Gong

Protogong

Gong began in Paris in 1967, founded by the Australian musician Daevid Allen and the English vocalist Gilli Smyth. Allen had co-founded Soft Machine in England the year before, but after a European tour in August 1967 he was refused re-entry to Britain for overstaying a visa on an earlier visit. The first line-up, with Ziska Baum singing and Loren Standlee on flute, was the one Allen later called Protogong. It held a residency at La Vieille Grille late that year, then fell apart in the student revolt of May 1968, when Allen and Smyth fled to Deià in Mallorca.

Jean Karakos of the BYG label advanced money for recording, and a contract covered Magick Brother, released on BYG Actuel in March 1970, and Banana Moon. The saxophonist and flautist Didier Malherbe arrived in 1969 and stayed through most of the band's eras. From autumn 1970 the musicians, managers and technicians lived together at the Pavillon du Hay, a former hunting lodge at Voisines near Sens. Camembert Electrique, recorded at the Château d'Hérouville and released in October 1971, introduced their space-rock sound and opened with a 26-second fragment called Radio Gnome. That year Gong played Glastonbury Fayre, toured Britain and recorded the first of their John Peel sessions.

Balinese gongs. One sound. Ommm.

Daevid Allen, asked about the name, 2012

Radio Gnome Invisible

After a brief split in August 1972, Gong signed to Virgin in October, one of the first acts on Richard Branson's new label. Flying Teapot, recorded at The Manor in Oxfordshire with Giorgio Gomelsky producing, added Tim Blake on synthesizers and, late in the sessions, Steve Hillage on guitar. It came out on 25 May 1973, the same day as Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, as the first part of the Radio Gnome Invisible trilogy, and its opening track, Radio Gnome Invisible, is the broadcast that starts the story. Allen said the band made the mythology as silly as they possibly could so that most people would not take it seriously, treating it as a Sufi-style teaching story.

A new line-up then formed around Hillage, Blake and Malherbe, with Mike Howlett on bass and Pierre Moerlen on drums. Angel's Egg was recorded at the Pavillon du Hay in August 1973 with the Manor Mobile and released that December. From October 1973 to May 1974 the band toured Britain, France, Germany and the Netherlands, improvising the themes that became You, recorded at The Manor in the summer of 1974 and credited to the whole band under the pseudonym COIT. Its fourth track, Master Builder, became the song Gong have played more than any other. In 2015 Rolling Stone placed You at number 38 among the greatest prog rock albums.

Splinters

Late in 1974 Karakos won an injunction, the start of a twelve-year legal battle between Virgin and BYG that absorbed Gong's royalties. On 10 April 1975, at a gig in Cheltenham, Allen did not come on stage; he said a cosmic force field had told him to leave. Smyth left that year to have children. The band went on to make Shamal, produced by Nick Mason, but divided over songs versus instrumental music, and Hillage left. From 1976 the drummer's Pierre Moerlen's Gong played mallet-percussion jazz rock on Gazeuse! and Expresso II, while Allen and Smyth spun off Planet Gong, Mother Gong and New York Gong. The trilogy line-up came together once more in Paris in May 1977.

Gong again

Allen's Invisible Opera Company of Tibet became Gongmaison in 1989, and from April 1992 the name Gong returned, with Shapeshifter that year. The band marked its 25th anniversary at the Forum in London in 1994 and toured the world through the late 1990s. You Remixed (1997) drew The Orb, The Shamen, System 7 and Yamatsuka Eye. Acid Mothers Gong, a 2006 Gong Family Unconvention in Amsterdam and the reunion album 2032 (2009) followed. Allen's last album was I See You (2014), which brought in Kavus Torabi and Cheb Nettles.

Allen died of cancer on 13 March 2015, aged 77, having asked the band to carry on with Torabi as frontman. Smyth died in August 2016. The current group, which its own biography calls the longest running line-up, all hand-picked by Allen, has made Rejoice! I'm Dead! (2016), The Universe Also Collapses (2019), Unending Ascending (2023) and Bright Spirit (2026), and the Canterbury-scene zine Facelift reads the last three as a new trilogy. In 2019 Hillage curated Love From the Planet Gong, a box of the Virgin years remastered by Simon Heyworth, who had engineered the original records.