Gong - On the planet of Radio Gnomo

Whatever Gong means to you, chances are it means the exact opposite to someone else, which I find deeply satisfying. I'm proud of Gong's free spirit, which has never been compromised for commercial reasons, right or wrong as they may have been.

(Daevid Allen)

Often hastily lumped together under the "Canterbury" umbrella, Gong actually have very little in common with Caravan and their peers. Their artistic trajectory stands apart quite distinctly from that of any other band, as they forged an unmistakable, utterly peculiar style, born of a mindset open to every influence and, above all, of the explosive creativity of Daevid Allen, a tremendously fascinating figure who managed to be as innovative as he was consistent.

Able to step outside the show-business machine and bend trends to suit their own needs and spirit, Gong created one of the strangest and most important sagas in the history of rock music.

The story of Gong begins in 1967, when Daevid Allen, a twenty-nine-year-old Australian hippie who had settled permanently in Europe and already a founder of Soft Machine, a landmark outfit of the English jazz-rock scene, is held up in France by the authorities over bureaucratic issues and forced to leave the band of Robert Wyatt and co. This allows him to launch a project with the poet Gilli Smyth, who would soon become his partner, and a revolving cast of musicians who drift in and out of the new band, jam after jam.

In 1969 the duo meets Didier Malherbe, a promising French flautist and saxophonist, who helps them record their debut album, Magick Brother/Mystic Sister, completed the following year and produced by the mogul Jean Karakos, head of an emerging label set against the music business, Byg. Bassist and guitarist Christian Tritsch and drummer Rachid Houari also join the lineup on a permanent basis. Despite a few notable flashes, it's still a somewhat immature record, not particularly indicative of the "Gong style" to come.

1971, by contrast, is a pivotal year in the band's career: the legendary Pip Pyle replaces Houari on drums, and with this lineup, now settled as a quintet, the group begins recording four albums, only two of which will actually be released under the Gong name.

The first, chronologically, is Bananamoon, credited to Allen alone. In reality it's a collaboration with Robert Wyatt, whose presence was specifically requested by the producer. The material is unquestionably strong, though the truly standout tracks are the ones sung by Wyatt, plus the lengthy "Stoned Innocent Frankestein", the Australian guitarist's first major compositional feat, destined to become a staple of his repertoire.

A few months later, the band finds itself working on three projects simultaneously: Obsolete, the result of a session with the poet Dashiell Hedayat, which contains "Cello Drive", a lengthy experiment bordering on cosmic music; Continental Circus, a soundtrack for a documentary film about a former motorcycle racing champion; and, little more than a preview of what was to come, Camembert Electrique, Gong's first masterpiece and one of the most original and important psychedelic records of all time.

The album is, first and foremost, along with its successors, the most reliable manifesto of Allen's wonderfully absurd personal mythology: he envisions a planet (Planet Gong, naturally) inhabited by little green men (the Pot Head Pixies), who govern themselves under a system called Floating Anarchy. They get around using flying teapots and tune in to a pirate radio station (Radio Gnome), all under the watch of great sages possessed of superhuman intelligence (the Octave Doctors).

The songs reflect these themes with a goofy, clownish, at times almost childlike light, their lyrical irony drawn directly from Frank Zappa, perhaps the figure in rock history closest in spirit to Daevid Allen. Musically, meanwhile, Gong remain an unrivalled melting pot of influences: from late-period psychedelia to nascent space-rock, from jazz-rock to cosmic music. On the boldest, most mature tracks the results are outstanding: the simplicity of the bizarre theme of "You Can't Kill Me", their first mantra-like chant; the exasperating "Dynamite/I Am Your Animal"; the hypnotic cosmic gallop of "Fohat Digs Holes In Space", with Gilli Smyth's famous "space whisper" lending the compositions a touch that's at times ethereal, at times intense, at times orgasmic; and finally "Tropical Fish/Selene", one of the greatest achievements of their entire career, a wild melodrama that in its seven minutes touches on every facet of the magnificent Gong diamond.

