Gong

Part 1: Flying Teapot (Virgin, 1973)

Part 2: Angels Egg (Virgin, 1973)

Part 3: You (Virgin, 1974)

In the beginning there was GONG

We all know what the early '70s meant for rock music. Thirty years ago, the charts of half the world were dominated by names like Jimi Hendrix, Carole King, Led Zeppelin and dozens of other artists of equivalent stature. We were still in that (historic) era when their music - the very same music - was played at giant happenings, spun in discos, broadcast on the radio and sold by the ton on vinyl. It's in this context that, pollinated by the residual freak influences of the West Coast's "Summer of Love" and nurtured by its many fathers, a project took shape - after a journey around the world with stops in Australia, England and France - that would become a stem cell for all of avant-garde rock music.

The project in question is Gong, an underground rock band through and through, who, led by Daevid Allen, distilled their art into the Radio Gnome Invisible trilogy (pronounced the French way [radjo gnom invizibl]).

Musically speaking, the trilogy gathers up and melts together everything it was possible to hear during this period. It's a hybrid par excellence, its foundation built on San Francisco Bay psychedelia blended with the English Canterbury scene; Allen's outlandish visions combined with the surrealist poetry of his wife Gilli Smyth make up the other trademark; keyboards, horns and bongos are the missing tiles of an incredible mosaic of sounds. Although by definition always confined to an underground sphere, in 1971, with their third record "Camembert Electrique" (here too the French pronunciation is mandatory), their first commercial success arrived. According to legend, this album was recorded exclusively during the full-moon nights of that same summer. It's "Camembert Electrique" that will pave the way for the subsequent "Radio Gnome Invisible", recorded at the same farmhouse-studio and (it seems) with similar rituals.

If David Bowie had stopped at Ziggy Stardust with his stardust and Martian spider, Gong pushed even further beyond. The Radio Gnome Invisible trilogy is essentially a hymn to free thought. Almost emulating the Tower of Babel, it materializes as an attempt to reach some divinity through a kind of "mammoth conjunction of the arts". Although Gong's music was born under the influence of "primordial" psychedelia (chiefly Syd Barrett and Grateful Dead), what eventually comes out of the hat has very little that's primordial or classic about it. The result is music that can be defined in a thousand ways, and in just as many opposite ways, without ever being wrong. It's rock heavily sprinkled with mysticism, medieval, heroic, fairy-tale and hippie elements; at the same time steeped in bucolic, enchanted, spacey and surreal atmospheres. Certainly a sound that's difficult to characterize and describe.

Let's take a step back, to the second half of the sixties, when Daevid Allen — an Australian nearing thirty, transplanted to England and musically raised in Canterbury — after marrying English poet Gilli Smyth, decided to break with his band at the time: Soft Machine, led by Robert Wyatt. He would repeatedly criticize the band for its excessive artistic stagnation and scant inclination toward innovation. Later, in 1967, Allen, together with his wife and other musicians, settled near Paris, out in the countryside, on a farm that would be converted into a kind of center devoted to musical research. Out of this shared living arrangement, after a few adjustments, the first Gong line-up would emerge.

In the band, each member is known by their own nickname (sometimes more than one), which in turn differs from the names of the characters they play on the records. Moreover, to add even more confusion, the instrument names are always fantastical, almost mythological pairings, like: spermguitar, space wisper, dog foot, and so on. This shouldn't suggest a slapdash musical attitude on their part, though: everyone had a classical background, and everyone, even amid the improvisation, knew where they wanted to go.

In any case, in descending order of "trippiness", the Gong of Radio Gnome Invisible, with their fine nicknames, were:

· Daevid Allen – Bert Camembert (guitar, voice – local vocals, lewd)

· Gilli Smyth – Shakty Yoni (voice – space wisper, orgone box)

· Steve Hillage – The Submarine Captain o Stevie Hillside (chitarra solista – spermguitar, slow whale, sideral slideguitar, dog foot)

· Tim Blake – High Tea Moonweed or Francis Bacon (organ and keyboards – VCS3 box, Cynthia size A, crystal machine)

· Didier Malherbe – Bloomdido Bad de Grasse (sax, flute – split sax, soprasax, so floot)

· Mike Howlett – Mista T Being (bass – aqualung bass)

· Pierre Moerlen – Dierre de Strasbourg o Lawrence the Alien (batteria, percussioni – drumbox kicks & knoks)

Radio Gnome Invisible. The story

Straddling 1973 and '74, the three albums making up the trilogy were released on the Virgin label. In order: "Flying Teapot", "Angels Egg" and "You".

