In telling the tale of Soft Machine’s diasporas, there’s no simple diagram. These players will interact, and will move across similar territory at different times, yet be too distinct to easily compare. There seems to be little choice but to start with the first departure, then go on to the next.
The circumstances under which Soft Machine lost Daevid Allen, I mistold last week. As traumatic as it must have been to become an outcast from the country of one’s friends and from one’s own exciting band, Allen would find himself in the right company in the Latin quarter of Paris, the capital of a land that appreciated Soft Machine. On his first trip there in 1960 he’d met Terry Riley (the psych-minimalist composer who’d later make a fascinating album, The Church Of Anthrax, with John Cale) and once in England met William Burroughs, who at that time, having exhausted his early inspiration through severe opioid overuse, was trying to renew it (he’d eventually succeed, but his 1960’s output was often grueling) through the cut-up fold-in collage method of writing, which has obvious parallels to musique concrète. In England around this time Allen also met Robert Wyatt, who joined his Sun Ra-influenced jazz trio, which would eventually become Soft Machine.1
Once back in Paris in 1967 Allen formed the first version of Gong with his partner Gilli Smyth, and in May 1968 they participated in the student riots in a beatnik merry pranksters way which the protest leaders didn’t appreciate. Just about every musician I’m going to write about with progressive ideas, or otherwise, is going to express them in ways that politicians, even revolutionists, don’t appreciate. Politics could be much more interesting, as could most of the music that dabbles in it today, just sayin’.
Fleeing France briefly in the aftermath of the riots (says Wikipedia, though Allen said it was more a case of fleeing his first wife than running from les flics) Allen and Smyth took refuge in Deià, Mallorca with a Wyatt family friend, the poet Robert Graves (1895-1985), another influence on the writing of the Soft Machine set. Grave’s poetry is stark and antipoetic – he was an iconoclast who rejected almost the whole of the Shakespearian and post-Shakespearian canon - yet packed full of highly personalized mysticism, much of it inspired by the matriarchal religious concepts of Johann Jakob Bachofen which I mentioned a few weeks ago.
In 1970 Gong recorded their first LP Magick Brother, and in 1971 Allen recorded the solo Banana Moon, mentioned last week, with various guest artists. Of Banana Moon, David Bowie said “It’s possible, just possibly maybe, that strands of the embryonic glam style started here. I replayed it just this morning and was flabbergasted to hear something that sounds like Bryan Ferry and the Spiders from Mars (together, at last!!) on Track 1, recorded a full two years before the “official” glam releases from either of the two above-mentioned protagonists.”
This comparison escapes me, though I can imagine I’m hearing Here Come The Warm Jets in places, but Bowie’s sense of futurism should never be doubted; what I do hear is punk played with progressive jazz chops, or prog jazz played with punk intensity, and the link between these artforms is going to need some discussion. Meanwhile, the musique concrète aspect of Banana Moon takes the form of taped monologues from the Soft’s patron, Texan Wes Brunson, an eccentric pioneer in the optometry industry, and the owner of a Tulsa club called Evil Monkey, who is said to also be the subject of ‘Stoned Innocent Frankenstein’, a song subject to many later versions, and “All I Want Is Out Of Here’ takes its title from William Burrough’s experience of ayahuasca in The Yage Letters. Camembert Electrique, the second Gong album (or third if you count Banana Moon), and probably their masterpiece, was one of the albums Virgin records sold in New Zealand for 99 cents (Faust 4 was the other) in the early 1970’s, to try to get us interested in the rest of their weird European music. This wasn’t a huge success for Virgin commercially, but it certainly worked for me.
I paraphrased Marx, or maybe it was Engels, in an earlier post about the evolution of ideas within more privileged classes before they expand human potential more widely, and the evolution of punk is another example of that – the inevitability of its coming was conceptualized by several prog artists, educated, well-read and devoted to futurity as they were. In the USA we have Todd Rundgren’s ‘Heavy Metal Kids’ (1974) and The Tubes’ ‘White Punks on Dope’ (1975), in the UK Peter Hamill’s ‘Nadir’s Big Chance’ (1975), and there are proto-punk moments on various of the works I’m writing about here.2 It took working class kids who couldn’t play their instruments properly, and middle-class kids who tried not to, for the punk moment to coalesce, but while they were waiting in the wings they had to listen to something, preferably something strange, energetic, and expressive of rebellion and lunatic intensity. The Gong albums, despite their cultivation of far-flown hippy dippy whimsy, are often rough-hewn (perhaps that’s the Australian in Allen, because he’s far from being a clumsy musician)3, unsettling, even at times suitably offensive:
Pretty miss titty
She works in the city
Whiter than whiter
She gets up typewriter
Men catch up later
They don't love or hate her
They just masturbate her potato
Well big bad businessman
Have you any love
‘Pretty Miss Titty’, Magick Brother (1970)
In 1975 Allen left Gong (he’d return in 1990) – the band had got too big for him to manage, and a force field stopped him getting on stage, leading to the creation of a “Gong family” of acts. Planet Gong’s Live Floating Anarchy 1977, Allen and Smyth’s collaboration with Here And Now, flies a punk flag over its stripped back, high energy chaos, and, with 1979’s About Time, New York Gong recorded a dedicated punk album. Both are good efforts that showed that Allen didn’t need to compromise anything to fit into the new scene he’d helped prefigure. Gong guitarist Steve Hillage, a true original of the instrument and a pioneer of ambient electronica, would famously collaborate with Sham 694, while Here And Now from the Planet Gong lineup toured and shared members and an LP (What You See... Is What You Are) with Alternative TV.
