Daevid Allen & Gong: “Absurdism is the highest form of comedy”

Originally published in Uncut Take 149 [October 2009], we return to France, in the late 60s, where a motley international band of beat poets, “space whisperers” and potheaded pixies set up a commune in the woods outside Paris. Here, they drop LSD, duet with kettles, watch out for UFOs and begin an extraordinary musical trip that has lasted 40 years. Bonjour, GONG…

“It sounds bonkers”

“The problem always is that when aliens appear on Earth, most people are just going to be scared and they’ll want to kill them. This is why aliens have tried to prepare the way through my music, by creating a strange, new sound.”

This could be the ramblings of a Lee Scratch Perry, a Sun Ra, or a George Clinton. But the words are coming out of the mouth of Daevid Allen, an entirely plausible-sounding Australian, nursing a half-pint of lager while explaining the philosophy of his band, Gong.

“It sounds bonkers, but I always had a sense of being contacted by another planet of intelligent beings, who wanted to help the Earth people. They figured the way to do this was to find certain bands, use them as a vehicle for their strange noises, and prepare the way for a peaceful arrival. So, when they appear in the year 2032, if you’ve been listening to our music, there’s no reason to be afraid of them.”

Psychedelia, beat poetry, jazz improvisation, tape loops, prog rock and Indian drones

This strange mix of conspiracy theory and surrealist whimsy is classic Gong, a band who provide the missing link between vintage psychedelia and latterday rave culture. For the past 40 years Daevid Allen – together with a cast of sidekicks that’s almost as large as the alumni of the Fall – has sung about flying teapots and pothead pixies, about magic bananas and Foster’s lager, about aliens and electric cheese.

It’s all been set to a strange and highly musicianly blend of psychedelia, beat poetry, jazz improvisation, tape loops, prog rock and Indian drones, and has proved enduringly popular to three generations of revolutionary socialists, anarchists, occultists, UFOlogists, hippies and crusties.

Four decades after their birth, Gong find themselves headlining at Massive Attack’s Meltdown, and playing a pulsating, three-hour set at the Glades stage at Glastonbury in front of thousands of ravers.The story of Gong starts in 1967, where Daevid Allen, then de facto leader of the up-and-coming psych-pop outfit The Soft Machine, is playing London’s Speakeasy Club surrounded by rock royalty.

“Everyone had this weird sense of entitlement”

“Hendrix was chatting up some girls at the next table. Keith Moon was getting drunk. There were sundry members of The Beatles and the Stones and Pink Floyd dotted around the place.” Allen’s voice becomes ever more withering with every casual namedrop. ”And it was like the court of King Louis XVI or Henry VIII, it was just seeping with decay. Everyone had this weird sense of entitlement, which, as an old communist, disgusted me. I realised at the time, fuck, I don’t feel good in this situation, I’ve got to get out of here.”

The chance to leave came in April 1967, when he was returning to England after a brief visit to Paris. Customs officials at Dover examined his Australian passport and informed Allen that his visa to remain in the UK had expired.

“It didn’t help that I was dressed in loon pants and had hair down past my shoulders,” he chuckles. “Anyway, they chucked me out, and that effectively killed off my involvement with Soft Machine. But it meant I could make a new start in France.”

“Space whisper”

It helped that Allen already had roots in the country. Born in Melbourne in 1938 as David Allen (“the ‘e’ in Daevid stands for ego,” he says, “to differentiate me from all the comedians and actors and sportsmen of the same name”) he was part of a generation of postwar Aussie creatives who fled to Europe in search of culture.

He arrived in Paris in 1960, being drawn to the Beat Hotel, a run-down joint favoured by the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Brion Gysin. There, he got to know US expats William Burroughs and Terry Riley, sold hash, and flirted with tape loops and the Fluxus movement. He also got to know an English professor at the Sorbonne, the poet Gilli Smyth.

