Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Piazza Unita d'Italia / Trieste / Italy
Concert date: 01.08.2009
Attendance: 3
Ticket price: €0.00 (free admission)
You go through plenty in a concert-going career, but for the legendary progressive psychedelic space jazz fusion rock oddballs Gong to show up practically on your doorstep and play two hours of their music totally for free is about as likely as getting clocked in the forehead by a cosmic comet. Being part of this spectacle on the big square of united Italy (Piazza Unita d’Italia) was a real honor, and it drew a surprisingly big crowd, around 2,500 people. The seats were practically all taken just after nine in the evening. You’d think: “Who the hell even knows and listens to Gong anymore?” But the older generation, 50 and up, really showed that there are still true music lovers among them, people who haven’t surrendered to couch-potato life and the mandatory watching of syrupy, cheap evening soaps.
The French-British alliance Gong came together through a twist of fate back in 1967. A quick memory refresher. The Australian Daevid Allen, as part of Soft Machine, was refused entry to Great Britain by the authorities because of visa problems, so he stayed in Paris and founded Gong with Gilli Smyth. Through many lineups, whose reshuffling repeatedly demanded adapting the Gong name, the band has pushed on and survived to this day. Fact is, you very rarely catch Gong in our corner of Europe. When they do play, it’s in northern Europe, France, the UK, and that’s it. In other words, where their main fan base is.
Gong arrived in Trieste with a lineup of original, longtime members Daevid Allen (guitar, vocals), the cosmic whistler Gilli Smyth, Steve Hillage (guitar), Hillage’s life partner Miquette Giraudy (synthesizer, backing vocals), helped out by Dave Sturt (bass, backing vocals), Chris Taylor (drums, backing vocals) and the all-round Theo Travis (saxophones, flute).
The band is re-energized and flirting once again with the primal core of its musical sermon. Cosmic psychedelic experimental rock, roughly framed by the albums “Camembert Electrique” (1971) and the famous “Radio Gnome” trilogy of “Flying Teapot”, “Angel’s Egg” and “You” (1974). The live repertoire accordingly devoted itself to resurrecting that era on stage, which could of course mean only one thing: great joy for all the zealots of musical weirdness from this former true anarchist commune! With its extravagance and bizarreness, Gong’s arrival naturally stirred up instant revolt among the infallible quasi-moralists in the service of Big Brother, who force the masses into the common drudgery of gray emptiness.
At last we got to enjoy a morsel of that original Gong provocation. First, though, we had to wade through more than 25 minutes of one of the young Italian bands. They played some kind of indie rock, with content any clueless person on this planet could master in five minutes. Who lets bands get away with the expressive void of generic reheating, and with torturing the listeners’ mechanoreceptor organs on stage these days? Criminal. A whimpering, self-smiling “ColdPlay” vocalist backed by an exchange of “heavy” three or four chords, lazily gnawing at and rocking their own repertoire. Nothing at all. Not pop, not rock, not punk, not alt, not…. In practically one sentence: “Swimming in quicksand!”
At 9:30 the lads took pity on us and stopped playing (sadly I didn’t catch the name of the Italian rock outfit), and the techs needed 20 minutes to set up the stage for Gong. First on were partners Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy, who took us into the opener Escape Control Delete. It wasn’t long before the rhythm gears started turning too, with Teo Travis stepping in on sax, and the song carries us into a scene of a simple rock rhythm, but with an energy that could remind someone of “krautrock”. Quite a surprising start. It’s a new track from the upcoming album “Gong 2032”. That album is a direct link back to the Radio Gnome trilogy, so mixing old songs from 1971 – 1974 with the new album, due out in September this year, made for a completely logical and tasteful combination in the set, both stylistically and in terms of the key names of the Gong crew. Gong are coming back, “pre-Shamal” Gong.
Midway through the song Daevid Allen shows up on stage. A silver-haired fellow with a Merlin the wizard hat plopped on his head, wearing checkered pajamas. Standing on rickety little legs, “waving” his guitar around in rickety little arms. Is there anyone skinnier and more spindly than spider Allen? On planet Gong, surely not. A 71-year-old gentleman with a lush mane and not a whiff of dementia. To be Gong, you simply must not age. Especially in Gong’s case. It was clear right away that Allen is the channel for all the movement, all the essence, the very being of the band. The Hillage, Travis, Giraudy trio built the foundation that the charismatic Allen fearlessly leaned on to show off his extravagant face. Somewhere in the middle of the song he threw off his gnomish hat and happily set about teasing “glissando” out of his guitar, Allen grabbing the tremolo arm in his right hand and sliding along the neck. Hillage didn’t stay in his debt there either – that’s just one more typical Gong thing. In the next number, Tic Toc, which you can hear on the album “Live au Bataclan”, madame Gong Gilli Smyth floats onto the stage to let out her piercing, one-of-a-kind cry, which fits like a glove the total disconnect of this crazy “psycho space” ride in a teapot!
