The story of Gong begins (again), full moon Easter 1966; daevid allen has a vision which is to change his and many other people's lives.
daevid gains the impression that he is an experiment being supervised by intelligences far beyond his normal level of awareness, that he is later to call the octave doctors, seeing himself on stage in front of a large rock festival audience and experiencing a connection with them that had the quality of intense LOVE, while at the same time being surrounded by a enormous cone of etheric light… simultaneously drawing astral shadows from deep below us and dissolving them in the downpouring radiance focused at its peak.
This vision spawns the entire mythology around which the band is based. The concept of playing anything as remotely fashionable as pop music was a radical step for Allen. He says he would never have considered playing pop songs if he had not heard the Yardbirds', 'Still I'm Sad'.
daevid : For a time i forgot about this revelation, but before long, the act of offering myself to the powers that combine, energise and transform all that lives through music became my only reason to exist. At this point I became aware of my life purpose.
daevid's first attempt to manifest this vision resulted in the formation of the Soft Machine in October 1966. In retrospect he felt that the band lacked the spiritual integrity that he was looking for, but did provide the circumstances for his first performances with Gilli Smyth as the 'electric poets'. His involvement with the project came to an abrupt end in August 1967, when he was refused entry back into the UK owing to his visa having expired.
daevid spent the next couple of months in Paris experimenting with his electric guitar and a boxful of nineteenth century gynaecological instruments processed through an echo box and other effects. daevid claims to have been inspired by watching Syd Barratt playing with Pink Floyd at the Ally Pally.
Whilst playing around the left bank cafe scene, daevid and Gilli met up with magic brothers and mystic sisters; Elson, Taner, Ziska and Natch.
The six of them obtained a residency at La Vieille Grille and began to realise the concept of Total Space Music together with daevid's glissando guitar, Gilli and Ziska on Space Whisper (a.k.a. Atlantean temple chant), Elson and Natch on flutes and Taner mixing it all through his pride and joy, a state of the art 6-channel Semprini echo chamber, becoming the very first in a sacred lineage of switch doctors. daevid described the whole experience as 'eight of the maddest musicians imaginable… improvising around nothing for hours on end, completely stoned.'
During this time daevid was introduced to a young filmmaker named Jérôme Laperrousaz, and young bassist and drummer Marc Blanc and Patrice Lafontaine, plunging straight into the student riots in Paris, May 1968 with an ORTF camera crew. Their performance was stopped by the police, the trio had been photographed and a warrant signed for their arrest, so daevid and Gilli split for Deya just in time to avoid being busted by the police who considered them to be insurgents.
They returned to Deya, narrowly avoiding expulsion from Spain due to a provocative interview Gilli had unwittingly done with the Barcelona tabloids.
Once the heat had died down a bit they smuggled themselves back into France with the intention of fulfilling commitments with Living Theatre and the Bananamoon Band. Whilst in Avignon they met up with a cheery Parisien flea market dealer called Bob Benamou, who had invited Gilli to stay at his house, in the grounds of which was Dr Mishra's Ashram/Retreat run by one Brahmanananda - (a.k.a. Banana Ananda) an old friend from Paris days.
daevid and Gilli spend the rest of '68 in Deya working on the material that was to become Magic Brother / Mystic Sister, there they met Didier Malherbe who was living in a goatherders cave on the side of a mountain in Robert Graves' back garden. They staged poetry readings in a miniature reproduction amphitheatre next door involving local poets and musicians. They returned briefly to Paris to record demos for Pathe Marconi and Barclay with the Bananamoon Band - these have eventually surfaced as Je ne fum pas des Banananes - they turned down the original deals they were offered on the grounds that the deals were too old-fashioned.
daevid's father Wally gave him enough money to buy the old millhouse on Bob Benamou's land in the south of France, which they moved into and began work restoring. One of their visitors that summer was swashbuckling entrepreneur Jean Karakos, who had started an anti-music-biz record company called BYG. He advanced the money to record Magic Brother and Bananana Moon before hearing a single note or signing any contract.
At this point daevid reconnected with the original vision that had spurred him on, realising that he was '…one of the many human, and thus flawed, instruments creating a cultural and spiritual revolution. It was very clear to me that laughter was a vital ingredient and could be used as camouflage - absurdity was the ideal shield.'
By July of 1968 a three year contract had been signed for Magic Brother and Bananana Moon and subsequently with Gong for Camembert Electrique. Allen wasted no time in pulling together a team of virtuoso musicians in Paris to form the first proper Gong band, and began recording in September.
Karakos, along with BYG records and Actuel Magazine, set up the Amougies Jazz festival where Gong played their first gig on October 27th. Billed as the first ever French festival, it was actually held ten miles across the border not far from the site of the historical battle of Waterloo, due to pressure from the French Police, still nervous from the previous years riots.
