Radio Gnome Invisible

The first track on Flying Teapot, written by Daevid Allen and recorded at The Manor with Giorgio Gomelsky producing. Its lyric is about telepathy, picking up voices and messages from an invisible Radio Gnome, with flying teapots and a chant that plays on shared knowing. Allen defined Radio Gnome as a secret frequency on which people of like mind can tune in to each other's ideas. A 26-second Radio Gnome had already opened Camembert Electrique in 1971.

Oregano Rathbone of uDiscover heard "a delightful, beaming burble" of cosmic-funk riffs. Strawberry Bricks found it silly on the surface, but its slowly rising mantra rhythm a true invocation, and Toppermost picked it among Allen's ten best as the place to start for a sense of what follows. The 2019 reissue added a rough mix and a premix with story narration.

Live

The song was in the set before the album came out: setlist.fm logs its first performance at the Grand Théâtre in Angers on 8 November 1972, and forty in all, the last in São Paulo in 2013. Gong recorded it with Hillage's Captain Capricorn's Dream Saloon for John Peel in January 1974, issued on Pre-Modernist Wireless, and live versions from Roanne in 1973 and Sheffield in 1974 have been released. The upload in the hypersongs web is the original 1973 studio recording in Simon Heyworth's 2018 remaster, released in 2019.