DAEVID
ALLEN
I
first met Daevid when he was playing with Soft Machine.
Then they went off to France to play at a Jean Jacques
Lebel event and came back as a trio. At a club called Happening 44, I think their first gig without Daevid, Mike Ratledge told me he’d been
refused re-entry into the UK. Ever the Capricornian,
Daevid settled in France and formed Gong. The next time
I saw him was when the Camenbert
Electrique band came to London. Steve Hillage and
I were living in the same house at the time and I
remember sitting Steve down to listen to Gong - they did
a Peel show while they were here. Steve hadn’t heard of
them, but at the end of the broadcast he looked at me
and said, definitively: ‘I’m going to join that band’.
And within a couple of years he had.
Robert
Wyatt,
Ian MacDonald and Daevid were also instrumental in
getting Henry Cow signed to Virgin. And for the first
half of the ‘70s I was the informal stand-by, stand-in,
drummer for Gong whenever they were between drummers -
or when, for one reason or another, Pierre Moerlin
couldn’t make a gig or a tour. Then, in 1978, Daevid and
I spent a fortnight or so in Deya (Majorca) recording
the basic tracks for what became N’existez
pas - and socialising a lot. One day, I remember,
we visited a flickering Robert Graves, who included in
our conversation several other people not visible to us.
Round then I was also playing, on and off, in Gilly
Smyth’s Mother
Gong and, in 1978 (again) we flew off to New York
to play at Giorgo Gomelsky’s Zu Manifestival; a trip
that included an unscheduled emergency landing in the
Azores. Never a dull moment with Daevid and Gilly. Both
much missed.
In
1999,
I was drafted in for a Japanese tour with the Gong
Family 30th anniversary, playing in a trio
with Daevid & Hugh Hopper. Eight years later Daevid,
Hugh and I, now as Brainville
3, did several festivals and tours, until Hugh’s
untimely death in 2009. Daevid and I re-gathered in
another trio not so long after, with keyboardist Yumi
Hara – a project more poetry than song based, until
Daevid followed Hugh in 2015.
Daevid
and
Hugh were two one of the most level-headed and
thoroughly decent people I ever met.
HUGH
HOPPER
I
first bumped into Hugh at Community
Supplies, a wholefood wholesaler, then in Camden,
set up to supply communes with bulk organic food. We
first played together in Moscow and Volgagrad in Lindsay
Cooper’s Oh
Moscow, and
then in Japan, with Daevid Allen, as part of the Gong
Family 30th Anniversary. In 2006, Hugh
invited me to join him in a one-off project in Paris to
play the whole of the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s LP Birds of Fire - something I doubt I would ever have even considered
undertaking with anyone else. After that we started to
do occasional concerts as a duo. And, of course, he
Daevid and I became Brainville 3. In
2008, we were booked to play as a duo in Mexico. I had
left early to give a couple of lectures at the
University and, two days before the show, I got a mail
from Hugh saying he was hardly able to move and unable
to fly. Tests identified Leukemia, from which Hugh died
a few months later. I miss him.
ON
RECORD
w
DAEVID ALLEN
N’existe
Pas Charley Records, 1979
Poesy at Play BaR 003, 2017
Rain Cheque (DVD) BAR 008, 2018
w
HUGH HOPPER
The
Frog and the Spoon, 16
minutes from a concert
Hugh and I
did in Koln, in 2007 - on CC100, 2014.
w
HUGH & DAEVID
BRAINVILLE
THREE Trial By Headline. RER BV1, 2008
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