Today is a sad day, one of my music heroes, Mr Daevid Allen, just passed away. I've been listening to Gong all my life, and Angel's Egg was one of the first LPs I ever bought as a young teen - when it was badly out of fashion. I was always playing his music to my friends, even when everybody (including me) was only listening to punk, post-punk, industrial music and later techno or noise - and they always ended up loving it against all the odds. Now I play Gong to my child (whose name is the title of a Gong song - post-Allen Gong so he's not called Pothead Pixie nor Zero the Hero) and we dance to it… And lately - since I got me a wah pedal effect - when I play guitar with the Soft Power Ensemble of Vienna, I have reminiscences of Steve Hillage and try to just let go… (BTW Soft Machine was another band created by Daevid Allen).
Gong probably heavily influenced my later eclectic tastes in music, mixing rock, jazz, electronic music, trance, asian traditional music, sonic experimentations... - I also listened a lot to Daevid Allen's solo work with sounds cut-ups including William S. Burroughs' voice, and one of his sentences is haunting me since: 'you never existed at all'. Few people are ever able to not take serious their own genius the way Daevid Allen did. You can easily overlook the poet and the composer and just remember him as a silly hippie clown, but maybe it's not bad this way… Unfortunately I never had the opportunity to see him on stage, even if I was living in Amsterdam on and off at the time of the Gong Unconvention. But I met him in his music and I'll meet him again and again, and spread his blessing.
Daevid Allen was one of the persons I wanted to thank for making my life better...
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