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This weekend I saw the wonderful Gong playing at Massive Attack’s Meltdown festival in the Queen Elizabeth Hall. What started as a nostalgic indulgence of my misspent teenage years listening to early 70s prog and psyc ended up with me totally transfixed by a band led by a 70 year old man in a red-sequined dress.

It wasn’t a bad line up considering that that all the original drummers (Rashid Hourai, Pip Pyle and Pierre Moerlin) are now dead, as is the sadly missed Bloomdido Bad de Grasse himself, Didier Malherbe. However we did get Steve Hillage, Miquette Giraudy, Gilli Smyth and Mike Howlett; the latter in a particularly fetching monk’s cowl which was later removed with some difficulty by a roadie. Despite some notable absences in personnel, the sound was all present and correct: walls of glissando guitar, a rhythm section so tight you couldn’t slide a sheet of A4 between it, scary chromatic riffs and even scarier pixie costumes.

The set was amazing and took in most of the classic period, err, classics, starting with Fohat… and ending with You Never Blow Yr Trip Forever. We even got “Light in the Sky” off of Hillage’s Motivation Radio which prompted the red-sequined dress affair.

Anyway, it all took me back to more innocent days when the term PHP meant so much more to me than the name of a web programming language. That’s Pot Head Pixie for the uninitiated. My path to Gong went via lots of other prog and psyc bands: Genesis, King Crimson, Pink Floyd / Barrett, Soft Machine, Kevin Ayers, Caravan. This was between the years of 15 and 18 when I should have been listening to the Smiths, shambly indie music and Madchester. When I was at Kent University I even visited the homes of Richard Sinclair and Hugh Hopper. That’s dedication for you. I didn’t manage to get Richard Sinclair to one of my band’s gigs though, even though we did play a version of “In the Land of Grey and Pink”. Ungrateful so-and-so.

The Independent recently ran an interview with Daevid Allen which reminded me just how loveable Gong are and how exciting that time round the end of the 60s and the beginning of the 70s was, both politically and musically. I particularly like the bit about how Allen tried to sneak back from France into the UK for a gig after he’d been refused entry:

“I came through in a van with a photo of the Buddha on my passport,” he recalls.       

There’s more to say about Gong and indeed lots of other bands I used to love and I plan to return to them. For now though, check out this footage of Gong on YouTube playing “Fohat digs holes in space” from 1972. Camembert Electrique is quite the bad-trip album (”finger on the trigger and your body burning up!”) but this is just plain frightening.