The monastery at Montserrat, in Spain’s Basque region, might have harboured separatist terrorists and refugees from General Franco’s regime, but it surely never before or again saw anything quite like this 30-minute visitation from the planet Gong. This brief but fascinating performance, featuring Gong’s Radio Gnome-era line-up, is an incongruous juxtaposition of counter-culture, paganism and spirituality that clearly bewildered visiting tourists and the resident brotherhood alike.
Gong is, of course, a multifaceted Hydra and, as an acquired taste, makes Marmite seem a positively populist product, as the short films supporting the main ‘feature’ here ably demonstrate. Of principle worth is footage of Soft Machine at the UFO Club’s benefit for International Times photographer John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, with Daevid Allen’s Richard III delivery of Poem For Hoppy (‘Our fathers who art in power…’) prefiguring John Lydon’s style by a decade.
Of the others, though Allen’s sincere delivery of Gaia has delightful warmth, the rest underwhelms and might be a struggle even for long-time Gong devotees. In particular, the interminable Conscience Strike 2006 is an unengaging mix of poetry and performance art ruminating on the nature of terrorism, and Acid Mothers Gong’s impenetrable appearance at the RFH in 2002 is definitely a trip too far.
