Gong - Biography
By Scott Feemster
Gong is more of a shifting collective of musicians rather than a proper group. Most versions of the band have been centered around the wacky imagination of Australian ex-Soft Machine member Daevid Allen and his wife, singer Gilli Smyth. The group, in it's different incarnations and offshoots, has swung from whimsical psychedelia to hard-driving percussion-fueled progressive rock, with many stops in between. The fact that the group has managed to carry on in one form or another for nearly 40 years is testament to Allen and Smyth's singular vision of bringing more psychedelic-influenced whimsy and wonder to the world of music.
Daevid Allen was an Australian expatriate guitarist living in England who helped form the original line-up of Soft Machine along with drummer/vocalist Robert Wyatt, bassist/guitarist/vocalist Kevin Ayers and organist Mike Ratledge. Soft Machine was an early favorite of the emerging London psychedelic underground, and as their reputation grew, they were asked to play a series of gigs in mainland Europe in 1967. After returning from the last of the performances in southern France, Allen was denied re-entry into the United Kingdom due to a visa complication, so the rest of Soft Machine continued on without him. During Soft Machine's performances in France, he met the British poet and Sorbonne professor Gilli Smyth, so when Allen couldn't return to England, he contacted Smyth and asked if he could stay with her in Paris. The two soon became a romantic couple and, after Allen spent time experimenting with his guitar and effects and an echo box, decided to play music together. With Allen on guitar and Smyth singing, the pair hooked up with four other musicians in the Left Bank scene in Paris, listed only as Taner, Ziska, Natch and Elson, and obtained a residency at the La Vielle Grille club, playing wildly improvisational jams usually under the influence of one chemical or another. Soon after, Allen and Smyth began playing with bassist Marc Blanc and drummer Patrice Lafontaine and collaborating with young filmmaker Jerome Laperrousaz. This new collective played at one of the Parisian student riots during the heady summer of 1968, and when their performance was stopped by the police, they were also photographed and a warrant was soon issued for their arrest. Smyth and Allen fled France and ended up in the town of Deia on the Spanish island of Majorca. As legend has it, Allen and Smyth found saxophonist Didier Malherbe living in a cave near the town, and the trio soon began playing music together. Laperrousaz contacted Allen and Smyth about recording a soundtrack to his movie Continental Circus, and the pair, along with Malherbe, were able to return to Paris. After discussing the project, the trio returned once again to Deia to woodshed new ideas, and then returned again to France. Smyth and Allen received money from Allen's father to buy an old millhouse on a friend's land in the south of France, and the pair moved in and restored the property to serve as their home and home-base for the nascent band they were building. One of their visitors at their new base was entrepreneur Jean Karakos, who had just started an anti-establishment record company called BYG. He was so taken with Smyth and Allen that he advanced them money to record what would be Gong's first couple of releases.
Allen wasted no time and immediately returned to Paris with Smyth and Malherbe to form the first version of Gong. After rehearsals, the group started recording and released Magic Brother (BYG) in 1969 and gigged heavily around France. Their director friend Laperrousaz hooked the band up with providing music for more films, TV ads and programs, and gave the band use of his chateau in Normandy for a time to work on their projects. Part of the deal that Allen had struck with Karakos stated that Allen was to deliver two solo albums to the label, preferably with the help of his old Soft Machine bandmates. After being able to get a hold of Robert Wyatt, (plus Spooky Tooth keyboardist Gary Wright as well as Gong members Smyth, Pip Pyle and Christian Tritsch), Allen was able to return to England in 1970 and record his album Bananamoon (BYG), released in 1971. Allen and company soon returned to Paris and began recording in earnest at Herouville Castle and completed the soundtrack to the film Continental Circus (Philips)(1971), collaborated with French pseudo-beatnik Dashiell Hedeyat on the album Obsolete (CBS)(1971) and the next proper Gong album, Camembert Electrique (BYG, later Virgin)(1971). The band continued it's activities through 1971, touring and notably playing the Glastonbury music festival in the U.K. Allen's former Soft Machine bandmate Kevin Ayers joined Gong as a semi-permanent member during this time, and at the end of the year drummer Pyle leaves the band, replaced by Laurie Allan.