Despite its extraordinary blend of ingredients, Camembert Electrique is ultimately nothing more than a transitional record: Gong are already preparing something even grander, and in 1973 they arrive at their most important work, and one of the greatest albums in the entire history of rock music.

1972 is spent on tour across Europe: with their contract with Byg at an end, the band take a bit of a break before starting work on new material. In January 1973, Allen and co. enter the studio to record Flying Teapot with a heavily reshuffled lineup. Alongside the inseparable trio of Allen, Smyth and Malherbe are two great specialists and experimenters on their respective instruments: Tim Blake on synth (who would go on to become one of the masters of the international scene) and Steve Hillage, formerly of Arzachel and, notably, Khan, on guitar. Laurie Allan takes over on drums, while on bass, recruited directly from Magma, is Francis Moze. Both, however, will only stay with the band for the duration of the album's recording.

Produced by Virgin, Flying Teapot can be considered — unlike Camembert, conceived more as a collection of disconnected pieces — a genuine concept album about life on Planet Gong, and it's the first instalment of a trilogy, the Radio Gnome Invisible trilogy, which will also include the subsequent Angels Egg and You.

From the very first notes of "Radio Gnome Invisible", a wonderfully daft nursery rhyme brimming with hippie spirit, it's clear we're in the presence of a timeless masterpiece. Having shed some of the naivety found on Camembert, the band's style has evolved impressively: the arrangements are spectacular and finely judged, never intrusive, never trite. Even a childlike chant like "Pot Head Pixies" is turned into a thoroughly enjoyable song, but the finest track (and perhaps the high point of the entire Gong saga) is the title track, twelve minutes in which the music first builds slowly around a delicate jazz theme, with a brilliant Malherbe on winds, before exploding into a hypnotic, mantra-like refrain of unmatched intensity, an exasperating chant buried under waves of sound effects, before sudden silence gives way to an all-percussive outro.

Blake is given free rein on the ambient interlude "Crystal Machine", which introduces the magnificent "Zero The Hero And The Witch's Spell" (the narration of the saga of the fabled Zero, one of the Pot Head Pixies), another extended, intricate track in constant flux — melancholy and solemn at first, then delicate and sophisticated, then mystical and ethereal, and finally hypnotic once more, in a memorable, skin-prickling crescendo that spills into the first devastating notes of "Witch's Song/I Am Your Pussy", a wild psychedelic poem for wah guitar, sax, and the voice of the "witch" Smyth, who delivers a truly memorable performance.

During this phase of their career, Gong swung from one extreme to the other: from the amateurish quality of their early productions to the near-fastidious professionalism of Shamal, from the childish themes of their beginnings to the serious maturity of You. Flying Teapot is the most well-balanced album in the group's entire discography, including on the humorous front

With the arrival of internationally renowned drummer and percussionist Pierre Moerlen and bassist Mike Howlett, the "classic" Gong lineup was now complete — the one destined to record, within just a few months, the other two chapters of the trilogy.

On Angels Egg (1973), the second chapter of the trilogy, the sound undergoes a marked evolution. Hillage and Blake, relegated to mere guests on the first record, now carry more weight in the songwriting and are granted greater freedom in executing the instrumental parts. Allen, by contrast, focuses increasingly on the lyrics. It's probably no coincidence that this is the best-conceived Gong album yet, and even if it doesn't quite match the brilliance of its predecessor, it still maintains an excellent standard throughout. The music is more fluid and "ambient", at times almost meditative, pervaded by a kind of mysticism that manifests itself in various ways. The range of influences reaches its peak, even though very little remains here of Camembert Electrique. The compositions are short, polished, sparkling, never repetitive or dull. The decadent vaudeville of "Prostitute Poem" is perhaps the record's gem, alongside one of their classics, "Outer Temple/Inner Temple", complete with gliss guitar, warbling synths and an atmosphere somewhere between cosmic and Hawaiian. On "I Never Glid Before", Hillage hints at the path he would pursue as a solo artist two years later, while "Ooby-Scooby Doomsday" stands as the last burst of goliardic madness from the early part of Gong's career.

