February 18th
Gong-You Can’t Kill Me- Live Etc
I think I may
have written earlier that the only prog albums I have ever had were by Genesis
and ELP? I suppose that Gong may just fall into that bracket, but looking on
Wikipedia (which is always correct,) they are also termed as psychedelic and
/or space rock. So that’s ok then-I’m off the prog hook.
This album was
released in 1977 and I think that I got it a couple of years later i.e. on the
cusp of punk and post-punk. It was seemingly therefore a strange record for me
to get at that time, being preoccupied by the likes of Gang of Four, The Fall,
Swell Maps and the like. I’d heard tangentially of Gong by one of my friends who
made me listen to a split live LP recorded by Alternative TV (Mark Perry’s punk
band) and Here & Now (a sort of Gong offshoot).That album (“What You
See...Is What You Are”), I tried to get for ages and ages with no success,
until I came across a copy only 18 months ago. It’s not on the iPod, so I won’t
be writing about it directly, but it certainly is a curious mix of ATV’s punk
thrash and Here & Now’s hippy trippy ramblings. Especially on the last
track when both bands play ATV’s “Splitting in Two” together.
As I couldn’t get
hold of the live Here & Now album, then the next best thing was a live Gong
album. They’d issued another live album in 1977 called “Floating Anarchy Live”,
but I couldn’t get hold of that either-that had been released on Charly and was
a complete live concert recorded in Toulouse.
I was left with getting this
“Live Etc” album released on Virgin (probably as a spoiler to affect any
success for the Charly release as Gong had previously been signed to Virgin).
As spoiler albums go, it’s pretty good. It’s a mixture of various live tracks
recorded between 1973 and 1975, as well as some tracks that I think may have
been recorded by the BBC for John Peel’s show.
For a long time I’d mistakenly
assumed it was all from one concert and not patched together from old tapes in
the vaults. It was well packaged though. A double LP (but not gatefold-that
would tip it into the prog side of the equation). It had a silver sleeve with
the Gong logo and was cut out around the logo itself, so you could see the
inner sleeves of the records which were brightly coloured collages made up of
numerous photos of the band.
For some
odd reason I ordered this album from a mail order company advertised in the
back of Sounds and it turned up in the post-after I‘d sent a cheque-in a 12”
cardboard package. (How old-fashioned and quaint. Cheques and mail order. Music
in the post).
Gong always had
a reputation of being a bunch of stoned hippies rambling on about pothead
pixies and flying teapots. Go figure-it sounds quite justified. However, they
can’t have been stoned all the time if this album is anything to go by. It’s
more jazz fusion than prog, and all the playing is so tight and hard that they
were either extremely brilliant musicians who could still play well through a
haze of class A,B and C drugs, or were having nothing much stronger than a cup
of PG Tips when this was recorded.
Get/see/read the rest of "Totally Shuffled" here;
Kindle e book
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