We have friends on Planet Gong

Aliens have been involved in the rock’n’roll world before. Oh yes. Back in the seventies it was almost fashionable to have some kind of interstellar hook up. But the groups who took it beyond fashion into an all enclosing philosophy were the genius musical collectives of Gong and Parliament. In fact they were so out there they almost came across as aliens themselves.

I am not an alien. Honest. My little guys are though, and they love Gong. They also get down to Parliament when it’s party time, but they thrive continually on the inner/outer space explorations of Daevid Allen’s madcap gang.

I discovered Gong via Hawkwind. I was told by a complete stranger that if I listened to Hawkwind I needed to hear Gong. And they were right. The fact that so much brilliance could be combined with so much lunacy was a revelation. Maybe that’s why my little guys picked on me. I tend to crank up the spacey guitar on occasion to see where it will take me. Who knew, huh?

Gong spread the gospel of the Pothead Pixies to the world over the course of three essential albums in the early seventies. Starting with Flying Teapot, then into Angel’s Egg and finally You they took jazz-rock fusion and turned it into ridiculous spaced out fun. That is an achievement on its own given how po-faced most jazz-rock practitioners were at the time, even those that were already in an alien frame of mind. Sun Ra anyone?

The best of the bunch in my humble opinion is Angel’s Egg simply because of the process followed in its creation. It was largely recorded in the open air at night in the woods behind the French farmhouse the collective was communally calling home. You can sense the herbal and fungal influences, and smell the wine and smoke, in almost every track.

Psychedelia is a much misused term in music, so let’s try a definition: Psychedelic music takes you outside of your conscious self and transports you to places outside of time and space. That’s a starting point anyway.

There are very few genuinely psychedelic tracks, let alone albums, ever recorded. Country Joe and the Fish and Mad River’s minor key explorations. Jimi Hendrix at the wild end of his first three albums. Brian Eno’s Another Green World. You can fossick around mentally and drag out a few more less obvious ones, but Angel’s Egg is the doozey of all psych song cycles. The range of styles on show is as wide as you can imagine, and the kicker tracks define acid rock (The Other Side of the Sky, I Never Glid Before). Pysch needs a balance between light and dark to work best. Consequently this is a comedy show as much as a head trip.

The other two albums in the trilogy cover similar territory, but without the wide range of styles. Flying Teapot has epic length jams and is the most straight ahead of the three. On You the concept is starting to fray around the edges, but the high points are like the peaks of the pyramid on the cover. Master Builder is worth the price of admission alone. The Pothead Pixie trilogy is one set of albums that needs the deluxe package treatment (it probably has but I can’t be arsed googling it right now).

After You the membership of Gong underwent a quantum shift. Daevid Allen left temporarily, followed by first mate Steve Hillage, leaving the rest of the group to drift into more standard fusion territory.

Ironically psych fell out of favour at the end of the 1980s just as technology was making genuine psych explorations more doable. The focus instead went on introversion as the “alternative” to makin’ money and chasin’ celebrity. Call it a sign of the times. Tough times lead to more conservative choices. It’s not a complete shame, but it has made some of the more interesting possibilities in music less likely to emerge. It’s that zeitgeist thing again.

The Hopkinsville Goblins wanted to highlight Gong so their friends could get a bit of attention. You can spot the similarities between them, it’s pretty obvious. The big difference is around the edges. Gong were too gentle for some of the harder sounds my little guys like to produce. My little guys like to work hard and play hard, but they agree with the main philosophy of the Pothead Pixies: it’s all far too serious to be serious about.

Get ‘em all and find out for yourself, starting right here:

Find it on Amazon, I-Tunes, Spotify, Deezer and Google Play, or from any of the purveyors of fine sounds listed on this site.

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