The following album, You (1974), is in fact a rather thin affair. For the first time, the main problem is a lack of inspiration: the band recycles material from Angels Egg and "updates" it by adding sprawling electronic accompaniments, which heighten the solemnity of certain passages and highlight the dominant role of Hillage and Blake. Every link to the Gong of three years earlier is severed. The impression is that, although the album is played impeccably and is pleasant enough to listen to, the ideas are, fundamentally, unoriginal and insubstantial. Gong, stripped of Allen's now-exhausted inspiration, have been reduced to mere performers: classy ones, but performers nonetheless.

Happy exceptions are "Master Builder", a grand-scale crescendo (which Hillage would later appropriate under a different title) and the lengthy "You Never Blow Your Trip Forever", which features samples from the other two albums of the trilogy and feels almost like Allen's last testament, as he was by then in the grip of an evident creative crisis. Indeed, within a few months the hippie would leave the band, along with his wife and Tim Blake.

Crippled and leaderless, the group seemed lost, but Virgin gave Pierre Moerlen the chance to rebuild the band under his own direction. The French percussionist, together with Malherbe, Howlett and Hillage (though only as a guest) and a crew of session musicians, recorded Shamal in 1976, produced by Nick Mason. The tracks are mostly instrumental (the vocals on "Wingful Of Eyes" are decidedly weak) and centred on the frontman's incredible technique — a wizard with the drumsticks, without question, but lacking equally strong compositional talent. The result is rather dull and unremarkable, were it not for the title track, the only moment truly worthy of the band's past.

Clearly, this new Gong lineup had nothing in common with the one led by Allen. Moerlen began churning out a series of carbon-copy records, of which only Gazeuse! rises above the general mediocrity, elevated by a collaboration with the guitar tightrope-walker Allan Holdsworth, who livens up tracks similar to those on Shamal with his explosive technique.

Gong had become a band for virtuosos: after Holdsworth came Lozaga, but by then the group had wisely changed its name to Pierre Moerlen's Gong. Pierre Moerlen, however, died suddenly on 3 May 2005, at the age of 53.

In the '90s, Lozaga himself founded his own Gongzilla, a fusion outfit that achieved decidedly better results (1995's "Suffer" is a notable album).

Meanwhile, Hillage and Blake launched prolific solo careers: the former poured his ideas on connecting Canterbury with electronics into the extraordinary "Fish Rising" (1975), one of the masterpieces of English progressive rock, followed by a string of lesser records; while the latter released "Crystal Machine" and "New Jerusalem".

And Daevid Allen? After taking a three-year break, he too returned to the music scene alongside his partner, more energised than ever, with an exhilarating new project: Planet Gong, who in 1977 set off on a European tour, documented on the live album Floating Anarchy — a record that, once again, leaves no doubt about the total genius of the Australian guitarist, who had managed to reinvent himself in the spirit of the emerging punk generation.

Floating Anarchy delivers one surprise after another, starting with the title track, a frantic song that burns through all of the duo's energy (backed by Here And Now) in two intensely charged minutes. "Opium For The People" follows in the same vein, another electrifying anthem that rightfully ranks among the composer's finest songs (in the strict sense of the word), but the best material is found in the two tracks running past the ten-minute mark, cosmic jams of staggering power — twisted, vibrant, and emotional.

It should have been Allen's rebirth album, but in the end it turned out to be his second testament: in 1981 he vanished for the second time, this time taking a much longer break that would last until 1988 — seven years spent in his homeland, after which he returned with a project called GongMaison. The new lineup featured Allen and Malherbe, surrounded by a large cast of session musicians and friends. The underlying idea was interesting: updating Gong's sound by cross-pollinating it with the most disparate influences, from dub to Latin music and, above all, dance. The execution, however, is rather poor, at times even dismal. Only "Titicaca" and, especially, the hypnotic dance groove of "We Circle Around" are worth salvaging.

