Music

Flying teapots and electric Camembert: the story of Gong, prog's trippiest band


‘I was 23, playing under an Arab moon, by the sea,” says Mike Howlett, recalling a high point of his time with Gong, when the cosmic rockers played a Tunisian festival, in June 1973. That sounds magical – but then the acid they’d taken triggered flashbacks to a trip Gong had jointly experienced weeks earlier involving the hallucinogen datura.

Among the plant’s deranging effects are making things appear that aren’t there – such as the dead – and making things that are there disappear. When frontman Daevid Allen’s guitar vanished out of his hands, he took this as a sign that he wasn’t supposed to be on stage and wandered off, leaving the rest of Gong to improvise a singer-less set. “About 45 minutes in, though, Daevid rematerialises at the front of the audience – he’s leaning on the stage right in front of me, still in his crazy makeup and Gong-symbol headpiece, and he’s making all these weird wincing expressions, like he’s analysing and judging each note I’m playing. That freaked me out – I felt I was hanging by my bass strings over an infinite abyss, and if I got a single note wrong I’d be plunging down.”

Gong have been through many incarnations since Allen founded the band 50 years ago, an anniversary marked by a 13-disc box set, Love from Planet Gong, which focuses on their early-70s prime when they were signed to Virgin. Before Gong, Allen was a central figure in Soft Machine, who were second only to Pink Floyd in the London psychedelic underground.

Allen left his native Australia in 1960, a precociously long-haired beatnik and Sun Ra fan. After a stint in bohemian Paris, he arrived in England and became a lodger in a free-and-easy Canterbury house owned by the journalist Honor Wyatt. Her 16-year-old son, Robert, fell under Allen’s influence, as did young Wyatt’s friend, Kevin Ayers. “I was seen as the beat poet from Australia who scandalised the neighbourhood and led the schoolboys astray,” is how Allen remembered it.

He and the schoolboys formed Soft Machine. But Allen’s involvement was cut short when, following a 1967 tour of Europe, he was refused re-entry to the UK. So he returned to Paris, living in a barge on the Seine owned by girlfriend Gilli Smyth and getting caught up in the May 1968 riots. His contribution was antic rather than insurrectionary. Prancing between the students on one side and police on the other, he sang absurdist ditties in a crazy costume, and rather than hurl paving stones at the gendarmes, he handed out teddy bears.

The classic Gong sound assembled itself bit by bit as recruits joined the amorphous, ever-shifting ensemble. On the 1969 debut, Magick Brother, and Camembert Electrique (1971), there are echo-laden “space whispers” from Smyth and flute and sax from Didier Malherbe, a French jazzman Allen discovered playing in a goat herder’s cave behind the poet Robert Graves’s Mallorca home.

Daevid Allen in 2008.



Daevid Allen in 2008. Photograph: Simone Cecchetti/Corbis/Getty Images

By 1973’s Flying Teapot – the first instalment of a Radio Gnome Invisible Trilogy recorded for Virgin – Steve Hillage’s spectacular Hendrix-influenced guitar entered the fray along with synth swoops from Tim Blake. Then for Angel’s Egg (1974) – after his astrologer girlfriend calculated that Gong’s star sign lineup required a Taurean bassist – Motown fan Mike Howlett arrived to push the sound in a groovier direction, meshing with the precision hyper-syncopations of new drummer Pierre Moerlen.

In addition to contributing lead vocals, Allen developed a unique style of “glissando guitar” using a metal bow. But in many ways, says Hillage, “mythology was the main instrument Daevid played. Didier played sax, Daevid played mythology.” The Gong mythos was a fantastical sci-fi narrative involving the peaceful Planet Gong, its small green inhabitants, the Pothead Pixies, and their healing gurus the Octave Doctors. The Pixies had propellers on their heads that doubled as aerials tuned into the telepathic transmissions of Radio Gnome Invisible (an interstellar pirate radio station) and they travelled by “glidding” in flying teapots (a stoner-friendly joke on flying saucers).

Allen extended this whimsical fantasy not just through lyrics but line-drawings daubed over the record sleeves. “Gong originally grew out of experiments that Daevid and Gilli did in Paris around 1967 or 68, and at that time in France there was a huge boom for bandes dessinées – what we call graphic novels,” says Hillage. “Daevid’s drawings really came out of that comic-book style.” They also parallel the artwork done by Pedro Bell for Parliament-Funkadelic and by Barney Bubbles for Hawkwind – contemporaries who similarly wrapped an allegory of cosmic liberation around their music.

