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Gong Gong is a progressive/psychedelic rock band formed by Australian musician Daevid Allen. Their music has also been described as space rock. Other notable band members include Allan Holdsworth , Tim Blake, Didier Malherbe, Pip Pyle, Gilli Smyth, Steve Hillage, Mike Howlett and Pierre Moerlen. Others who have, albeit briefly, played in Gong are Bill Bruford, Brian Davison and Chris Cutler. The various incarnations of Gong, its spin-offs and related bands have become known as the Gong Global Family.
Gong formed in 1967, after Allen—then a member of Soft Machine—was denied entry to the United Kingdom due to a visa complication. Allen remained in France where he and a London-born Sorbonne professor, Gilli Smyth, established the first incarnation of the band. This line-up fragmented during the 1968 student revolution, with Allen and Smyth forced to flee France for Deya in Majorca.
They found saxophonist Didier Malherbe living in a cave in Deya, before film director Jérôme Laperrousaz invited the band back to France to record the soundtrack of his movie Continental Circus. They were subsequently approached by the newly formed independent label BYG and signed up for two albums (Magick Brother, Mystic Sister and Bananamoon).
Gong played at the first Glastonbury Festival and were subsequently one of the first acts to sign to Virgin Records, getting first pick of the studio-time ahead of Mike Oldfield. By 1971, a regular line-up had established itself and Gong released their Camembert Electrique album. The UK release, put out by Virgin Records subsidiary Caroline Records in 1974, was priced at 49p (that is, the price of a typical single rather than an album), ensuring that sufficient numbers were sold for the album to chart had it not been barred from the charts for being so cheap.
Between 1973 and 1974, Gong, now augmented by guitarist Steve Hillage, released their best-known work, the Radio Gnome Trilogy—three records that expounded upon the (previously only hinted at) Gong mythology. At a gig in Cheltenham, in 1975, Allen refused to go on stage, claiming that a "wall of force" was preventing him. He left the band, as did Smyth, who wanted to spend more time with her two children. The band also lost keyboard player Tim Blake, replaced by Patrice Lemoine. The band continued, touring the UK in November 1975 (as documented on the 2005 release Live in Sherwood Forest '75) and working on their next album Shamal, but Hillage and Miquette Giraudy left before Shamal was released in 1976. They re-joined the band briefly for a 1977 live reunion.
Gong continued, under the control of drummer Pierre Moerlen (died 2005) and without their two principal members, because of contractual obligations. They morphed into the jazz-rock outfit Pierre Moerlen's Gong, in this time the guitarrist Allan Holdsworth came into the band and contributed to give gong the new jazz-rock sonority.
Allen, however, continued to develop the Gong mythology from the late seventies up until the nineties in his solo work, and with bands such as Euterpe and Planet Gong (which comprised Allen and Smyth playing with the British festival band Here & Now), while Smyth formed a separate band: Mother Gong.
In 1992, Allen and Malherbe reformed Gong and released the album Shapeshifter, subsequently dubbed Radio Gnome part 4. In 2000, a fifth installment, Zero to Infinity was released, featuring Smyth and classic line-up bassist Mike Howlett. However, 2004 saw a radical new Gong line-up, sometimes called Acid Mothers Gong, including Acid Mothers Temple current member Kawabata Makoto and former member Cotton Casino. Allen and Smyth's son Orlando Allen joined on drums for the album Acid Motherhood and there were also live dates.
The classic Radio Gnome line-up have reunited on a number of occasions in the past. However, it was recently agreed that touring is unprofitable, so they organise an "unconventional" gathering in November each year instead. The first "Gong Family Unconvention" (Uncon) was held in 2004 in the Glastonbury Assembly rooms as a one day event. The 2005 Uncon was a 2-day affair featuring several Gong-related bands such as Here and Now, System 7, House of Thandoy and Kangaroo Moon. The most recent Uncon was a 3-day event held at the Melkweg in Amsterdam on 3-5 November 2006, with practically all Gong-related bands present: classic Gong, System 7, Steve Hillage Band, Hadouk, Tim Blake & Jean-Philippe Rykiel, University of Errors, Here & Now, Mother Gong, Zorch, Eat Static, Acid Mothers Gong, Slack Baba, Kangaroo Moon and many others. These events have all been compèred by Thom the Poet.
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