The stage was big and spacious, and the atmosphere was boosted especially by superbly prepared, lush stage lighting, which added an important element to the two-hour creation of the unique Gong world. Psychedelic projections in the background, synced to the message of each song in the set, weren’t missing either. Roughly speaking, that set meant tonight’s Gong were closer to what Hawkwind fans love than to Soft Machine. Of course the jazz element wasn’t removed from the sermon entirely, but Hillage, for example, was pushed into a much bigger supporting role than I expected. On three or four numbers he flagged his uniqueness as a guitar artist, offering a glimpse of his mastery through solos of peculiar distortion and sharply accented echo. Most of the time, though, instrumentally Gong lived inside the communication between the two guitars of Allen and Hillage and Travis’s woodwinds. Often playful communication, entirely experimental psychedelic musical outbursts with a strong whiff of spontaneity and surprise. This showed especially in the parts of songs stretched into longer “jamming”, which, working in repeating motifs of a trapped rhythm, with a strong emphasis on synth sampling (repeating certain sequences), made for a hypnotic experience.
Besides the crazy motifs on the backdrop screen, which took in every possible offering of the various tea brews of planet Gong, the rides in Teapots and the search for contact with different religions (from Mayan to Buddhism), plenty of humor was of course brought on stage by Allen himself with his presence. In the new song Wacky Baccy Banker, a somewhat grittier, even punk-flavored Gong ditty, he first asked the audience what the Italian translation of the English word “Wanker” is. Nobody in the crowd dared to reveal that secret, but everyone got it in an instant when Allen dedicated the song to the “wanker”, Mr. Silvio Berlusconi, and burst out laughing. Allen went on to entertain those present with his black T-shirt that read “Nobody knows I’m A Lesbian”, and he especially woke up the audience when he appeared on stage in a silver skintight outfit, a cross between Spock and David Bowie from the Heroes video, with the obligatory spiral hat. Whether the spiral hat meant a sperm tail, or an extension of the second “g” in the word Gong, only Daevid Allen knows, as he ground out his new glissando in Oily Way. This is precisely where the concert hit its peak, as the band marched through the gems of the Radio Gnome trilogy and revived the golden age of carefree artistic expression in rock from the first half of the seventies. Here Gong won the Italian crowd over completely, and people crammed into the space between the barrier and the first row of seats.
A one-of-a-kind, unrepeatable mix of excellent playing, which demands finely honed ears and self-possession from everyone on stage so they always know what their bandmates are up to, with a hefty dose of mockery and extravagance, fearless provocation, a drive to explore and discover new musical dimensions, all seasoned with that unique Gong idealism, which delivered a dense, full sound in which every single moment, even in the more complexly shaped motifs, created a perfectly clear and undistorted manifestation of this band’s unique musical energy. After loud ovations the band came back out for the obligatory encore and rewarded all the fans with the classic Tropical Fish/Selene from the album “Camembert Electrique” (1971).
This show offered a look into a vital crew of seasoned old foxes, in which the lion’s share of the winning moments of course went to the wildly charismatic, ragged Daevid Allen, who remains the band’s main engine. Gong, who played Catania, a city in Sicily, the day before, thus rounded off their short trip around Italy in Trieste. A week’s break follows, then shows at festivals across northern Europe. September brings the release of the album “Gong 2032”, which heralds the year of the union of the planets Gong and Earth, and then a UK tour in November. The show convincingly sucked us in with its unique magic for two hours into the world of planet Gong. That was its purpose. Fully realized. It remains an obligation for all music gourmets, especially after proof that the band, in the mature phase of its existence, is enjoying a new spring.
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist
1. Escape Control Delete 2. You Can’t Kill Me 3. Tic Toc 4. Dynamite: I Am Your Animal 5. Digital Girl 6. Yoni Poem 7. Dance With The Pixies 8. Wacky Baccy Bankers 9. I Niver Glid Before 10. Flute Salade 11. Oily Way 12. Outer Temple 13. Inner Temple 14. She Is The Great Goddess 15. Master Builder 16. Tri-Cycle Gliss 17. You Never Blow Your Trip Forever —encore— 18. Tropical Fish/Selene
Photo Gallery