Magic Brother became pop album of the week on French Radio. Gong spent two months gigging hard around Paris.
Laperrousaz gave them free use of his haunted Normandy Chateau (Château du Theil) - built oddly enough by the inventor of the curling tongs - where Gong lived, wrote and rehearsed music for films such as 'Je, tu, elle', TV ads,Es que je suis…/ Hyp hyp hypnotise ya, it's the time of your life and even the theme tune for the ORTF news.
Benamou officially becomes Gong's manager and the band move back to Montalieu in July. Despite the successes of the band - receiving radio play on programmes like the French 'pop2' - Houari left the band. Allen: 'In the end he was playing quieter and quieter until one day he just wasn't there anymore.'
Technically daevid still owes Karakos two solo albums. Karakos had wanted at least one ex-Soft Machine to be involved and, as it happened, Robert Wyatt was around. After several cases of Fosters lager and loads of black hash they decide to book Marquee Studios in London and cut Bananamoon.
daevid is introduced to young sound engineer Tim Blake and invites him back to France to act as the band's sound mixer.
March sees a move to a hunting Lodge in Voisines, and Pip Pyle joins in April. Thus the scene is set to begin recordings at Herouville Castle in May for Camembert Electrique, Dashielle Hedayatt's Obsolete, and Continental Circus - the latter being a film by jérôme Laperrousaz about ex world motorcycle champion Bruce Findlay. The debut gig for this more muscular line-up is at Glastonbury festival in the UK. Bananamoon is released in July and Kevin Ayers joins in August as a semi-permanent member. They set off on a UK tour, Pip leaves after French dates in December and goes back to England.
Laurie Allan joins on drums in Jan 1972 and does the Belgian dates and a UK tour, after which Kevin Ayers decides that he really can't hack the lifestyle and goes back to his more relaxed solo career. Laurie Allan refused ever to play the same song twice and left as soon as he knew what was coming next.
Drummers came and went. In August the band split for a while. Gilli had just given birth to her first son, Taliesin Allen and needed time off from the busy schedule of gigging and recording. Bob Benamou and Jaques Fivel return to the antiques business and Karakos had more or less disappeared off the scene, having run into trouble with his label BYG and forced to go under ground.
Georgio Gomelsky persuades daevid, Gilli and Didier to return to Britain and talk to Richard Branson who had taken an interest in them on the basis of their Glastonbury Festival performance, so the band shack up with Virgin Records despite still being technically signed to BYG - the start of years of legal wrangling and unreceived royalties.
Gong was having problems settling on a permanent rhythm section. Christian Tritsch wanted to move off bass and concentrate on lead guitar and vocals. They audition several bass players including Bill MacCormick (ex - Matching Mole), but finally plumb for Francis Moze from Magma. With Laurie Allan back on the drum stool this band perform a three week tour of France before picking up Kevin Ayers' Guitarist Steve Hillage, and inviting Tim Blake back as a full-time member.
in January 1973 the band travel to England to record Flying Teapot at Virgin's Manor Studios in Oxfordshire. The sessions are allegedly tumultuous due in part to Moze clashing with everyone except daevid and Steve. After one too many disagreements, daevid calls it a day and splits back to France. Plans are made for the band to continue without him as Paragong. daevid seeks commitment from Virgin in the form of a new contract and agency deal.
daevid and Gilli temporarily leave Gong and return to Deya to spend time as a family. Paragong tour France in April with new bass player Mike Howlett and drummer Pierre Moerlen
daevid returns with a renewed sense of purpose. Gong play in London, watched by Richard Branson and Mike Oldfield, who spots Pierre and asks him to play at the premier of Tubular Bells at the Queen Elisabeth Hall the following month. Flying Teapot is released and the first BBC 'Top Gear' session is recorded. The first major UK tour - with this, the classic line-up - is undertaken in June and work immediately begins on Ooby Scooby Doomsday at Manor Studios in Oxfordshire. In July they move back to France and begin sessions for Angels Egg at Pavillion du Hay in Voisines.
Gilli gives birth to Orlando Allen and the second Peel session is recorded in January.
Gong move to Middlefield Farm near Oxford, UK, and are almost immediately busted for dope. Pierre Moerlen rejoins in May and they begin rehearsing for You.
daevid allen: 'The creation of You was very different to Angels Egg. We had come to the conclusion that, because I was contributing a lot of the material, that it was too much my original creation. It was time we created something completely together, so we booked up a cottage in England, and we lived there for a week, we saved up some wonderful acid and we took this acid together as a group. And this was one occasion where there was no paranoia, it was just a wonderful, wonderful trip and we all played and played and played. And we connected so strongly together out of the improvisations, we just improvised and recorded it and then at the end of the day, we would listen to the recordings and take the pieces out that we wanted to learn.'
daevid wrote the lyrics over the next month and recording began in July : You was the final record (of the trilogy) and so I had to write the words and make that story come into its final cycle.