Meanwhile, Allen also resumed playing with Gilli Smyth and his Mothergong, until, in 1992, the great Pip Pyle rejoined the band, which dropped the "Maison" tag and reclaimed its original name after fifteen years. The unexpected reunion produced an album that September, Shapeshifter, Gong's first studio album with Allen since 1974. It's a finely crafted, original work that forcefully relaunches the band. The babel of influences from GongMaison remains, but handled in a far more measured way, less modern, less trend-chasing. Although there are a few missteps ("Loli"), the tracks are striking, starting with the electronic surge of "Dog-O-Matic", moving through the introspection of "Give My Mother A Soul Call" and the bizarre rock'n'roll of "Heaven's Gate". "Goddess Invocation" rediscovers some classic motifs steeped in a meditative, spiritual mood. The standout track, though, is the spectacular jazz-rock jam "Can You You Can", the only truly unprecedented piece in their entire career up to that point.

In 1994, to celebrate the band's 25th anniversary, a major reunion was organised: Allen, Smyth, Malherbe and Pyle were joined by Tim Blake and Mike Howlett, reassembling the lineup from the trilogy era (rounded out by young Steffi Sharpstrings on guitar, replacing Hillage). The result (released on CD by Gas under the title 25th Birthday Party) is an extraordinary concert lasting nearly two hours, with the band revisiting the great classics, from Camembert to You, before launching into cosmic jams inspired by their more recent material. It's a unique concentration of emotion, the definitive crowning achievement for one of the most important bands of all time.

From that point on, the musicians' paths diverged once again, though not for good: in 2000, Gong's final studio album, Zero To Infinity, was released, still packed with spectacular music and moments that have little to envy in the splendour of the past ("The Invisible Temple", "Infinitea", with music growing ever more spiritual and ambient).

Among the main projects, we should mention Acid Mothers Gong, an explosive collaboration between Allen and Acid Mothers Temple; University Of Errors, Allen's group with guitarist Josh Pollock (notable their debut “Money Doesn't Make It”, 1998); and Gilli Smyth's Goddess Trance (“Electric Shiatsu”, 1999). Tim Blake resumed his solo career after thirteen years of silence (“Magick”, 1992, rather disappointing). Steve Hillage collaborated with The Orb and founded his own techno outfit, System 7, capping off one of the most eclectic careers in the history of music.

In 2009, surprisingly, a fourth volume was added to the “Radio Gnome Trilogy“. Since 1974 (You) this is the first time Steve Hillage has found himself playing with Daevid Allen's band, and the result is extraordinary. The new Gong album sounds current, fresh, bursting with invention and humour.

2032, which gives the album its title, refers to the year in which the planet Gong, inhabited by the Pot Head Pixies with their flying teapots, will make contact with planet Earth following a harmonic astral alignment. The recipe is the usual one: intelligent progressive, psychedelic injections, ideas in abundance, breathtaking rhythms, shifts in tempo and mood, Zappa-esque humour, goofy rhymes, drones and long stretches of pure, visionary space rock complete with space whispers. Aside from Pip Pyle and Pierre Moerlen (both now deceased), the line-up is the original one, with a few additions such as Yuji Katsui (electric violin) from the Japanese progressive-psychedelic jam band Rovo.

Class will out: “City Of Self Fascination” opens the album with a thoroughly contemporary pulse. “The Year 2032” is a poetic track, in Daevid's finest style, with breathtaking contributions from Didier Malherbe on soprano sax that bring to mind an ideal link with the past.