Finding himself back in Paris in 1967 after being thrown out of England, Allen hooked up with Smyth. The two married and formed the axis of the first incarnation of Gong in late 1967, together with vocalist Ziska Baum and flautist Loren Standlee. Allen, experimenting with an electric guitar and a box of 19th-century gynaecological surgical instruments, developed a form of guitar playing heavily influenced by Syd Barrett’s that he dubbed “glissando guitar”. Gilli and Ziska developed a form of breathy singing (“it comes from trying to calm down animals by whispering,” says Gilli) that they called “space whisper”.

“Daevid made a speech attacking the police”

“We had a residency at the Vielle Grille,” says Gilli Smyth, “a little club in the Latin Quarter, just in the run up to the May 1968 revolution. It was an incredibly exciting time. The British press tend to dismiss May 1968 as a few student riots, but it wasn’t. It was a civil war, with more workers and trade unionists on the barricades than students. We used to play music for the students.”

One university gig was broken up by police trashing their generator. “Daevid made a speech attacking the police, as the audience cheered. And for that we were going to be deported. So we fled in the night to Spain.”

Allen and Smyth sought sanctuary in Deià, an artistic commune in Majorca. Allen had first visited the island several years earlier with Robert Wyatt, who had introduced him to the poet Robert Graves, an old friend of the Wyatt family. “Graves was part of an intense artistic community,” says Smyth. “He had an amphitheatre in the grounds of his house where he would perform poetry. There were musicians and writers and artists who lived there, and lots of interesting visitors, too, like Spike Milligan, Kenneth Tynan and the Sufi scholar Idries Shah. It was very inspiring.”

“I liked the spirit of fantasy and silliness”

It was there that they met Didier Malherbe, who was living in a goatherder’s cave on the island. Malherbe was a jazz saxophonist who had also learned the bamboo flute in India, and spent time in Tunisia learning North African instruments. “I was very influenced by Daevid’s music in Soft Machine, long before I met him,” says Malherbe. “I liked the spirit of fantasy and silliness that he brought. Soft Machine lost it when he left, but that spirit resumed with Gong, mixed with French obsessions like jazz, surrealist poetry and anarchism.”

“I said, ‘Do you have a house for rent?’”

Allen, Smyth and Malherbe returned to France in 1969 to form the next incarnation of Gong, and needed a place to stay. “I looked in the telephone book,” says Gilli, “put my finger on a name at random and rang it up. And it was a Monsieur Reynard. I said, ‘Do you have a house for rent?’ He said, ‘Well yes, we do, but it’s in the middle of a forest and it hasn’t been lived in for 30 years.’ In fact, it was perfect. We didn’t much like the boars’ heads mounted on the walls – we were all vegetarian! – but it was a wonderful, creative space in the middle of nowhere where we could rehearse all day long without fear of disturbing any neighbours.”

This 19th-century hunting lodge – in a village 130km from Paris called Senf – was where Gong began in earnest, with a constantly mutating cast of percussionists, keyboard players and bassists. For the next three years the house became a commune, and the band was run as a co-operative. “There were around 15 people in the house – the band, the road crew and assorted girlfriends,” says Smyth. “We had a series of sound engineers, who we called the Switch Doctors. Every centime that we earned from gigs or royalties would go into a pot. If you wanted anything – writing paper, cheese, whatever – you’d put it on a list and we’d do a big shop every week.”

“You could do anything”

“The great thing about working in France at the time was that France was wonderfully free of the rules of rock’n’roll,” says Allen. “They had their ‘variété musique’ and all that horrible, cheesy pop that Eddie Barclay’s label released in the early ’60s, but otherwise it was a blank canvas. You could do anything.

“Psychedelia was a very handy cloak for encompassing my diverse interests. It would allow you to throw in elements of jazz, rock, Indian music, Chinese music, Balinese music, tape loops and whatnot and say, ‘Wow man, it’s really psychedelic!’ That appealed to me, because I was never remotely interested in rock’n’roll. I was a jazzer, a beatnik. Gong allowed me to channel the innovations of Ornette Coleman and Charles Mingus through the filter of psychedelia.”