Gong were visually potent as a live experience, too. Capering in his wispy, gingery beard and pointy hat, the singer resembled Catweazle (from the children’s TV series about an 11th-century wizard). Hillage’s arrival as lead guitarist allowed Allen to concentrate on what he called “audience connection and ritual theatrics”. Another focal figure on stage was Smyth, who, recalls Howlett, “wore fantastic costumes and projected this earth-mother-slash-witch trip. She couldn’t really sing, but with the ‘space whispers’ she developed this whole new style of vocal that didn’t exist before. She’d incant poetry and spin out certain words with long echo, using a special switch on her microphone.”

For much of the early 70s, Gong lived communally in a run-down hunting lodge in the middle of a French forest. “There was this fantastic large room we called le grand salle that became our permanent practice place,” recalls Hillage. Angel’s Egg was recorded there, with some members of the group playing out in the surrounding woods, experimenting with “tree echo”. Much of the time the group were writing and recording in altered states.

Ritual theatrics ... Gong in 1974.



Ritual theatrics … Gong in 1974. Photograph: Virgin Records

Although the locals tolerated the hairy oddball visitors, the druggy escapades indirectly led to Gong losing the house. “We had a raid, but it wasn’t the police, it was the customs, looking for carnet infringements, equipment we’d shipped over,” says Hillage. “But they found some drug paraphernalia. It all got a bit difficult.” So Gong moved to another communal setup in Oxfordshire, near Virgin’s Manor studio, where they recorded You, the final instalment of the Radio Gnome Invisible Trilogy.

Released in October 1974, that album sold more than 100,000 copies. Gong were on the verge of becoming the Grateful Dead of Europe, a trip band who could play sell-out concerts and appear high on the bill of commercial and free festivals alike, catering to a surprisingly large constituency of “freeks” who – even on the eve of punk – were carrying on like 1967 never ended. But then things fell apart.

“We were all very strong personalities, with very different ideas, and when it worked we made a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts,” says Hillage. “But it was a combustible mix.” A schism formed between the “lyrics” faction and those who wanted to pursue an instrumental, jazz-rock direction. The latter, led by the classically-trained percussionist Moerlen, wanted to jettison what they deemed to be the distracting frivolousness of Allen’s mythology. Allen and Smyth left abruptly in April 1975, retreating to their cottage in Deya, Mallorca. Hillage didn’t stick around much longer. Howlett stayed for the slick fusion of Shamal, supplying vocals and lyrics in a vain attempt to preserve some of the old Gong, before bailing out.

“I missed Daevid greatly when he left. It was a big shock for me,” recalls Hillage. “I had great admiration for the way he blended quirky humour with philosophy and spiritual seriousness.” Hillage carried on flying the freak flag in his solo career, then produced Simple Minds, and in the 90s immersed himself in rave culture, collaborating with the Orb and forming his own techno outfit, System 7. Howlett reinvented himself as a leading new wave producer, working with OMD and A Flock of Seagulls among others.

A more recent Gong lineup from 2017, with Steve Hillage third from left.



The Gong lineup from 2017, with Steve Hillage third from left. Photograph: Ashley Jones

Gong reconfigured and reunited many times over the ensuing decades. Allen was still fronting a version of the group when he died in 2015. That incarnation, which contains no original members, continues to release records and tour. “It was Daevid’s absolute adamant dying wish that the band he’d been playing with carry on,” says Hillage. According to Howlett, “Daevid saw Gong as an institution, not dependent on any person. People could join, contribute, move on – but the institution would abide.”

“Institution” is an odd word to describe anything to do with an instinctive anarchist like Allen – someone whom Howlett remembers setting fire to a £20 note to make a point. “He was the founder of Gong, but not the leader – none of us liked the concept of leaders, and especially not Daevid,” says Hillage, who describes Allen – 15 years his senior – as more like an older brother than a father figure. Howlett concurs: “What I liked about Daevid was that he was an anti-guru. He had that charismatic force of personality, a powerful stage presence, such that people would be in awe of him. But he did a lot of things to undermine any kind of hero worship – which he could easily have exploited. He thought being cool was the stupidest thing to want to be, so he would be deliberately uncool – even embarrassing.”

In that sense, Daevid Allen and his madcap troupe were the original daft punks.

Gong tour the UK until 23 November. A box set, Love from Planet Gong, is out now.



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