It's genuinely hard to single out a best moment, though “Guitar Zero” offers an irresistible groove, in which Steve Hillage's fluid phrasing leads into a gorgeous sax solo from Theo Travis. “Portal” is strongly rock-driven and quintessentially Hillage-esque, while “Digital Girl”, the ideal single pulled from the album, is pure gnomic song, as is “How To Stay Alive”, which once again showcases Allen's gift for storytelling, with improbable rhymes set to a hilarious Arabic-scaled psychorap tempo of ancient memory given fresh clothes. The song also spawned an entertaining animated video that nicely captures the complex Gong cosmogony.

Daevid's recent experiences with, for instance, University Of Errors, or less recently with Kramer and Microcosmic, have surely helped bring the new Gong's sound up to date, making it more contemporary, able to put modern verbs and new signifiers to classic meanings.

A sense of amused joy pervades the whole album, and there was no better way for Gong to celebrate the band's fortieth anniversary.

Spry and tireless at seventy-six, fresh from winning a first (and hopefully last) battle against cancer, in 2014 Daevid Allen assembled a largely new line-up, whose only members carried over from the past were horn player Ian Est and bassist Dave Stuart. Joining them: his son Orlando on drums, and two guitarists, Fabio Golfetti (straight from Violeta de Outono) and Kavus Torabi (Monsoon Bassoon, Cardiacs, Knifeworld and countless other minor projects), Brazilian and Iranian respectively, further widening the geographic reach of Planet Gong.

And the surprising thing is that what might look like (or perhaps, to all intents and purposes, is) a band merely backing up its sole leader produces what may be the most cohesive record of the group's career: I See You. The opening of the title track is emblematic of the whole album's content: the typical Gong sound, in many of its finest facets, polished up and pared down to its essentials. And this last point is probably the most interesting aspect, the one that makes the record something more than a simple, nostalgic act of self-celebration. The raw sonic blast of “Occupy”, as much as the playful, fairy-tale-like “Syllabub” and the jittery “You See Me”, prove free of any technical showmanship or exhibitionism. The emphasis instead falls on melodic progressions, whether carried by guitar or by horns. The absence of an elaborate, complex concept is further proof of an unexpected restraint: perfect examples are the journey through the forest of the exotic “Zion My T-Shirt”, the possessed, contrast-driven ritual of “When God Shakes Hands With Devil”, and also the cosmic stroll of “The Eternal Wheel Spins”. On the rare occasions when Allen allows his mad inspiration free rein, the results are equally vivid passages such as the nursery-rhyme “Pixielation” or the curious set-to-music poem “This Revolution”, hallucinated trips that still leave most of today's standard-bearers of psychedelia trailing far behind. Mastery finally crystallizes in a monolithic statement formed by the closing triptych: the noise-adjacent opening of “A Brew Of Special Tea”, the ten minutes of theatrical fanfare of “Thank You”, and the concluding black hole of “Shakti Yoni & Dingo Virgin”, a passage into open space so dear to the German cosmic couriers. Forty years on and you wouldn't know it. Forty years of love, grudges, betrayals, reconciliations. We've already said enough in words; here only the music speaks: the legend continues.

Unfortunately, though, illness lay in wait for Daevid Allen. On June 2, 2014 a cyst was removed from his neck, later revealed to be cancerous. From then on, a futile battle, which he chose to consciously bring to an end: “I'm not interested in endless surgical operations, and it came as a relief to know that the end is in sight,” he had declared. “I am a believer, and I think the time has come to come to terms with the evidence that the end is now near. I think it's time to stop resisting and surrender to the facts.”

His moving farewell to fans was sealed in an extraordinary letter, in which Allen found the strength to joke about his illness: “Hello everyone, kookaburra,” he had begun, announcing his imminent death, diagnosed by doctors who on February 5, 2015 had given him six months to live. Allen had, in fact, only a month and a half left. Yet, even fully aware of his fate, the Australian musician had still joked around, bringing his beloved cats into it: “Ok, they gave me the Pet-Cat scan,” he joked, playing on the words “pet-cat”, which actually stood for “Pet/CT”, the radiotherapy scan used to treat cancer.

