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Gong
No other band has such immediate word association with 'hippies' as Gong, the psychedelic vision of Australian beatnik Daevid Allen. Gong emerged in the full flood of psychedelia, appearing on stagein 'pothead pixie' hats, and committing to vinyl a space-jazz soundtrack for getting stoned to - a notion that informed many of their songs, along with a breezy eroticism and sub-Tolkien allegory. Strangely enough, twenty years on, the old albums stand up surprisingly well, especially by comparison with the output of their more earnest mates in the era's progressive-rock scene. The story of Gong centres around those of Daevid Allen and Gilli Smyth, Allen has been involved with performance his entire life. He pioneered 'Beat Poetry' and 'Poetry and Jazz' in Melbourne, Australia in the late fifties. He helped introduce 'Performance Poetry' and 'Free' Jazz to London in the early-sixties, and had by 1966 fallen in with the Canterbury scene in England, lending his guitar and poetry bohemianism to the embryonic Soft Machine. Within a year, however, and after just one single with the Softs, Allen left the band, having been refused re-entry into England after a French tour. He then settled in Paris, where he set up a proto-version of Gong, recalled as 'a large number of musicians and singers improvising around nothing for hours on end, completely stoned'. Poetess Gilli Smyth has been hailed as a pioneer in the struggle to achieve gender equality, and her voice in early Gong started to be heard at a time when, apart from other pioneers and freethinkers, this shattered conventions and was considered pretty radical. They shared similar spiritual visions of the purpose of what they were doing, a passion for poetry, an absurdist sense of humour and a desire to push back the barriers in life and art. Gong developed in the highly charged atmosphere of Paris in the late sixties. Shaped and influenced by a mixture of the political and philosophical theories of "anarchy", Eastern, Arabic and Jazz music, ritual theatre, mime, beat poetry, tape loop experimentation, the Goon show and more. They developed a unique style of avant-garde psychedelic mantric music and created, in the Planet Gong, an entire world where all the social norms and institutions were turned topsy turvy and absurdity held sway. Gong's success abroad led to them becoming one of the first signings to Richard Branson's Virgin label. An early influence was Terry Riley - today a respected systems/minimalist composer but then beginning his experiments with tape loops - whom Allen met, inspiring his technique of 'glissando guitar' and the tape textures that gave a base to Gong's pioneering 'stratified' rock. This was in evidence right from the band's first recording, a film soundtrack entitled Continental Circus (released in 1970), which Allen and Smyth had worked on around the time of the Paris 1968 uprising. Branded 'cultural agitators' by the authorities, they had left France in a hurry, and were not allowed to return until 1971... During this period, Allen and Smyth released two albums on the French Byg label: Magick Brother, Mystic Sister (1970) and Banana Moon (1971). Although the latter was credited to Allen alone, all the Gong ingredients were in place - whimsical surrealism ("Fred The Fish"), sexual fantasy ("Pretty Miss Titty"), and, of course, drugs ("Stoned Innocent Frankenstein") - while the music spiralled out from the old Soft Machine imprint...
With the range of influences they had and in an era of lumbering blues and R'n'B driven 'rock' experimentation Gong were always destined to be outsiders, aliens to the current trends. Spanning an epoch that championed self expression and individuality on a large scale for the first time Gong took that ethos to the edge. At the same time they attempted to by-pass the usual ego-bloating adulation 'rock stars' habitually suffer from by embracing a communal lifestyle, crazy pseudonyms for their performances and relating to their audience, both on and off the stage, in a totally human way. Their communal home was consistently overflowing with passing friends and fans. They epitomised joyful celebration of the individual while honouring their connectedness to the whole... They were attempting no less than spiritual regeneration through popular music. Their chosen struggle was fascinating and inspirational to their audience and when it did come together musically it was, well... transcendental. Each performance was approached as a ritual. They believed as musicians theirs was a sacred task - the construction of the 'Nuclear Mystery Temple' which could be percussioneived in the ethers around the band and audience by those with the clairvoyance to see. The Nuclear Mystery Temple provided a conduit by which a connection could be made, via music, between Gong, its audience and universal consciousness. Most importantly of all, this process was never po-faced or dogmatic, it is always conducted with a lightness of spirit, humour is always a vital element... When Allen and Smyth returned to France in 1971, they fermented Gong's first stable line-up from a rural farmhouse commune, depicted on the album sleeve of Camembert Electrique (1971). Recorded 'during the full moon phases' of that summer, this began both Allen's obsessively wacky wordplay with the names of his musicians, and the idea of Gong as a planet. Gilli Smyth (space whisper) became Shakti Yoni; Didier Malherbe (saxophone, flute) transmuted into Bloomdido