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 Gongmaison Live at the Fridge DVD+CD
Landmark 74430 || 2008
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Gongmaison were the stepping stone band to full Gong and was many a younger person's introduction to the live Gong experience as this outfit toured extensively in the UK and Europe in the early '90's. It was decided to resume the Gong name when Pip Pyle came on board making it 3 original Gong band members alongside daevid and Didier. This era of Gong culminated when the rather wonderful Shapeshifter album was recorded. With the Voiceprint DVD edition of this concert out of pressing this is currently the only way to get hold of footage of this London concert and is a pretty good record of the event. I remember being an excited part of the video mixing along with daevid one warm sunny day at a studio overlooking Winchester Cathedral Green back in 1991. The 'bonus' audio CD included is the first time the concert has been made available in such form.
DVD:
Personnel:
So much for the bare facts of the release... unfortunately the background to this DVD+CD appears to be a bit murky...
A few months ago I bought 50 copies of this release, which has been out and about for quite a while, from one of my regular distributors in the hope that 'the Biz' had been properly done somewhere along the line - but it was cheap, so perhaps I should have known better. (Music biz factoid No. 23 - if it's cheap, then the only people not receiving any money from sales will be the musicians.) It's taken me until now to list it in the Kazbah because I find the whole thing rather disheartening. Plenty of dumb stuff about this: None of the musicians know anything about this release. So, leaving aside any other issues that arise from that fact, no-one gave permission for an audio CD to be drawn from the film soundtrack. There are no writing or publishing credits on the packaging - so you would be right to assume that no MCPS publishing royalties will ever be paid despite the appearance of an MCPS logo. No-one in the band would have sanctioned that cover. Go and try and find out what you can about Landmark on the net, I can find out very little about them, which speaks volumes. Finally - something actually pretty good wrapped in a dumb, ugly package which smells of uncaring petty avarice. One never loses hope that whoever has done this has a change of heart one day and makes good their 'error'. If you want what is actually a good Gong DVD, and one which - if you buy it here - at least supports the artists by enabling PlanetGong to chug along, and you were going to buy it anyway... well here they are. |
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