlocutor with a Basilisk stare. He is recognisably the same chap – much shorter hair of course, but the face is the same long, lean thing it was and his eyes are still pagan. He leans forward. "Even though we played a lot of chord changes and time signatures, which people might say fits with the prog definition, there's something that Miquette and I share with Daevid Allen about the prog mentality... It's overblown. We may have dressed like we were part of it, we may have sounded like we were part of it. But we didn't FEEL like we were part of it."

So there you have it: Hillage Not Prog. And he has a point. He, and the band from which he sprang, Gong, did not conform to the basic precepts of proggery. They were far too far out for that.

But why does he care? Why not laugh and be done with it? After all, following years of production work in the field of spacey rave music, not to mention the continuing health of System 7, the techno unit he operates with his partner from Gong days, Miquette Giraudy, no one out here gives a flying fish whether Steve Hillage has a proggy bone in his bod.

Then again, it must feel odd having to publicise a passage of work that belongs so remotely in your past, especially when your great preoccupation in life is inhabiting the present as cogently as possible. But whether he likes the idea or not, the complete Steve Hillage Band oeuvre is coming out again in two batches over the coming weeks, starting with the debut album from 1975, Fish Rising. It's a body of work which has no firm footing in the 21st century, except in the way it forms connective tissue between the past and the present, between psychedelia and chill-out, between rock formalism and rock postmodernism. Yet in the mid 1970s, Steve Hillage had hit albums, Top-20 hit albums.

"It was exhilarating," he says. "The whole decade was a rush. And we kept it going until the end of '79, when we stopped it. By then we'd done what we wanted to do, said what we wanted to say, and it wasn't giving us the same excitement anymore. We wanted to look at new things and new ways of working..."

What had he wanted to say? "Well, it's hard to put into words. The records were what we wanted to say. For more than a decade, I'd had a musical vision, a mass of sounds in my mind..." The eyes widen and strain slightly in their big lids.

Hillage grew up in Chingford on the edge of Epping Forest, the son of a social-worker/magistrate mother and a father who worked in the economics department of the Bank of England. Childhood in the Fifties was "not bad", although he went through a disconnected phase as a small boy. "Maybe I saw a UFO when I was five," he says. "But actually I think I was just that way inclined. My mother has pointed out that there was a period when I was five or six when there was a lot of illness in the family – both my brother and my grandmother, who died – and I was left on my own a lot for a few years. I became an introspective and quite poetic sort of person then – though I'm no introvert. That might have something to do with it. I don't remember suffering but I do remember going for long walks in Epping Forest and thinking a lot."

Long forest walks and thinking. It is of course a feature of Northern European Romantic culture that troubled boys go for thoughtful walks in the woods. And how many Anglo-Saxon Goethes, Müllers, Friedrichs and Schuberts must there have inhabited the Home Counties as post-war austerity retreated in the face of the onrushing consumer boom of the 1960s? A thick undergrowth, if early-Seventies rock music is anything to go by.

Hillage went to university in Canterbury already armed with the experience of having seen Jimi Hendrix at the Marquee "in February '67 – six feet away from the man. I got it completely. I was blitzed". He was also armed with the Fender his father had helped finance on the understanding that he went as far as he could with his education. He lasted four terms of his Humanities degree.

Four terms was enough to refine his psychedelic sensibilities, however, and he quickly fell in with the rapidly coalescing "Canterbury Scene". This fabled, rather florid, often twee socio-musical rump still stands rather unstably as perhaps the high-water-mark of English psychedelicism – the little local world of Soft Machine, Caravan and Egg (keyboards by Hillage's school chum Dave Stewart, later of Hatfield & the North). Here was a parochial English mysticism to echo that of Blake and Palmer, if not in reach, solemnity and refinement then certainly in its capacity to see visions.

Hillage will not be drawn on specifics – a vision is a chap's own business. But it was through the workings of the Canterbury Scene, and discomfort with the pressures of leading his own band, Khan, that our man met and fell in with another woggle-headed visionary, Daevid Allen, co-founder of the Soft Machine, then de facto leader of the communal Anglo-French hippie-surrealist band Gong. They met, they jammed, Hillage played on Flying Teapot and in due course he became a full member.

"I got to join my favourite band," Hillage says, laughing for the first time. "Life in Gong was very intense, full of ups and downs. People kept leaving and joining and in the end I left." But not before he'd formed a partnership with one of the Gong ladies, Miquette Giraudy aka Bambaloni Yoni. "It was a true community. But everyone accepted that Daevid was the founder and had the vision, the pre-eminent role. We simply had ideas and he Gongified them..." And so, in exemplary communitarian style, when the break for solo territory came in 1975, Miquette went with Hillage and most of Gong played on Fish Rising.

It was the third Hillage album, Motivation Radio, in 1977, which suggested that its author was not operating in a hippie vacuum, oblivious to what was going on in the visionless world. Here were chunky, even funky riffs, and fewer fish. The "iconic hippie Aunt Sally who needed to be shoved in the stocks and have tomatoes thrown at him" (see, it's all coming out now!) was not listening to the Voidoids and Television, as one suspected, but to Bootsy Collins, Funkadelic, Parliament, Earth Wind & Fire and "The Commodores, before Lionel Richie went all schmaltzy". Hillage got the funk. This did not mean that he suddenly took to landing on The One like James Brown and wearing spangly pants on the outside of his trousers, but it did mean he engaged Malcolm Cecil to produce the album – the same boffinesque Malcolm Cecil from Tonto's Expanding Headband who'd programmed Stevie Wonder's Innervisions synthesizers half a decade before...

Hillage doesn't play much guitar at all these days. Indeed, he owns only a single instrument, one of those strange stubby carbon-fibre affairs without a headstock. He points to it in the corner, where it rests in its case, an undifferentiated piece of kit. "The perfect techno guitar." Presumably that was the thing he played at the recent Gong reunion held at the Melkweg in Amsterdam, where he even squeezed in a short SHB set, the first since 1979. "It was great fun actually. Really great. Might even do it again."

Alternatively, he could always complete his course at Canterbury. "Technically, I could have gone back to university, cos I only left on a sabbatical in case everything went pear-shaped. Maybe I still can. I think I should study psycho-politics in the 21st century; do a thesis on neo-conservatism and media manipulation." He laughs for only the second time.

Watch this space.

Eric

Merci beaucoup pour la suite des articles (passionnants) sur Gong et Steve Hillage !

merci Algernon, je ne connaissais pas ce mag!
Pour les R&F tu peux y aller!
-si certains ont des "Rock en Stock", n'hésitez pas, je n'en ai plus mais je me souviens que c'était plutôt bien avec de nombreuses chroniques de disques.
-j'attends aussi vos Extra et les Best débuts 70s
- pour ceux qui aiment le prog si vous avez des contacts en Italie essayez de récupérer des
"ciao 2001"

En principe, je devrais être plus dispo en septembre. Je ferai chauffer le scan, enfin j'espère.

Les vidéos de DailyMotion ne peuvent pas être posées ici ? Y a du GONG là
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1d5l_ ... rcus_music

Merci pour le lien "Continental Circus"
A noter aussi un indispensable dvd (pour les amateurs !) qui est sorti il y a peu :
http://www.voiceprint.co.uk/product_details/15247