: Kevan Furbank
: Gong Revised and Updated Every Album, Every Song
: Sonicbond Publishing
: 9781789523997
: 1
: CHF 8.40
:
: Musik
: English
: 192
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB

Every now and then a band comes along that defies convention, refuses to be pigeon-holed, thumbs its nose at comfy predictability and blows raspberries at commercial wisdom. That band is Gong. From 1970 to the present day, Gong have ploughed a unique musical furrow - part progressive rock, part spacey psychedelia, part proto-punk, ambient trance, drum 'n' bass and absurdist political performance art.
In this revised edition, long-time fan Kevan Furbank examines all the Gong albums from Magick Brother in 1970 to 2023's Unending Ascending and chronicles the stories behind each recording. He examines the songwriting, arrangements and mythology that inspired each track, with new insights from, amongst others, the current fantastic Gong line-up, bassist Mike Howlett, violinist Graham Clark and guitarist Josh Pollock.
...He salutes the many great musicians who have passed through Gong in the last 50-odd years, including guitar hero Steve Hillage, drummer Pierre Moerlen, flute and sax maestro Didier Malherbe and, of course, whimsical visionary and Gong founder Daevid Allen. The author also discusses the off-shoots of the Gong family tree - including Mother Gong, Gongmaison and Pierre Moerlen's Gong.
If you have never heard any Gong, this book is the perfect introduction. If you have, you will want to go back and revisit the glorious music this band has made.


Now happily retired, Kevan Furbank was Managing Editor of Reach Ireland, publishers of the Irish Daily Mirror and the Irish Daily Star and a journalist on local and national newspapers for more than 40 years. He has published books on local history and written stories, articles and columns on practically every subject under the sun. This is his fifth book for Sonicbond. His music tastes encompass prog, rock, folk and jazz and, in his spare time, he likes to pretend he can play, guitar, bass, ukulele, bouzouki and keyboards. He is married with two grown-up daughters and lives in Northern Ireland.
Chapter1

Magick Brother (1970)


Personnel

Daevid Allen: guitar, bass, vocals

Gilli Smyth: space whisper

Didier Malherbe: flute, soprano saxophone

Rachid Houari: drums, percussion

Additional personnel

Barre Phillips: contrabass on ‘Rational Anthem (Change The World)’ and ‘Princess Dreaming’

Earl Freeman: contrabass on ‘Ego’, piano on ‘Gong Song’

Burton Greene: piano on ‘Ego’

Dieter Gewissler: contrabass on ‘Mystic Sister, Magick Brother’ and ‘Gong Song’

Tamsin Smyth: voices on ‘Mystic Sister, Magick Brother’ and ‘Princess Dreaming’

Recorded September and October 1969 at Studio Eta and Studio Europa Sonor, Paris

Producers: Jean Georgakarakos, Jean Luc Young

Executive Producer: Pierre Lattes

Engineers: Dominique Blanc-Francard (Studio ETA), Jean Francois Baudet (Studio Europa Sonor)

Label: BYG Actuel

Released: March 1970

Highest chart positions: Uncharted

Running time: 43:52

Current edition: Snapper SNAP199CD (2004)

What’s interesting about Gong’s debut album is that it arrived with virtually all the band mythology intact. According to the Planet Gong website, Allen had a vision back in 1966 in which he believed he was ...

... 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 an enormous cone of etheric light…

The Soft Machine was his first attempt to create a band that could fulfil his aims, but Daevid thought it lacked spiritual integrity – Gong would be his own creation that would reconnect him with his original vision. But he was also canny enough to realise that taking the whole thing too seriously would be a career-limiting mistake, that his philosophical and political points might be better received coated with liberal helpings of whimsy and absurdity.

As well as being a poet and musician, Allen was also a talented artist – the Pot Head Pixies, with little propellers twirling about on top of their pointy heads, came out of cartoon sketches he and Gilli had made. Other ideas came from philosophy and religion – the Flying Teapot a clear reference to the argument by philosopher Bertrand Russell against people making unfalsifiable claims; the ‘search for self-understanding’ part of many spiritual beliefs. Tea is, of course, a slang word for marijuana but, in Allen’s whimsical world, also meant tea.

Much has been made about the influence of Pink Floyd’s original frontman and main composer Syd Barrett and there are indeed some similarities, not least in their raw but inventive guitar work and the fact that Syd was singing about gnomes in 1967, creating fairy tale and nursery-rhyme images with psychedelic wordplay. Allen did that too but, unli