Bad De Grasse; and one Venux De-Luxe emerged as switch doctor and mix master; the line-up was completed by Pip Pyle (drums and breakage). The album itself was an abandoned piece of space-funkery, too stoned for its own good at times, but zesty enough to attract the attentions of the embryonic Virgin Records, who signed the band and, echoing their promotional trick with The Faust Tapes, re-released the album as a 69p bargain buy. Encouraged by Virgin, Allen moved Gong to a new rural commune, back in England, so as to more easily use the company's production facilities. Thus endowed, the band launched into a shamelessly psychotropic triptych of albums, Flying Teapot and Angels Egg (both 1973) and You (1974) - playing out a melodrama of spiritual and musical mythology from the Planet Gong. These wonderfully trippy albums offered a sequence of songs and uplifting proto-ambient layers of electronics well ahead of their time. A major component was the meshing of now integral members Steve Hillage and Tim Blake, whose respective guitar and synthesizer provided a serenely mantric backdrop for Malherbe's eclectic saxophone patterns and delayed flute codas. The rhythms were tight, too, with Mike Howlett (bass) and Pierre Moerlen (drums) giving Allen and Smyth's ethereal poetry its tightest structure ever. Live, the band were even better, an astonishing spectacle utilizing lasers (their first appearance in rock), and dressed and lit like a mummer's play. Allen described the band live as like a 'more feminine version of Hawkwind'... Unfortunately for this extended family of utopian dreamers and deviants (from Angel's Egg, the cast included Hillage's partner, keyboard player Miquette Giraudy), the times were about to change .... big time. In 1973 Virgin could indulge its hippie hangover of iconoclasm and obscurantism, funded by the soaraway success of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells. But Allen never became 'the Beefheartian cult figure' of Virgin's press release imaginings, and as the decade progressed, punk would brand Gong with the same prog-rock brush as Genesis, ELP et al...
Success and monetary reward as always is a two-edged sword and it was Gong's new found popularity that was one of the elements that led to the demise of the most popular band line-up in 1975. Over the years several unscrupulous record companies have taken advantage of Gong's utopian idealism to short change them on a grand scale. But the sacrifice of royalties for liberty has never been an obstacle that could ever interfere for long with Gong's higher purpose... The paths that individual members have taken after leaving Gong has been as wide as the influences that Gong embraced. Either as successful solo performers, as Daevid Allen or synth player Tim Blake, in the context of new bands like Gilli Smyth with Mother Gong or Steve Hillage and his various projects such as System 7, or as in demand session musicians or producers like Didier Malherbe and Mike Howlett, the Gong vibration has been widely spread... "The original Gong band like a magic mushroom that had grown too large, spawned a series of mushrooms and when it blew apart in the wind all it's members went off to develop their own particular vision." - Gilli Smyth.
The Gong spirit was kept alive more by Steve Hillage, whose solo albums, all spaced-out guitar and New Age lyrics, Virgin marketed successfully alongside the Sex Pistols, though it was to cost him a solid decade in the shadows of a new subculture's mass derision. Oddly, Allen and Smyth returned to England much more in key with the times, re-forming as Planet Gong with musicians from a punk-hippie hybrid of souls known as Here & Now. They hurled their forty-something bodies into a free concert tour of Britain, the Live Floating Anarchy tour, along with thinking-punks Alternative TV. The music (commemorated by a live disc) was a mix of punk and hippie-psychedelia, corroded into a howl of urban squat polemic ("Opium For The People"), and going a little lighter on the space whisper... Tim Blake recorded two seminal synth LPs, 'New Jerusalem' (Barclay) and 'Crystal Machine' (Egg). Blake (who has the distinction of being the only musician sacked by Gong) briefly joined Hawkwind (in a bizarre line-up that also included Ginger Baker), before basing himself in France and recording and performing as Crystal Machine - a synthesizer/laser/lightshow acid head's dream. Drummer Pierre Moerlen formed 'Pierre Moerlen's Gong' who had great success through a series of albums and tours especially on the continent, albeit with a purer jazz-rock sound. Daevid released two successful solo albums, 'Good Morning' (Virgin) and 'Now is the Happiest Time of Your Life' (Affinity). Allen moved to New York around 1978, made a few solo albums, and instigated a New York Gong project with Bill Laswell, before returning to Australia, where he wound up driving taxis. This period is well documented on the recordings, 'New York Gong' (Charly) and 'Playbax 80' (Charly) . Meanwhile Gilli Smyth continued to question the accepted gender roles and celebrate the higher connectedness between the sexes with her solo album 'Mother'(Charly) and with the band Mother Gong, work which she has continued into the '90s with 'Glo' (Gas), an ambient/trance dance CD produced in collaboration with Steffy Sharpstrings... Hillage and Howlett operated as Virgin's in-house producers (Simple Minds, Martha and The Muffins, among others), before the former returned to the limelight with The Orb and his own System 7...