Allen also cites the late 19th-century French absurdist Alfred Jarry as a key influence, along with some of the more anarchic elements of French political philosophy, like situationism.

“Absurdism as a weapon”

“By 1968 I had abandoned communism and embraced anarchism,” he says. “I also liked to use absurdism as a weapon, to puncture the pompous and powerful. In May ’68 I remember confronting some armed paratroopers on the barricades with a teddy bear. That annoyed the humourless left-wing students almost as much as it annoyed the paratroopers!”

Malherbe shared Allen’s sense of theatrical absurdism. He would boil kettles on stage and insert a flute into the spout: when the kettle boiled he would improvise along with the boiling flute. He would dangle out a sock on the end of a fishing line while soloing, reeling in the audience.

Their debut album Magick Brother, recorded in October 1969 and released the next year, served as a compelling calling card for their live show. With few established gig venues in France, Gong set up their own circuit.

“We’d drop a tab every full moon, before a gig”

Says Allen: “Together with [French prog-rockers] Magma, we contacted students at universities around France and set up a touring circuit. The students would promote the gigs, and they’d have incredible, radical ideas. We’d end up playing in these wonderful 17th-century theatres, the one night that Marcel Marceau wouldn’t be playing, for instance, or playing outdoors. It grew like a forest fire and within a few years it was enormous.”

These early live shows were frequently assisted by LSD. “We’d drop a tab every full moon, before a gig,” says Allen. “And we’d make sure that there was no curfew, because we’d end up playing until two, three in the morning. Acid became a kind of shamanic quest for us. If you take it carefully, it can take you into other dimensions, and the music will follow you.

“Once I was playing on stage in Tunisia: I knew I was on stage, but it felt like I was in a bedroom, with two round windows in front of me. I looked out of one of them and saw eyelashes and a balcony which looked like an eyelid. Then I looked further downwards and saw this hand playing the guitar. And slowly – because this was all happening in slow motion to me – I looked out and realised that what I thought were the lights of a thousand buildings were actually the audience watching me!”

“We were all playing at our peak”

Gong started to make a decent living in France. They appeared on French TV, wrote advertising jingles and even penned the theme music for the news on ORTF [the state-owned French TV station]. They also worked on several film soundtracks, including Jérôme Laperrousaz’s motorbike film, Continental Circus, Peter Foldes’ Je, Tu, Elles… and Martial Raysse’s incomprehensible arthouse movie, Le Grand Départ. Still, they were itching to return to England. In June 1971, around the time of the release of second LP, Camembert Electrique, Gong played their first UK gig, at a then-unknown festival in Glastonbury.

“I remember taking lots of ginseng,” says Allen, “and getting into the whole spiritual significance of the event. When we took to the stage, at sunset, hardly anyone was watching us. The moment we began, these people started winding down from the Tor, dancing, like an ancient, medieval scene. That’s when Gong was born in England.”

The performance was enough to earn the first of several John Peel sessions and an extensive UK tour the following autumn; it was also enough to impress Simon Draper at Virgin Records, who quickly signed the band. “They really put out the red carpet for us and, having toured France so thoroughly, it was difficult to turn down a UK contract. The band was hot, we were all playing at our peak.”

“All our royalties disappeared”

Unfortunately, Virgin hadn’t taken into account the fact that Gong were already signed to a French free-jazz label called BYG Actuel. “For years, all our royalties disappeared down through this black hole created by conflict between these two companies,” says Allen.

After an 18-month furlough – when Allen and Smyth retreated to Majorca to raise their two young children – Gong released their first proper Virgin release in 1973: Flying Teapot, the first in the “Radio Gnome Trilogy”. By now, Allen’s complex, sci-fi mythology was in full swing. The songs told a loose, rambling tale about the protagonist, Zero The Hero, who worships flying teapots and receives messages from the Planet Gong via a magic earring.