Daevid Allen died in Byron Bay, in his native Australia, at 77. He leaves behind a unique legacy of ideas and sounds, and an example of vitality and irony that transcends even the boundaries of death.

On August 22, 2016, Allen's longtime partner Gilli Smyth also passed away. Less than a month later, the band's twenty-eighth album was released, titled Rejoice! I'm Dead!, in tribute to the Australian sprite. For the occasion, past members Steve Hillage, Didier Malherbe and Graham Clark returned, to commemorate and celebrate a new beginning. Clark himself lends his violin right from the psychedelic klezmer opener “The Thing That Should Be”, while Hillage pays tribute to Allen on “Rejoice!”, his guitar suddenly setting off for the galaxy in the second half of this unruly requiem. After the space-doom metal rhythms of “Kaptial”, another welcome return is that of Didier Malherbe, whose duduk cuts through “Model Village” alongside Daevid Allen's voice. The Australian sprite also appears on “Beatrix”, a sort of melancholy “Prostitute Poem” (“Angel's Egg”) without Smyth's lascivious whispers and verbal striptease. The spacey-clerical atmospheres of “Visions” are then followed by the closing triptych, steeped in echoes of the “Radio Gnome Invisible“ trilogy, “You” in particular; from the overloaded space-rock of “The Unspeakable Stands Revealed”, to the stellar battle aboard flying teapots of “Through Restless Seas I Come” (again featuring Didier Malherbe), through to the multi-ethnic divertissement of “Insert Yr Own Prophecy”.

This is a commemorative record, steeped in joy and memory, and it couldn't have been otherwise. That's how Daevid Allen and Gilli Smyth would have wanted it, and Gong carries on its saga without its founding members. Even though the originators are no longer with us, it must be stressed that if there's one thing “Bert Camembert” and “Shakti Yoni” have taught us, it's that the story of Gong has always been that of a great “global family”, with all the losses that every family must sooner or later face.

After the fitting farewell to Daevid Allen, The Universe Also Collapses turns out instead to be the starting point of a new era. The definitive watershed between what Gong was in the hands of its creator and what, in all likelihood, it will continue to be in the future. After all, the band's return doesn't surprise anyone who has followed its more recent history: Daevid's wish was always to leave the group at the mercy of fate, not wanting it to hide behind regrets and endless sonic funerals.

The quantum leap reverberates through the sound system, going back to the origins of time and space: guitarist Kavus Torabi's declared intent was indeed to produce an album of pure, high-strength psychedelia. Gone, then, are many of the superstructures that characterized part of Gong's central saga; there's no room for overt jazz and progressive contamination, only a single psych-rock flow that acts directly on the listener's mind. 

You can sense something strange is going on just from the length of the opener, "Forever Reoccurring", 20 minutes that seem to have come straight out of Timothy Leary's head. The modus operandi ties back to the spacey early Gong of "Camembert Electrique", in an overlapping swirl of synthesizers, saxophones, guitars and astonishing percussive runs. The final result, however, doesn't fully convince, as some sections come across as almost inconclusive and redundant.

The more dynamic, properly Canterbury soul of Gong instead surfaces in the brief interlude of "If Never I'm And Ever You", which launches into the album's second-longest track, the granite-like 13 minutes of "My Sawtooth Wake". Here too the guitar glissando rules the roost, Allen's old trademark, which together with Ian East's saxophones becomes the true star of what is the most convincing track of the lot. A genuine statement of intent in which mannerism steps aside, revealing what Gong can truly offer in the years to come. Everything falls apart, however, in the closing space-folk of "The Elemental", centered on Kavus Torabi's voice, which in such a rhythmically bare setting doesn't seem able to carry the weight alone and lift the song to a higher level. A slightly underwhelming finale, but we take note for the future of what truly matters: even if the universe collapses, there's still life on planet Gong.

Contributions by Valeria Ferro ("Rejoice! I'm Dead" and "The Universe Also Collapses")

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

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