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Including: Gong, The Beatles, The Yummy Fur, The Replacements, The Kinks, Erik Satie
Love From The Planet Gong: The Virgin Years 1973-75 UMC Signs and cymbals: Daevid Allen and co’s finest work, now with live treasures.
THE master of the Voisines hunt and his friends don’t look like the kind of rural Frenchmen who would appreciate a psychedelic collective living in the woods nearby. Not so: “Gong are very friendly,” says the huntsman, interviewed on French TV’S
Rockenstock in 1973. A friend adds, “We’ll be sad when they leave, because they play gigs all around here. We like them.”
A year later though, after drugs and customs busts, Gong would leave France, and head to the Oxfordshire town of Witney, not previously known for its collectives of like-minded musical, spiritual and chemical explorers. There they carried on what they had begun in that old hunting lodge 60 miles southeast of Paris, namely, the trilogy of ‘Radio Gnome Invisible’ LPS that form the centrepiece of this exquisite new 12CD boxset, Love From The Planet Gong – May 1973’s
Flying Teapot, December’s Angel’s Egg and You, released at the end of 1974.
Much like their music, the creation of Gong as a band had been more a result of happy accidents than planning. Australian guitarist and singer Daevid Allen, an anarchist in love with the absurd, had ended up in France when he was refused entry back into the UK in August 1967 and had to leave Soft Machine. After taking part in the ’68 Paris riots and meeting and falling in love with a similarly unconventional Sorbonne lecturer, Gilli Smyth, he put a skeleton Gong together, releasing Magick Brother in March 1970 and the excellent Camembert Electrique in October 1971. Gong’s musical horizons expanded, too: jazz, funk, psych-pop, avant-garde, funk, heavy rock, ambient and music-hall quirks all swirl through the music captured in this box, many within a single song. The differing perspectives also led to a continual tug of war between members who favoured structures and those who preferred wild improvisation, with chief songwriter Allen at one end and jazzer Didier Malherbe and drummer Pierre Moerlen at the other.
If Gong itself was something of a balancing act, then for a few short years the collective
managed to produce some incredible music, its vibrancy a result of the tensions that also made them so unstable. Flying Teapot features a couple of infectious psychedelic gems, “Radio Gnome Invisible” and “The Pot Head Pixies”, but there was also room for Tim Blake’s short synth piece “The Octave Doctors And The Crystal Machine” and two epics, the title track and “Zero The Hero And The Witch’s Spell”. The former is one of the crowning glories of Gong’s work, a propulsive piece of syncopated groove with some very fine “gliss guitar” (an Allen technique which, Hillage explains, basically took Syd Barrett’s tape-echoed slide sound to the next level) and chanted vocals (“Have a cup of tea!/have another one!/have a cup of tea!”), which begins with abstract ambient tones and ends in a manic, freejazz climax.
While Allen looked after most of the writing for Flying Teapot, Angel’s Egg saw his bandmates taking on more of a compositional role, and the result was akin to a technicolor Faust Tapes, with snippets like “Outer Temple” and “Percolations” surrounding proper songs such as the stately, spacey “Selene” and the sublime “I Never Glid Before”, with a stunning echoed guitar solo from Hillage and superb Synthi burbles from Blake. You, the final part of what Allen had now decided was a trilogy, continued the group’s voyage towards a jammier vision. Side One’s highlights are “Master Builder”, which blossoms into an acidic, heavy modal riff, and “A Sprinkling Of Clouds”, its Tangerine Dream synth sequences developing into a sublime hard-jazz rush; Side Two, meanwhile, is dominated by the lysergic groove of “The Isle Of Everywhere”, which sounds like Pink Floyd’s “A Saucerful Of Secrets” covered by Funkadelic.
There’s a refreshingly strong feminine presence across these records, too, from Miquette Giraudy’s contributions to You to Smyth’s evocative “space whisper” and her portrayal of various characters in the Gong mythology. Speaking of which, there’s a whole lore on these albums, a half-jokey, half-serious philosophy developed by Allen, involving pothead pixies, flying teapots, Zero the hero, octave doctors, something called Radio Gnome Invisible, and the Planet Gong, which is currently invisible but will, according to Allen, appear and save Earth in 2032. Despite the group’s wacky pixie hats and Allen’s artwork scribblings, there’s a tongue-in-cheek nature and a Dada-esque joy to his tales, even while a spiritual drive underpins it all.
Whether one is spiritually tuned into Gnome FM or not, though, there’s still a motherlode of previously unreleased material in this box to enjoy, especially the multiple full live shows from May 1973 to September 1975, after Allen’s departure. It’s all stunning quality, both in audio fidelity and musicality, and the recordings prove to be the perfect showcase for the band’s improvisational skills: “I Never Glid Before”, for instance, is a relatively svelte six-and-a-half minutes at Hyde Park on June 28, 1974, but was up to 11 minutes at the Paris Bataclan on May 20, 1973 courtesy of a jazzy intro, a jammed middle section and an ecstatic, wild climax; elsewhere, “The Isle Of Everywhere” ranges from 10 minutes (Hyde Park) to 15 minutes (September 1975 at the Marquee), while the heavily electronic “Other Side Of The Sky” is wildly different each time, but still as beautifully nebulous.
In many ways, the studio albums seem more like demos than the ever-evolving live versions elsewhere in the box. “Inner Temple”, for example, from the CD of Peel Sessions also included, is grungier but superior to its studio counterpart, suggesting Can at their jazziest, and even throwing forward to mutant trip-hop.
While Allen was the linchpin of Gong, he was never really the leader and after he left in April 1975, soon after Blake, the group continued without him in various iterations, the earliest of which is captured here. But something had changed – the Gong mythology was no longer there to lighten the mood, and so the group, now led by Malherbe, bassist Mike Howlett and Moerlen, became more serious, with progfusion heavy lifting replacing weightless psychedelic exploration. A September ’75 two-night-stand at the Marquee is included from the post-allen era, with much of the set consisting of material from Steve Hillage’s solo album of that year, Fish Rising. There are gems here, still: the opening suite “Aftaglid”, “Master Builder”, equally transcendent and vicious, and the closing take on “I Never Glid Before”.
Gong’s next studio album, 1976’s jazzy Shamal, is also included in the box, but it points towards Pierre Moerlen’s Gong more than it harks back to what came before. For all that Hillage claims Allen was more of a “beacon” than a leader [see Q&A], Gong at its best was driven by his humour and sense of adventure. That’s never been more potently captured in one release. Most impressively, the sounds Gong created in that French hunting lodge still feel fresh, ahead of their time, and endlessly exciting. If you’ve never glid before, now’s the time.