By the middle of 1972, both Allan and Ayers had left the band, and with Smyth giving birth to she and Allen's first son and their label head Karakos basically disappearing after running into trouble with dealings with the label, Gong was put on hold for a while. A bit later the group was contacted by Virgin Records founder Richard Branson, and being especially impressed by the band's performance at Glastonbury, he offered to release their records on his new label. With a new start, the core of Allen, Smyth, Malherbe and Tritsch recruited former Magma bassist Francis Moze, keyboardist Tim Blake, returning drummer Laurie Allan and Kevin Ayer's guitarist Steve Hillage to form a new version of Gong. The group traveled to England to record what would become the album Flying Teapot (Radio Gnome Invisible Pt. 1)(Virgin)(1973). The recording sessions were strained, however, and, after having enough of all the disagreements, Allen and Smyth quit the band and returned to Deia to spend time with their new family. The band carried on under the name Paragong, and after losing Moze and Allan, added bassist Mike Howlett and drummer Pierre Moerlen, and played a series of shows in Europe. Feeling refreshed and approving of the new line-up of the band, Allen and Smyth returned to the fold and took the band back to France to record their next album, Angel's Egg (Radio Gnome Invisible Pt. 2)(Virgin)(1973). After more touring, the band returned to England again, and after reportedly living together in a cottage in Oxford and undertaking marathon jam sessions under the influence of particularly good acid, the group recorded the third installment in their Radio Gnome Invisible series, You (Virgin)(1974). ( The Radio Gnome Invisible is an acid-influenced story involving a hero named Zero and his adventures finding the Planet Gong and a Magic Eye mandala called the Angel's Egg.)
Around the time that sessions were finishing for You, a split was starting to emerge in the band. Some members wanted the band to adopt a more professional tone and not rely on their “druggy” feel, while Allen and others felt the group was being subversive and needed to continue in the direction they had been going in. Blake and Smyth both left the band, and before a gig in Cheltenham, England, in 1975, Allen claimed that when he tried to go on stage, a “wall of force” prevented him, and he subsequently left the band then and there. Leadership of the band briefly fell to guitarist Hillage and new singer Miquette Giraudy, also Hillage's girlfriend, and the band fulfilled whatever live dates where already booked. Percussionist/drummer Moerlen briefly left the band in 1975, but at the end of the tour supporting You, the group's record company Virgin contacted Moerlen about leading a new version of Gong.
Under the new leadership of Moerlen, Gong recorded the album Shamal (Virgin)(1975), with Nick Mason from Pink Floyd producing. Hillage and Giraudy were still marginally involved with the band, but after Shamal, both left, and after recording the band's next album, Gazeuse! (Virgin)(1976), so too did founding member Malherbe. Gazeuse! was basically a progressive/jazz fusion record and already miles away from the trippy progressive-leaning space rock Gong had become known for. Moerlen teamed up with percussionists Mireille Bauer and Benoit Moerlen and American bassist Hansford Rowe and created a band that was a percussion-based progressive-rock/jazz-fusion group. To separate themselves from the previous incarnations of Gong, they became known first as Gong-Expresso, and then as Pierre Moerlen's Gong. This version of Gong continued touring and releasing albums through the late '80's, including the albums Expresso II (Virgin)(1978), Downwind (Arista)(1979), Time Is The Key (Arista)(1979), Leave It Open (Arista)(1981) and Breakthrough (Eulenspiegel)(1986).
Meanwhile, through the late seventies up into the early nineties, Daevid Allen continued with his brand of latter-day psychedelia, working with the bands Euterpe and Planet Gong, (which consisted of Allen and Smyth playing with British band Here & Now using Gong ideas), and Smyth formed a second offshoot called Mother Gong. After spending the better part of the 80's back in his native Australia, Allen returned to the U.K. in 1988 with his new project the Invisible Opera Company of Tibet, which included Didier Malherbe and violinist Graham Clark. This group morphed into the band GongMaison, and after gaining original drummer Pip Pyle back into the line-up, started operating again as Gong. The reconstituted band released the album Shapeshifter (Celluloid) in 1992 and toured heavily behind the release. Gong celebrated it's 25th anniversary in 1994 with a performance in London that included ex-members Mike Howlett and Gilli Smyth, and the two continued on touring with the band through 2001 and released the albums Zero To Infinity (Snapper) and the live document Live 2 Infinitea (Snapper), both in 2000. By 2003, Allen put together a radically different line-up under the name Acid Mothers Gong with Acid Mothers Temple guitarist, (and longtime Gong admirer), Kawabata Makoto. The new group also included University of Errors guitarist Josh Pollock, Acid Mothers member Cotton Casino, Gilli Smyth, and Allen and Smyth's son Orlando on drums. The group released the album Acid Motherhood (Mister E) in 2004 to rave reviews from Gong's longtime fans and critics, and toured afterwards with Ruins drummer Tatsuya Yoshida replacing Orlando Allen in the drummer's seat. Since 2004, annual events called the “Gong Family Unconvention” have been held in England and Holland, and have featured performances by the “classic” line-up of Gong, (including Allen, Smyth, Howlett, Hillage, Blake, Malherbe, Giraudy and later members Chris Taylor and Theo Travis), as well as performances by the many musical projects and offshoots of the various ex-members. A version of Gong featuring Smyth, Allen, Giraudy, Hillage and Howlett played a series of concerts in London in 2008, and it is not known if the band is planning to continue in this form or not.