The band adopted pseudonyms – Allen was “Dingo Virgin”, Smyth “Shakti Yoni”, Didier Malherbe “Bloomdido Bad De Grass”, keyboard player Tim Blake “Hi T Moonweed The Favourite” and new guitarist Steve Hillage “The Submarine Captain”.

“It was the most psychedelic sound I’d ever heard in my life”

“I joined Gong during Flying Teapot,” says Hillage. “I’d been playing with my own band in Canterbury, Khan, and then joined the Kevin Ayers band to tour France. That’s where I first came across Gong. I was already aware of Daevid’s work in Soft Machine but, when I first saw Gong live, I thought, fucking hell, I need to be a part of this. It was the most psychedelic sound I’d ever heard in my life.”

By the next two albums in the trilogy, Angel’s Egg (also 1973) and You (1974), the band had expanded to feature drummer Pierre Moerlen and bassist Mike Howlett. “I think that was Gong’s creative peak,” says Hillage. “You had this fantastic mix of influences. Pierre was from a classical background, and was also interested in Balinese Gamelan orchestras. Didier had a bebop connection, but is also very interested in Indian music. Mike was into funk and stuff like Weather Report. I was into Hendrix and The Beatles; Daevid loved free jazz and beat poetry. Somehow all these disparate elements seemed to fit together and this amazing force flowed through us all, and, live, our improvisations were almost telepathic.

“But,” continues Hillage, “there was such an incredible energy there that we knew it couldn’t last, and it was the beginning of the end. We ended up losing the house in France because the landlord needed to sell it. Virgin helped us relocate to a farmhouse in Oxfordshire – it was a similar setup, but the magic and exoticism was lost.”

“Suitcases full of cocaine”

“By this time we were getting indulged,” says Allen. “When you get managers coming in with suitcases full of cocaine, and ludicrous expenditure on stuff you just don’t need – all of it on your account, of course! – a warning light goes on in your head. You need to sabotage things.”

Allen’s stage appearances started to become erratic. In December 1974 he went AWOL before a gig in Paris; the next year he felt physically unable to go on stage in Cheltenham. He soon left his own band. True to their soixante-huitard roots, Gong never really had a “leader”, and Allen, even as its founder and key writer, was happy to cede authority to others. The group continued without him, with Malherbe as the only original survivor on 1975’s Shamal, an album led by him and Mike Howlett. Both had left by 1976’s fusion outings Expresso and Gazeuse!, leaving a band dominated by the jazz-rock guitarist Allan Holdsworth and drummer Pierre Moerlen.

“Gong, like Soft Machine many years earlier, turned into a jazz rock band when Daevid left,” says Malherbe. “Interesting, but less humorous. The silliness we had with Daevid disappeared.”

“Gong pokes fun at our own folly”

For much of the next two decades, Gong’s alumni continued in various separate projects. Steve Hillage started a successful solo career, became a big-name producer and, after being championed by The Orb, started his own ambient dance-music collective, System 7. Didier Malherbe pursued a series of jazz and world music ventures; Moerlen continued the Gong franchise as a jazz-rock project well into the 1980s; and Gilli Smyth launched an occasional outfit called Mother Gong. Daevid Allen was embraced by some punks (he toured with The Fall, and visited CBGB’s in 1979) and pursued several side-projects (Planet Gong, Euterp, Invisible Opera Company of Tibet and the University Of Errors).

Gong eventually reformed in 1992 for the album Shapeshifter, and have toured with various lineups on several occasions since then. In Amsterdam in 2006, a three-day festival called the Gong Un-Convention featured every Gong-related project along with a full reunion of the classic lineup. This year they celebrate their 40th anniversary with an extensive world tour and a new album, 2032. Recorded in Australia (where Allen and Smyth now live, albeit separately) and London (where the band is effectively led by Steve Hillage), it sees them continue their obsessions – aliens, cheese, pixies – in a 21st-century setting.

“It sounds like silly stuff, but there is always a serious side to it,” says Allen. “Gong pokes fun at our own folly, at our attitude towards the alien. For me, absurdism is the highest form of comedy. I think that’s why people still love Gong.”