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The highly-anticipated second instalment of the wild, weird and wondrous history of Daevid Allen and Gong. Spanning 1969-1979, Gong Dreaming 2 covers the ""Classic"" Gong period; the making of legendary albums such as Banana Moon, Camembert Electrique, Flying Teapot and Angel's Egg, and features appearances from Gilli Smyth, Steve Hillage and Richard Branson. Lavishly illustrated with over 150 phots and illustrations, Gong Dreaming 2 is destined to become a collector's item.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
A long wait after the first installment but great stuff if you're interested in Gong and Daevid Allen. A truely fascinating read from Daevid Allen's totally unique perspective. Rather than a measured academic history of the band we follow Daevid's own vision and journey thru this period of his (and the band's)history. If Daevid Allen's Gong drive you nuts then probably this book will too, but if you love the music and vibe of Planet Gong then this is an absolute delight! Also a very brave bit of writing given his honesty about his own shortcomings. Personally I've never understood his apparent lack of confidence over his own guitar playing or singing as i believe the grooviest manifestation of Gong to be the Continental Circus/ Camembert Electrique/Glastonbury Fayre stuff....Although many great musicians have contributed to Gong over the years, Daevid Allen is its heart and soul and even muscle.....listen to Gong live in Sherwood Forest (after he left) to hear a band with the guts ripped out of it!
Anyway, back to the book...Lovely - can't wait for the next two installments tho' I dare say I'll have to.... Daevid Allen's an extremely interesting man and groovy musician who's persued his vision in what seems like a very
unsympathetic industry......The World's a better place for having him around....Flying Teapots are deffinately the answer to something?
Anyway, back to the book...Lovely - can't wait for the next two installments tho' I dare say I'll have to.... Daevid Allen's an extremely interesting man and groovy musician who's persued his vision in what seems like a very
unsympathetic industry......The World's a better place for having him around....Flying Teapots are deffinately the answer to something?
9 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I really wanted to read this book, dealing as it does with the years covering the classic Gong line-up. That particular line-up played a major part in my formative musical education. I saw Gong quite a few times at Liverpool Stadium. Hillage was the main draw for me - I'd seen him with Khan when they were right on the fag-end of a bill with Lindisfarne headlining, and he was a source of inspiration to me then that made me pick up a guitar in earnest. Gong's musical philosophy suited me too, doing away with a lot of the pomposity and musical snobbery that was endemic in prog rock at the time. If you took the utterly barmy lyrics with a pinch of salt, they were a good, jazz-tinged freestyle experience and not a little fun - and there wasn't an awful lot of fun to be had listening to someone like Yes, now was there?
My allegiance to Hillage notwithstanding, I was fully aware of how central to the whole thing Daevid Allen was, and how much his sense of the absurd and natural jazz leanings had influenced proceedings. So I knew when he left the band that the game was up for Gong, no matter how bravely/desparately they tried to carry on as more and more of the classic line-up moved on to other things. Basically, Allen was the absolute essence of Gong, and it's nice to see that most of the survivors have now coalesced alongside him once again after a mere 35 years.
But oh, the book. It's a messy cut-and-paste job of album and gig reviews of the time, held together by reams of gnomic observations from the latterday Allen himself, along with contributions from other key players of the times. It's certainly not a coherent or seriously chronological work. I suppose that, rather like his music, it reflects the author - but it makes it difficult to get to any real nuggets of new information. And the myriad typefaces, layouts and various doodles aren't exactly easy on the eye. It's almost wilfully trying to be a book you keep for reading on the loo.
Once you get through all the serendipitous shenanigans, what do we actually learn that didn't make itself known at the time? That Mike Howlett and Didier Malherbe come over as thoroughly decent chaps in very different ways; that the "serious" prog musicians in the band (Moerlin, Hillage, Howlett) wanted to move into a sort of Weather Report style - which would certainly have been anathema to these ears at the time (like we really needed more highly technical, clinical, humourless diddly diddly solos in improbable time signatures); that Tim Blake was not a particularly pleasant person - hippy or not; that everyone was doing way too many drugs to function as a coherent business (like it or not, the boys were there to make a living) or even as human beings half the time; and that the author himself - at the time an icon for hippy idealism - was all too aware of his mounting drug-related paranoia. He could be mean spirited (see his sideswipes at Bill Bruford amongst others), selfish, naive and - in the case of the Berlin Wall episode - incredibly stupid. And not a little smug. He can't help preaching flaky philosophy even this far down the track.
Had the marvellous Ian MacDonald (of Revolution In The Head fame and an open admirerer of Gong's music) still been around today, he would have been the ideal objective biographer for this period of the band's history. I'm afraid this book isn't it.
My allegiance to Hillage notwithstanding, I was fully aware of how central to the whole thing Daevid Allen was, and how much his sense of the absurd and natural jazz leanings had influenced proceedings. So I knew when he left the band that the game was up for Gong, no matter how bravely/desparately they tried to carry on as more and more of the classic line-up moved on to other things. Basically, Allen was the absolute essence of Gong, and it's nice to see that most of the survivors have now coalesced alongside him once again after a mere 35 years.
But oh, the book. It's a messy cut-and-paste job of album and gig reviews of the time, held together by reams of gnomic observations from the latterday Allen himself, along with contributions from other key players of the times. It's certainly not a coherent or seriously chronological work. I suppose that, rather like his music, it reflects the author - but it makes it difficult to get to any real nuggets of new information. And the myriad typefaces, layouts and various doodles aren't exactly easy on the eye. It's almost wilfully trying to be a book you keep for reading on the loo.
Once you get through all the serendipitous shenanigans, what do we actually learn that didn't make itself known at the time? That Mike Howlett and Didier Malherbe come over as thoroughly decent chaps in very different ways; that the "serious" prog musicians in the band (Moerlin, Hillage, Howlett) wanted to move into a sort of Weather Report style - which would certainly have been anathema to these ears at the time (like we really needed more highly technical, clinical, humourless diddly diddly solos in improbable time signatures); that Tim Blake was not a particularly pleasant person - hippy or not; that everyone was doing way too many drugs to function as a coherent business (like it or not, the boys were there to make a living) or even as human beings half the time; and that the author himself - at the time an icon for hippy idealism - was all too aware of his mounting drug-related paranoia. He could be mean spirited (see his sideswipes at Bill Bruford amongst others), selfish, naive and - in the case of the Berlin Wall episode - incredibly stupid. And not a little smug. He can't help preaching flaky philosophy even this far down the track.
Had the marvellous Ian MacDonald (of Revolution In The Head fame and an open admirerer of Gong's music) still been around today, he would have been the ideal objective biographer for this period of the band's history. I'm afraid this book isn't it.
Format:Hardcover
Gong penetrate the veil of reality and bring home the music of the spheres. You've heard it all before, it exist always.
Let Daevid take you on his journey; let him guide you through the initiation; witness the magic; feel the pain...then grin your elf silly at the comic joke underlying. Excellent read, highly recommended.
Let Daevid take you on his journey; let him guide you through the initiation; witness the magic; feel the pain...then grin your elf silly at the comic joke underlying. Excellent read, highly recommended.
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