The most unique feature of the highly original Gong series of bands is the “space whisper” vocalizations of Gilli(an) Smyth, AKA Shakti Yoni, who, for example, performs in persona as prostitute, cat, mother, witch, and old woman across the albums of Gong’s Flying Teapot trilogy, and acted these parts in costume in live performance, balancing the music’s sexual energy and reclaiming half of it from the male musicians. As Mother Gong, on the early 1980’s trilogy Robot Woman with Harry Williamson, she predicts the AI apocalypse – says the website for the 2019 CD reissue, “The themes explored throughout the Robot Woman trilogy are specifically female with a focus on human empowerment in the face of an increasingly technological, potentially alienating (or is it liberating?) world”. As Smyth says on Live Floating Anarchy 1977, “the age of the Goddess is coming”.
Allen moved back to Australia in 1981, living in Byron Bay, where he died in 2015; Gilli Smith died there in 2016. Dave Graney sent me an archived interview with Allen, then aged 76, by Nathan Roche which tells much of his fascinating story in his own words. A couple of quotes:
“Drugs have played a big part in my creativity, and I remember the Easter Sunday where I dropped acid and everything just fell into place, you know? The mythology of Gong and all of that. I had this one girlfriend Clarissa who just went wild on the acid though; she took too much and would just walk around Ibiza speaking in tongues. The problem with becoming some sort of figure for psychedelic music and all these people are dropping acid, they think I’m responsible. The majority of my life has been looking after crazy women.”
’Howie Cooke calls up and tells Allen that they’re playing Japanese speed metal on Bay FM and he immediately goes and changes the radio station in the kitchen.’
I thought I’d be able to get four post-Softs careers on one page, but I’ve barely touched Allen’s odyssey and here we are. I do however have room to celebrate the Hugh Hopper achievement I heard as a teenager, his solo album 1984. I’m not sure what the Orwell reference is supposed to be, except that 1984, heard in 1975, was a truly futuristic album, and I could well believe that in a decade’s time we’d all be listening to multitracked bass sounds, horns tightly arranged (in weird tribute to James Brown), and musique concrète, and that everything would be prefixed “mini-“ like each of 1984’s tracks. My friend Lindsay Maitland loved 1984 and played it all the time, which was quite possibly an affectation, but affectations can make for sound discipline; when I came to play “free” music at least I had some idea what I was supposed to be listening for. The best tracks are those on which Hopper’s bass has the characteristic fuzz tone that defined his work with Soft Machine, best heard here on the demo versions of ‘Miniluv’.5
For some reason I always think it’s Hopper’s fuzz bass that Kanye West’s autotuned voice is channeling on the extended version of ‘Runaway’.
Lol Coxhill, a member of Kevin Ayers’ post-Soft Machine band Kevin Ayers and the Whole World, plays soprano sax on 1984. What else did Lol play on? Music For Pleasure (1977), the second album by The Damned, who had made the very first UK punk LP, Damned Damned Damned, just 9 months earlier.
Q.E.D.
In fact, ‘You Know’ wouldn’t have sounded out of place if it had been sung by Daevid Allen on a Gong album; there’s something familiar in the phrasing of that riff.
That Sun Ra and his Arkestra served as the prototype for Daevid Allen’s world building is obvious - a far more successful application of Sun Ra’s “space is the place” method than the MC5’s.
The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway (1974), the final record Peter Gabriel made with Genesis, also has a “punk” theme in its libretto, but unlike my other examples the band didn’t produce a musical objective correlative for it.
It passed over my head back in the day that the lyrics of Camembert Electrique contain references to life in Australia, as will, no doubt, other Gong songs.
”But you can’t kid me it’s like that back in Sydney” - ‘Selene: Tropical Fish’
”I see you sitting there on your old back verandah
You got your shady lady and waltzing Matilda” - ‘You Can’t Kill Me’
Was there a Gong influence behind Jimmy Pursey’s 1982 concept album Alien Orphan?
The fuzz tone here might be a ring modulator instead of a fuzz pedal.