The band's intentions were certainly aimed at creating something very close to a comedy for the ears, and the end result wouldn't stray far from that. Unlike the earlier "Camembert Electrique", which had established the band even with the wider public, "Radio Gnome Invisible" was conceived as a product of "pure, deeply intellectual counterculture"; aimed at niche followers devoted to "pure experimentation", a product entirely resistant to trends. It would hit all its targets dead on; the three records go well beyond the definition of concept album, yet at the same time present themselves as a work too refined and structured to be dismissed as mere artistic provocation. Three records able to enshrine Gong as a cult band in an almost unforeseen way, as if there were far more "nutcases" out there than anyone had bargained for.

Late-Sixties Paris was certainly not lacking in musical inspiration: a "global" hub where everything converged — classical music, free jazz, Balkan and Arabic music. From this metropolis Gong would absorb everything, including its darker side, starting with the political-philosophical concepts of anarchy (one of their fixations), their determination to avoid any form of snobbery, right down to their rejection of bourgeois identity. Parisian theatre too, with its lessons in melodrama, mime and prose, exerted a strong influence on the band.

"Radio Gnome Invisible" introduces the story and characters in the first act, "Flying Teapot". It tells of a "flying teapot" coming from the planet Gong that lands on the mountains of Tibet to meet three representatives of planet Earth (Mista T Being, Fred The Fish and Banana Ananda). The flying teapot carries the "Pot Head Pixies": small green creatures with tiny antennae planted on their heads, permanently tuned into the broadcasts of Radio Gnome Invisible coming, of all places, from the planet Gong (for the record, located in the seventh heaven, in a region of the Universe unknown to our all-too-primitive astronomers). The Pot Head Pixies' mission is to prepare planet Earth for the arrival of a large colony of Gongians expected in 2032. The story then continues across the other two records, following the adventures of our earthly representative Zero The Hero on the planet Gong.

All this is enriched, and at times overloaded, by continuous allusions where normality is non-normality. Banana Ananda, for instance, is presented as a Yogi Bear-type character living in his Tibetan cave, using the phrase "banana nirvana manana" to enter a trance. Or take the description of the mysterious impenetrable force shield surrounding the Octave Doctors, who in turn appeared as giant eyes tasked with protecting the planet Gong.

The booklet descriptions for "Angels Egg" are likewise a genuine bombardment, a real loop of allusions, and the liner notes confuse matters even further. The information needed to understand the story has been deliberately fragmented and scattered across different contexts. No curiosity is ever given a comprehensible answer; rather, resolving one doubt only generates more. As if that weren't enough, both the liner notes and the lyrics are packed with slang, and plenty of words are either invented or spelled phonetically. Seen from this angle, it's as if the band found itself caught in a kind of "psychedelic turbulence", feverish, delirious and hallucinating amid all this surrounding chaos.

Three, two, one, ignition!

The space odyssey begins with Flying Teapot, the narrative of first contact, the opening of Allen's fantastical vision. Already, this first track, the mini-suite "Radio Gnome Invisible", sits light years ahead of anything rock music had expressed up to that point. Into similarly ambitious territory - albeit in less complex and less paradoxical form - only Genesis with "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway" and the Kinks with "Preservation act. I & II" had ventured (or would venture shortly after) during this period. Even Pink Floyd's "The Wall", the Who's "Tommy" and Lou Reed's "Berlin", to name but a few, would remain tethered to more earthbound, less visionary scores.

Deliberately, as if to underline its high-tech/spatial connotations, every sound is deeply marked by a "synthetic" imprint; "conventional" rhythmic patterns are replaced by collages of sounds stretched out of the time domain and warped by mysterious cosmic anomalies. The track "Radio Gnome Invisible", together with "Flying Teapot", "The Pot Head Pixies" and "The Octave Doctors And The Crystal Machine", forms a cluster of space rock in its most primordial state: the melodic component is built from sudden swirls of falsetto voices, nonsensical phrases, keyboard loops and brief sax solos. The following "Zero The Hero And The Witch's Spell", "Witch's Song" and "I Am Your Pussy" showcase the perpetually "orgasmic" voice of the witch Yoni, aka Gilli Smyth. Orgasmic, mysterious, ethereal, saturated with eros in the same way Ulysses' sirens might sing if teleported into this dimension. Gilli's voice is a perfect match for the character of the witch Yoni: sadistic, seductive, a manipulator through sex. Allen personifies Zero The Hero, her male counterpart, in a script that seems to transpose a medieval-style duel, where the fearless knight faces off against a malevolent witch amid potions, amulets and magic rituals. The whole thing degenerates into a cabaret-style break where the only real contest is who can sing in the most absurd register.

