Musician and poet.
Born: January 13, 1938;
Died: March 13, 2015.
Daevid Allen, who has died aged 77, was a benign revolutionary who maintained his hippie ideals and beat poet status to the end of a life that saw this former Melbourne department store worker galvanise and inspire music scenes on the other side of the world.
When Allen found lodgings with the Ellidge family in the Kent village of Lydden in late 1960, he was unwittingly sowing the seeds for what became the psychedelic-jazz-rock band Soft Machine and what's known as the Canterbury sound. He later went on to form Gong, which became a social and artistic movement as much as a band, and worked with Bill Laswell in a band that was dubbed New York Gong, but just for firing the imagination of the young Robert Ellidge, now better known as Robert Wyatt, and his school friends, Allen would deserve his place in music history.
Christopher David Allen was born in Melbourne, the only child of Helen and Walter, an interior designer whose business failed during the depression but who rallied to become the director of a local furniture business. Walter could play by ear on piano any tune he heard and Daevid, who adopted this spelling when he became a poet, recalled family gatherings when everyone got drunk and sang uproariously.
At the age of seven, his musical interest was piqued further when he encountered a family of Irish buskers on a local street. He took up the ukulele as a result and then progressed to guitar, showing his father's talent for playing by ear. As a teenager he became besotted with jazz in all its forms, from traditional to swing to big band to bebop, and a chance discovery of the space travelling orchestra leader, Sun Ra's first album in a bargain bin may well have sealed his fate.
After leaving his fee-paying school, where the bullying he suffered was relieved by sneaking off to work as a child actor on a children's radio programme, Allen got a job in a department store then after a year moved to Melbourne University Bookshop. Jazz guitar lessons propelled him onto the local gig scene and when he discovered the beat poets, he combined poetry with jazz in his performances. He also briefly studied art at Melbourne's Gallery School but in 1960 he decided to concentrate on performing, with London as his chosen milieu.
He sailed to Greece, hitched through Europe and dallied in Paris's art galleries, eventually fetching up at the Ellidges via London and an advertisement looking for digs. His bohemian attitude, unconventional attire and extensive jazz record collection seduced Robert Ellidge and Soft Machine members Hugh Hopper, Mike Ratledge, and Kevin Ayers, who formed Soft Machine forerunner Mister Head with Allen after meeting a rich American on Majorca who financed new instruments and amplifiers.
Allen flitted between Paris, Majorca, Ibiza, Morocco and Canterbury through the early to mid-1960s and also worked with American minimalist composer Terry Riley, beat generation author William Burroughs and poet Gilli Smyth in Paris before forming Soft Machine. Then, just as the band were becoming underground heroes, drawing major record company interest and sharing management with Jimi Hendrix and the Animals, he was forced to leave when his visa was found to have expired on the band's return to the UK from a triumphant French tour.
He returned to Paris where he and Gilli Smyth, by now his partner, formed Gong, which would go on to influence rave and electronic musicians just as Allen's interest in free jazz and artistic experiments had stirred his Soft Machine co-founders. The Paris student demonstrations of 1968 found Allen handing out teddy bears to the riot police as peace offerings but seeking some peace of their own, he and Smyth decided to decamp to Majorca. There they met saxophonist Didier Malherbe, who was living in a cave on the poet Robert Graves' property, and co-opted him into Gong.
With Malherbe's virtuosity giving Gong an added dimension the band's work on the soundtrack to the film Continental Circus gained them a deal with BYG Records in Paris. The first Gong album, Magick Brother/Mystic Sister, followed in 1970 and they went on to record Camembert Electrique, which was subsequently re-issued at the price of a single (around 50p) after BYG went bankrupt while Gong were recording at Richard Branson's Manor Studios. Branson signed Gong to his new Virgin label in 1973. The Flying Teapot trilogy of albums followed.
While Gong continued with a more straightforward jazz-rock approach, Allen and Smyth again took refuge on Majorca and Allen added further solo albums to his earlier Banana Moon recording. He also worked with Catalan folk-rockers Pep Laguarda and Tapineria. In 1977 Allen and Smyth joined Gong onstage in Paris for a brief reunion and in 1980 Allen collaborated with Bill Laswell in New York, producing the album About Time.
The following year, having parted from Smyth, Allen returned to Australia but by 1988 he was back in the UK. In the meantime, Smyth, the mother of Allen's two oldest sons, had married musician and producer Harry Williamson and formed Mother Gong. Williamson then joined Allen in Gong Maison and Smyth and Allen took part in Gong's 25th birthday celebrations in 1994 in London which led to the classic Gong line-up reforming in 1996 and touring until 2001.
Allen's subsequent activities included further Gong albums, 2032 and I See You, on which he and Smyth were joined by their son Orlando on drums, and the groups The Magick Brothers, Acid Mothers Gong and the University of Errors.
He gave his final performance near his home in Byron Bay, south of Brisbane, on February 27 reading Kahlil Gibran's On Death.
He is survived by his sons, Orlando, Taliesyn, Toby and Ynis.
ROB ADAMS
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