An acoustic trio, The Magick Brothers, was formed, Gilli Smyth came over from Australia to tour with Mother Gong and a series of albums resulted, among them Daevid's 'Australia Aquaria' (Demi Monde) and Mother Gong's 'Eye' (Voiceprint). When 'Camembert Electrique' drummer Pip Pyle re-joined the band, the Gong moniker was adopted once more in 1992. A series of successful tours of the UK and Europe followed and the first new Gong album for nearly 15 years, 'Shapeshifter' (Celluloid), was recorded and released to critical acclaim... In October 1994, Allen hosted a 25th birthday party for Gong at London's Forum, headlining a bill featuring a host of permutations and spin-offs that had continued through the years. It was a testament also to the Gong Appreciation Society (GAS), which has been assiduously re-issuing much of the extended Gong catalogue, along with re-issues specialist, Voiceprint, as well as publishing Allen's five-volume Gong archive-autobiography... In 1996, the rising tide of interest in all things Gong continued, as they toured Japan, Europe and the USA, selling out venues as a new generation of fans joined the ranks of the converted to pay homage to these ever-changing psychedelic pioneers. This surge of enthusiasm was underlined by the release of You Remixed (1997) one of Gong's classic albums, remixed by The Orb, Graham Massey of 808 State, Total Eclipse and The Shamen among many others, Gong fans to a person, whose own musical work has been deeply influenced by the luminous green planet Gong... Gong continues to re-invent itself, never cashing in on past patterns by repeating well worn bankable formulas as often demanded by the music business. It is still acting as a cutting edge, often far enough ahead of it's time not to be recognised. Each variation of the band has brought revitalisation and new interpretation to the very special sound and soul call that is the Gong vibration... "It's all much too serious to be serious about" - Daevid Allen Gong Discography Camembert Electrique (1971; Charly). Gong's best early album, infused with the experience of Paris 1968 and trippy psychedelics.
Flying Teapot (1973; Charly);
You (1974; Virgin). The Radio Gnome Trilogy is definitive Gong - elegant, ethereal soundscapes, shimmering electronics and effusive musicianship. Essential stuff, but if you're unsure, the trilogy's finer moments are gathered on The Best of Gong (1996; Nectar Masters). Live Floating Anarchy '77 (1977; Charly). Allen and Smyth and Here & Now performing with garage-punk fervour as 'Planet Gong'. Rough, wild, angry and spacey. The Birthday (1994; GAS/Voiceprint). Double live CD featuring Gong's Virgin-period line-up playing together for the first time in twenty years. |
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Over the years Gong has been the formative home to a large number of high calibre international musicians, the alchemical crucible for a widely diverse range of musical styles, an influence on hundreds of bands and consistently odd. Each new musician in the ever changing Gong saga has joined already passionately steeped in a different musical or artistic tradition Be-Bop, Classical and Indian music, pure pychedelia, performance poetry, esoteric sufi music theory, modern atonal classical percussion, end of the pier music-hall, ambient music (before the term had been coined).....and even Atlantean Temple dance all played a part in forming the unique Gong sound But inspired empassioned individuals alone do not make a band. Something less tangible has always made the eclectic mixture gel.
More than thirty albums have been released under the Gong banner over the years. Perhaps the most well known works are 'Camembert Electrique' and the famous mystical 'Gong Trilogy'-'Flying Teapot', 'Angel's Egg' and' You'-adventures in poetry and song of