Pierre Moerlen leaves to become a full time member of the prestigious Percussions de Strasbourg, and Gong become split over various personal, spiritual and musical issues. daevid wants to leave the band, finding the music too technique-oriented. Other members object to having to fit their music to his perpetual storyline and take issue with his choice of ending for the trilogy. Record company businessmen want them to be more commercial and play down the political subversion. There is also heated disagreement about the wisdom of continuing to use drugs as part of the band experience.
Gilli leaves for Spain and is replaced by Miquette Giraudy - Steve Hillage's girlfriend - previously an actress who'd appeared in Barbet Schroeder's film La Vallée.
Laurie Allan returns for the UK tour, is busted for drugs whilst crossing the Franco-German border and is forbidden ever to enter France again. He is replaced by Bill Bruford for the remainder of the dates in Germany, Holland and Norway.
Youis released in November, but as the album rises in the UK charts, Karakos reappears and slams an injunction on the album claiming that Gong are still signed to BYG. A twelve year legal battle between Virgin and BYG ensues, resulting in all Gong's royalties going to the lawyers.
daevid finally leaves the band during a gig at Cheltenham: 'I couldn't actually get on stage. It was as though there was a an invisible curtain of force that was stopping me from going through the door. I threw myself at the open door and bounced back, off nothing. And this blew my mind so thoroughly that I just ran out of the theatre into the rain and started hitchiking on the road with all my clothes, my stage clothes, my costume and face painted with fluorescent colours. And then a woman looked at me so strangely that I started thinking I was a murderer and I was hiding in the bushes. Finally I got picked up by somebody who had left the concert, was taken home, and then I had to realise that I had to leave Gong, so that's the way it all ended.'
Gong completes the tour with Steve and Miquette fronting a truncated line-up.
Pierre Moerlen returns after Virgin offer him the leadership of the band, recording Shamal in December. Steve Hillage guests on a couple of tracks only and leaves the band for good to concentrate on his solo career.
The band split again into lyrical versus instrumental camps. Simon Draper of Virgin chooses the Moerlen-driven instrumental approach. Patrice Lemoine and Mike Howlett leave. Gazeuse! is recorded in September, but the band splits irrevocably afterwards.
The original purpose of the band had vanished, but they still had a contract to complete with virgin under the name Gong. Pierre Moerlen had met up with Hansford Rowe in New York, in November. They decide to form a new Gong line-up - the prototype of Pierre Moerlen's Gong.
Psychedelic, electro jazz crossover, anarcho-pataphysical hippy idealist revolutionary nursery-rhyme, goddess mantra-trance delirium. Whatever Gong may mean to you, it's well possible that it means the very opposite to someone else.
daevid: I was in the position of being a psychedelic usher at the cinema of the French mind.
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 Soft Machine, 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…
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.
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 Angels 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…
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', 'Angels Egg' and' You'-adventures in poetry and song of Zero the Hero and the pot-head pixies from the Planet Gong, travelling to Earth in flying teapots. The trilogy albums displayed a bardic sensibility. They were archetypical creation myths and truths garbed for a free-thinking, questioning generation, tales of Octave Doctors, the Good Witch Yoni, secret coded messages from deepest outer/inner space and the levels of initiation on the soul's cyclical journey of reincarnation. It was often too much of a challenge for those of a purely pragmatic outlook and seen as being too far from the 'norm'. But there were enough people in tune with Gong's particular call to make this series of albums successful through the early and mid 70's and the band established a huge audience in Britain and on the continent.
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 synthesizer 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…
Gilli Smyth : 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.
Allen and Smyth, however, pre-empted it all, jumping ship for Spain in 1975 - Allen maintaining he had been prevented from appearing on stage one night by a 'force field' of unspecified origin. Gong sailed on for a while, with Hillage and Giraudy leading the line for Shamal (1975), produced by Pink Floyd's Nick Mason, before finally docking into dry jazz-rock terrain as Pierre Moerlen's Gong, with Moerlen and Malherbe alone remaining from previous incarnations. Their albums, Gazeuse/Expresso and Expresso II (1977/1978) were Gong product in name alone.
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 synthesizer L Ps?, '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…
In 1988 Allen returned to England, settling (of course) in Glastonbury. He was a largely forgotten figure, but Gong material was beginning to be sampled on Acid House underground hits, and he reclaimed sufficient momentum to get a band together again, touring in 1992 as Gongmaison, with Malherbe back on reeds, and with tabla percussion and techno- esque electronics reflecting how many of the original musical tenets of golden period Gong had come back into play. As if to prove it, Allen went on to record with Bongwater and Shimmy Disc mainman Kramer for 1993's Who's Afraid album.
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…
daevid : It's all much too serious to be serious about.