Steve Hillage

Uriel, Arzachel and Khan

Stephen Simpson Hillage was born on 2 August 1951 in northeast London and grew up in Epping. He had his first guitar at about nine and a Fender Stratocaster at fifteen; Hendrix, from 1966, was the great influence, with Coltrane close behind. At the City of London School he met the keyboard player Dave Stewart in a maths class, and in 1967 they formed Uriel with Mont Campbell and Clive Brooks, playing Cream, Hendrix and the Nice. Hillage left in 1968 to continue his studies and the others became Egg, but in 1969 the four reunited for one session under joke pseudonyms, as Arzachel; Hillage was Simeon Sasparella. That album is his first recorded work.

At the University of Kent in Canterbury he fell in with Caravan and Spirogyra, the core of what became known as the Canterbury scene, and Caravan's manager got him a deal with Deram. His band Khan made one album, Space Shanty (1972), with Stewart on keyboards, and toured Britain supporting Caravan before Hillage, still only twenty-one, ended it. Much of its unrecorded second album became his first solo record.

Gong

After a spell in Kevin Ayers's band Decadence, Hillage met Daevid Allen in a Maida Vale flat and joined Gong at the end of the Flying Teapot sessions in January 1973. He was their lead guitarist through Angel's Egg (1973) and You (1974), the core of the Radio Gnome Invisible trilogy, and learned from Allen the glissando guitar technique Allen had developed after watching Syd Barrett play with a lighter. Hillage plays his with worn surgical-instrument handles bought at a Paris flea market. Miquette Giraudy, a French film editor and actor born in Nice in 1953, joined Gong in 1974 and became his partner in music and life; she appears on every one of his records.

While Gong fell apart around him in 1975, Hillage was finishing Fish Rising in the studio. He left Gong that December and, after a brief stint with National Health, began a solo career. He has called Gong the best band he was ever in.

The Virgin years

For L (1976) he went to Woodstock to work with his hero Todd Rundgren and the band Utopia, plus Don Cherry on trumpet; it reached number ten in Britain, his biggest success. He supported Queen at their Hyde Park free concert and played American arenas opening for ELO. Then he changed direction again. Motivation Radio (1977), made in Los Angeles with the synthesizer pioneer Malcolm Cecil, brought in funk and electronics; Green (1978), co-produced by Pink Floyd's Nick Mason, pushed further into synthesizers and guitar synth.

Rainbow Dome Musick (1979), two long, gentle pieces written for a relaxation dome at a London mind-body-spirit festival, is now heard as a forerunner of ambient music. Open (1979), For To Next and And Not Or (1982-83) followed, the last two built from a drum machine, Minimoog and bass. By then he had stopped touring; he said in 1995 that the band had simply grown bored with the music. Through the 1980s he worked mainly as a producer, for Simple Minds, Robyn Hitchcock, It Bites and the Algerian singer Rachid Taha among others.

System 7

In 1989 Alex Paterson of The Orb played Rainbow Dome Musick in the chill-out room of a London club night. The connection led Hillage and Giraudy to play on The Orb's first album and then to start their own project, System 7, with a rotating cast that has included Paterson, Youth, Derrick May, Carl Craig and Laurent Garnier. Its albums run from System 7 (1991) and 777, a British top-thirty album in 1993, to Flower of Life in 2026. Hillage programmed Glastonbury's first dance stage in 1995, produced The Charlatans, and set up the A-Wave label.

He has kept returning to Gong: for reunions in 1977 and 2006, as producer and guitarist on 2032 (2009), and as curator of the band's Virgin-years box set in 2019. In 2016 he released a twenty-two-disc career box, Searching for the Spark, and in 2019 and 2023 toured the old solo songs again, backed by the current Gong.

On stage

His live peak was 1976 to 1979, and much of it was filmed or taped: German television's Rockpalast in March 1977, two nights at London's Rainbow Theatre that year, the Marquee in 1978, BBC2's Rock Goes to College at his old university in Canterbury in February 1979, and a headline set at Glastonbury that June. The double album Live Herald (1979) collects the best of it, and a run of archive releases since 2015 has added Madison Square Garden and the Los Angeles Forum in 1977 and the Paris Bataclan in December 1979. His most played songs are The Salmon Song, Hurdy Gurdy Man and It's All Too Much.

Standing

Vintage Guitar called him the greatest master of tape-echo guitar in rock history, and Malcolm Dome observed that he rarely appears on lists of guitar heroes despite being one of the most consistently individual guitarists around. He received Prog magazine's Visionary award in 2013. His path, from Canterbury psychedelia through space rock to the dance floor, is one of the clearest lines anyone drew between the 1970s counterculture and the rave generation.

I've always regarded myself as an individual rather than a member of a tribe.

Steve Hillage, Classic Rock, 2007