Gong - From the Bedrock Series (DVD)
Gong - @ Montserrat 1973 and Other Stories (DVD)

The first of these two DVDs covers what I believe is the first of the late 90s Gong reunion bands, the one with Pip Pyle behind the drumkit, and the one that I got to see in San Francisco around 96 or so. They’re in better form here than when I saw them, although don’t let that give you the impression I didn’t enjoy myself immensely. This DVD is perhaps a slightly shorter set, starting with the inevitable “You Can’t Kill Me” and working through the trilogy fairly quickly. The one difference here from the band I saw was that here there’s an electronicsman doing Tim Blake’s job (Gwyo Zepix maybe?). Anyway I enjoy most of these modern incarnations about the same, I love the songwriting, but miss Blake, Hillage and the crew.

Which brings me to the travesty that is the Montserrat DVD. I haven’t been too fond of Voiceprint for a while, but this seems to be another way to make money off of Gong fans by enticing them with some legendary classic era clip, filling the rest of the DVD with some unbelievable junk and charging a good $18 for it. The Montserrat clip from 1973 would be neat in its own right had it been synched properly, it took a couple viewings for me to to come to the conclusion that, yes, you’re hearing the right music, but the synching between what you hear and what you see is seconds off, apparent in moments with both Daevid Allen and Tim Blake. The church is neat and watching the camera pan back from pews full of nuns and such is pretty funny, but with the pre-clip “Gong walks the hills of Spain” bit, the clip itself didn’t even come out to be all that long, just a medley of Other Side of the Sky and Bamboule.

The rest of the DVD is chalked up with useless filler. The six short movies are exercises in one’s patience and I’m likely to agree with most of the messages here. But “Tick-O-Cock” with the video of a naked Daevid Allen on the john yelling about his johnson, well yes I do get that it’s taboo breaking and such, but the first thing that came to mind was “I didn’t need to see that.” Some of the other videos are fairly interesting, but all seem to be rather irritating modern views of the Gong mythos, replacing the cosmic backdrop for irritating house and rave beats (and spiels about terrorists). You’d think by the Acid Mothers Gong and Soft Machine clips that just maybe there might be something else worth seeing. The AMG clip is 6 minutes of rather interesting psychedelia, but the Soft Machine clip, if you can call it that, is basically some Daevid Allen intro poem with the band vamping quietly behind, barely Soft Machine at all, even if it is neat to see them at the UFO in 1967. Don’t waste your time on this, even for a trilogy period freak, I felt ripped off to the hilt on this one.