Formed in the 1960s and still touring today, Gong didn’t just create far-out jams, they invented an entire interstellar mythology. They revisit their world of tree echo, space whispers – and run-ins with the French police
‘I was 23, playing under an Arab
moon, by the sea,” says Mike Howlett, recalling a high point of his time with Gong, when the cosmic rockers played a Tunisian festival, in June 1973. That sounds magical – but then the acid they’d taken triggered flashbacks to a trip Gong had jointly experienced weeks earlier involving the hallucinogen datura.
Among the plant’s deranging effects are making things appear that aren’t there – such as the dead – and making things that are there disappear. When frontman Daevid Allen’s guitar vanished out of his hands, he took this as a sign that he wasn’t supposed to be on stage and wandered off, leaving the rest of Gong to improvise a singer-less set. “About 45 minutes in, though, Daevid rematerialises at the front of the audience – he’s leaning on the stage right in front of me, still in his crazy makeup and Gong-symbol headpiece, and he’s making all these weird wincing expressions, like he’s analysing and judging each note I’m playing. That freaked me out – I felt I was hanging by my bass strings over an infinite abyss, and if I got a single note wrong I’d be plunging down.”