Angels Egg, the second act of the trilogy, is the record most closely tied to the story. "Other Side Of The Sky" picks up where Flying Teapot left off: Gilli's voice once again glides over a layer of cosmic alchemy conjured by Tim Blake's machines. The track sounds like a parody of the music from "2001: A Space Odyssey", serving as the soundtrack for the interplanetary journey Zero embarks on after bidding farewell to his old world. The sounds float in clusters, living in perfect symbiosis with the laws of chaos, the voices reduced to barely whispered monosyllables, while the only semblance of rhythm has to wait for the final drum solo. The approach (only an approach!) toward a more conventional song form takes shape with "Sold The Highest Buddha" and the following "Prostitute Poem": the drums mark out a jazzy tempo, keyboards and sax orbit around bass and guitar lines that gain extra weight on these two tracks. "Prostitute Poem", along with the following "Givin My Luv To You" and "Selene", reintroduces the harmonies of galactic vocalist Gilli Smyth who, embraced by sax and peppered with Eastern-tinged percussion, alternates English with French, words with moans, for another turn as an Odyssean siren showing off her seductive charms to unsuspecting space sailors in search of love. Next comes "Flaute Salad", another mini-suite where flute and synthesizer improvise together; "Outer Temple", where hallucination turns into frenzy (saxophone and synthesizer roam far and wide); "Inner Temple", a balance between delirium and trance; the percussion cacophony of "Percolations"; then "Love Is How You Make It": hypnotic voices, chiming bells and a music-box melody guide Zero into the world of sex. The album's final two tracks, "I Never Glid Before" and "Eat That Phone Book Coda", carve out a small space for Steve Hillage's guitar genius too.

Then comes You, the third and final act. Of the three, it's certainly the one closest to more conventional, earthbound rock structures. "Thought Four Naught", "A Pot Head Pixie Advice", "Magick Mother Invocation" and "Master Builder" are the album's first four tracks: Zappa-esque arrangements and vocals blend with percussion, cabaret fragments and birdsong.

Then come two magic formulas which, according to the liner notes, are meant to attune listeners to music's fundamental frequencies before setting off on the journey (which journey is never specified). The pace cools with the arrival of Zero's new vision: "A Sprinkling Of Clouds". Control is taken back by Blake's keyboard work, which reignites the cosmic psychedelia that serves as the trilogy's leitmotif: hailstorms of synthesized chords chased by percussion and moans. The next two steps, "Perfect Mystery" and "The Isle Of Everywhere", represent the peak of Zero's dazed, warped vision, by now overwhelmed - almost crushed - by a dance of phantom planets stretching endlessly into infinity; the sax and guitar solos feel more alien than ever to the context, as if they were the only earthly sounds left in a surreal world. "You Never Blow Yr Trip Forever" is the final track. A blend of Frank Zappa, Jethro Tull and Captain Beefheart, a suite in seven movements where rock, jazz and pop song interlock like puzzle pieces, for a finale that drifts away from the cosmic/fairy-tale imprint running through the albums, in favor of more rock-oriented sounds.

The trilogy - and by this point it seems almost superfluous to say so - stands, in its sheer monumentality, as one of the greatest rock operas of all time. Two and a half hours of cosmic dissonance, visceral vibrations of the universe, otherworldly evocations, "tripped-out" references where imagination was pushed (by whom, and with what, one can only guess...) truly to its limits. Two and a half hours in which the soul of a band at its creative peak is condensed.

The three CDs reviewed here are the reissues for the Japanese market released by Victor. From an audiophile standpoint, there's nothing to complain about. The 20-bit "K2 Super Encoding" remasters do a great job of dusting off the muffled sound of the vinyl editions. What stands out most is the transparency and dynamic balance of the recording. One might raise an eyebrow at the excessive use of certain stereo gimmicks, but then again, this was the early Seventies, and the man in sunglasses ready to "dazzle you with special effects" was just around the corner. It could hardly have been otherwise.

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30/10/2006