As the guitarist of the Soft Machine, Daevid Allen had, in theory, a crucial role in starting the Canterbury school of progressive-rock. In practice, Allen was only vaguely related to the school's main stylistic directions. Allen was, first and…
As the guitarist of the Soft Machine, Daevid Allen had, in theory, a crucial role in starting the Canterbury school of progressive-rock. In practice, Allen was only vaguely related to the school's main stylistic directions. Allen was, first and foremost, a hippie/freak who wed Frank Zappa's paradoxical aesthetics and San Francisco's communal ethos. Besides creating a unique sound with Gong, Allen also contributed to raise a new generation of progressive musicians: percussionist Pierre Moerlen, keyboardist Tim Blake, vocalist Gilli Smyth, guitarist Steve Hillage.
Flying Teapot - Radio Gnome Invisible (Virgin, 1973), recorded in February 1973, a concept album fusing fairy tale, operetta, cartoon and expressionist theater as no one had ever dared, their masterpiece and one of the greatest masterpieces of rock music. Allen as the cosmic jester sketches an anarchoid utopia and coins a style that fuses jazz, hard-rock and music-hall.
Tim Blake (synthesizer) and Steve Hillage (guitar) have been added to the lineup, while Pip Pyle has moved on to Hatfield & The North. The sheer force of this lineup is impressive. Every second of music invents something, turning each song into a wild collage of color and imagery. The surrealism and nonsense of these sonic frescoes transcend paradox. The bacchanal takes on perfectly geometric forms, the infernal shambles acquires heavenly character, the irrational demonstrates impossible theorems. Smyth as a seductive space witch leads the grotesquely elegant dances of saxophone, synthesizer and guitar.
The overture is a baleful vaudeville that immediately deploys the arsenal of tricks: synth eddies, Smyth's orgasmic vocals, saxophone gyrations, martial bass drum, cacophonous fractures, mantric slogans like "banana nirvana manana." In the same country-band spirit, with a hard-rock riff, blathers the other manifesto track, Pot Head Pixies, chorus-sketch no less farcical.
The major suites in which the "continental circus" program is realized are two. Flying Teapot opens on the sparse, disconnected sound of sidereal spaces, a dusting of galactic notes that turns in on itself. Over a soft tribalism the music expands into a liquid jazz-rock that grows faster and faster, stretches like a bow, grows and grows hopping on saxes, guitar, drums in delirium tremens, and finally explodes thunderously, belching out dissonant dixieland and syncopated riffs; and begins the journey into the endless expanses of the cosmos, into rarefied interstellar chaos in an epileptic crescendo of increasingly obsessive tribal rhythms, into the denser and denser chaos of free winds, synths, and guitars; out of the sudden silence that succeeds him springs a delirious solo by Pyle: a tip-tap of the stilts, Japanese whiffs and drumsticks, tam-tam at breakneck speed. Allen`s bananista (country fair banding, centenarian storytelling, acrobatic mimes). The jazz-rock of nonsense was born.
Introduced by a Blake solo, Octave Doctors, thus was born the heroicom
