Cops At The Door!
Written: Dec 22 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: There is a small corner in a galaxy far away that will be forever England
Cons: There's no way back
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| FilboidStudge's Full Review: You (Radio Gnome Invisible, Pt. 3) by Gong |
It's inconceivable that this album could have been made on a diet of anything less than mushrooms for breakfast, mushrooms for lunch and mushrooms for supper, all washed down with hash tea and a few blotters. And the drugs seem to have done entertainingly odd things to this band's heads.
The last album in Gong's 'Radio Gnome Invisible' trilogy, "You" saw this rag-tag collection of psychedelic explorers reach their pinnacle. The previous two albums, "Flying Teapot" and "Angel's Egg" had concerned themselves with the Planet Gong, the band's idealised version of what Earth could one day become. Infiltrating the songs were various characters such as the Pot Head Pixies, Zero the Hero and the Octave Doctor.
Not content with such fictional frivolities, Gong also created new names for themselves, much like Captain Beefheart's Magic Band. They included Bert Camembert, Chakti Yoni and, most outrageously, the Good Count Bloomdido Bad de Grasse.
On first play, "You" can safely be described as a spectacularly silly album. The vocals are often sung in a ludicrous pantomime voice which was last heard being used by Peter Gabriel in his "I'm the singer with Genesis - no, I'm a potato" days.
Opening song 'Thoughts For Naught' is a short, strange introductory statement to lubricate our journey through the Gong wormhole. Over a sea of electronic squiggles, flute, bass and epic, slow cymbal sounds, various band members incant interplanetary riddles: "Counting again and again...... from one to nine....... the brushing and pushing away of Infinity......"
Next song "A P.H.P.'s Advice" is even more insane and can only be described as a what passes for music-hall on Planet Gong. An incredibly curious few words of advice from the singer contain the lines "In case you don't remember, this is what you do: get up out of bed now" and "If you're a believer, what do you believe? Why do you believe it?"
In England, Gong were (and still are) largely seen as whacked-out hippies, leftovers from another decade; the only survivors of a particularly intense batch of brown acid.
However, the French have always seen truth and meaning where the English have seen nothing, and it was eventually to France the band decamped, setting up their own commune with chickens, dogs, children and other less immediately classifiable lifeforms.
Gallic temperaments read volumes of meaning into Gong's inter-dimensional treaties and humorous parables. They dug the music too, and it's here where Gong rose above their contemporaries. Steve Hillage (who now fronts techno band System 7) had joined the band a year previously, and his stratospheric guitar stomps invade the tranquility of the album every so often to startling effect.
Third song "Magick Mother Invocation/Master Builder" starts with a sustained cosmic drone made of a very basso-profundo voice chanting slowly with a softly dawdling soprano along to an excellent synthesiser sine-wave. Slowly, slowly, up starts an urgent chant, many voices calling forth in some alien language. The synthesisers flower off into Krautrock fractals as a flute starts to wind its mysterious melodies around.
The track is building. Drums are introduced softly; now there's another fluteline, now more synthesisers, and suddenly, what started out as a minimal, stately drone is now exploding into orgasmic horn lines and earwax-clearing synth squalls. Then it stops.
For some birdsong.
Then it starts again.
"A Sprinkling Of Clouds" is a pleasant instrumental, a synth/ band freakout the likes of which many other bands of the time were producing. It's amusing to learn that Gong's first synth player Tim Blake was fired by the band because he was so fascinated with his synthesiser that he kept missing gigs.
It has to be remembered that these were new machines and whatever noises came out of them were deemed original and exciting, sufficiently enough for an insubstantial little nicety like this to make it onto the album. [For real results using the same ingredients, try to find something by Richard Pinhas, or even better, the ridiculously rare "Allez-Teia" by French duo Heldon II of which he was half.]
"Perfect Mystery" is superb. An acid-fried, nursery-rhyme stomp, it's reminiscent of a song by the Incredible Bonzo String Dog Doo-Dah Band. Manic updates of sleepy New Orleans jazz grooves segue into gorgeous vocal whispers and sing-songs, all swimming around with watery xylophones and beautifully laid-back, frenetic drumming shot through with various spooky time signatures. Vocal duties are shared by male and female.
(Men) Cops at the door!
(Women) No cops at the door!
(Men) Cops at the door!
(Women) No cops at the door!
and later...
(Man) Look up in the air!
(Woman) The optic doctor's there...
(Man) And when he strokes his gong...
(Woman) Your middle eye comes on.
It's certainly hippy rubbish, but fantastically so, and to awesome effect. It's music from the outer reaches of space and time, it's true, but somehow it's also very European too.
With this much excitement and bare-faced cheek on offer from Gong, it's easy to ignore the one or two duff tracks. They were just getting into cocaine around this time, and band leader Daevid Allen's decision to give up drugs altogether made his fellow band members prodigiously increase their drug consumption just out of pure badness. This would explain any duffness or duffosity.
"You" is probably Gong's best album to date, although "Camembert Electrique" is also rather good. After countless line-up changes, splits and reformations (spliffs and reefer-motions), they're now doing anniversary all-dayers in obscure venues in and around London. I'd go to one myself, but I'm scared I'll run out of skins.
Recommended:
Yes
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FilboidStudge
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Member: Filboid Studge
Location: England
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