Was it entirely coincidence that the latest chapters of the Soft Machine and Gong dynasties emerged on the 13th day in March, the same date that founder member Daevid Allen died in 2015? Is it therefore any surprise that in both cases the current bands are making a case for the strongest representations of their respective recent line-ups?
In January I carried out interviews with Gong and Soft Machine in January for Prog and Record Collector magazines respectively. But members of both bands were so generous with their time and honesty about not just their latest albums, but a number of other topics, that it seemed an excellent opportunity to share some of their additional thoughts in more depth over a few separate posts on the Facelift blog.
Facelift will shortly be publishing an interview with Soft Machine about their latest album ‘Thirteen’, but in the meantime let’s delve a little deeper into Gong’s new album ‘Bright Spirit’, which appears to herald a bit of a pause for breath after a frenetic decade of touring and recording. All members of the band spoke to me back in January (with the exception of the legendarily incommunicado Cheb Nettles) providing an opportunity for me to ask Gong where they thought they had got to with the release of their latest album.
This line-up, who seemingly an aeon ago emerged from the embers of the last Daevid Allen line up of the band, are looking ahead to the conclusion of their latest joint tour with electronic madhatters Henge, plus a number of further summer European and UK dates. This multi-talented troupe of Dave Sturt (bass/vocals), Ian East (saxes and flute), Fabio Golfetti (guitar/vocals), Kavus Torabi (guitar and lead vocals) and Cheb Nettles (drums/vocals) will return, for a while at least, to their various solo and other band projects in 2027. It’s a line-up that now stands as the band’s most stable incarnation, and in ‘Bright Spirit’, puts together a seemingly more reflective, holistic album than previous ones, providing a perfect excuse for us all to take stock.
If ‘Rejoice! I’m Dead’, the first post-Daevid album, made a virtue of its members’ formidable and diverse talents, both performative and compositionally, in moving towards the band’s new reality, then ‘The Universe Also Collapses’ was grandiose, containing the epic ‘Forever Reocurring’ , the highly charged ‘My Sawtooth Wake’ and the startling ‘The Elemental’, whilst ‘Unending Ascending’ alternated between spiky riffing, Sixties-drenched psychedelic pop and the ‘Selenish’ implorations of ‘Ship of Ishtar’.
The latest project was not without its vicissitudes. Back in the spring of 2025, there were rumblings that the creative process had started to stall a little, or at least was starting to wilt under the pressure of deadlines. More of which below. But given ‘Bright Spirit’s’ rocky incarnation, it’s surprisingly at ease with itself, a coherent statement, almost a reverie of sorts, and, after the striking statements of the first two tracks, underpinned sonically by glissando guitar. It all adds up to a sense of completion of this particular cycle, a new trilogy perhaps?
Kavus: my feelings towards it are bound to be completely inescapably tied up with the creation of it and how we made it and what I was thinking at the time of writing it so it’s kind of interesting to hear how it’s perceived when you haven’t been inside that that globe of craziness!
Dave: in 2024 we were doing a lot including the East Coast in America and then a massive six week European tour. We had Christmas and then we had a few months off but catching up on everything. We kind of exchanged ideas beforehand because we knew we didn’t have a lot of time.
Kavus: On ‘Unending Ascending’ some stuff came together really quickly. For ‘My Guitar is a Spaceship’, Cheb just started playing a beat. I came up with the riff and then about an hour later we pretty much had that tune as you hear it now but with different words. We managed to tour around Europe most of the stuff that appeared on the last album. We were pretty sure of how we wanted the songs to go and they were really under our skin. The recording process was very easy.
With ‘Bright Spirit’, we didn’t have that luxury. We got a month or so off to write and then we’re back in the studio again. And in that month or so, I went through some sort of interesting changes. I quit drinking before the European tour. I had turned into a raging alcoholic. No easy way of saying it. And so then I found myself in January sober um at home
I wrote ‘Fragrance of Paradise’ actually that was a tune I’d written ages ago, but finally got it over the line, but I wrote ‘Dream of Mine’ and a few other bits and pieces at the beginning of the year.
Dave: The writing sessions were quite intense and we spend days and days working on something and then decided it wasn’t and do something else. There was a lot of toing and froing. It’s always interesting the way these things develop because they always change as soon as the kernel of an idea is there and it’s just like everyone throws in ideas and then it develops through the recording as well.
Kavus: when we got back together (in early 2025), it was like, I just need a break from Gong. But we couldn’t have a break. We had this deadline. We had to do this. And as things were getting closer and closer to getting this in rehearsal and working the stuff out, it just got really fraught because we had to make a good album. I feel like everything that we do, everything I do anyway has to be better in some way or at least deeper than the thing I’ve done before. We were having to make decisions about the songwriting or about the song structures that were maybe made under pressure rather than under consideration.
Fabio: I feel that this album is like a conclusion of what we developed during these 10 years, a kind of resume of the creative process of this incarnation of Gong. Each song has its own world and connects to the ‘stone foundation’ of Gong (using Jonny Greene’s words). It seems like a wrap of ideas that we’ve been putting together and developing until this moment. It seems that it is time to turn the page and move forward to the next era.
Looking at the material that we recorded, I was very confident that it would result in a good album, and for me this album has more aspects that are closer to my personal taste in music, more meditative, melodic, and some bits reflecting the Gong of the old days, of which I’m still a fan.
I believe we called this a trilogy, first because Gong had a trilogy (in the Seventies) and this would be a kind of honouring the past, but also because this is the third album that we moulded our version of Gong starting with ‘The Universe Also Collapses’. We consider ‘Rejoice! I’m Dead’ as a transition, although it has some seeds of what we developed, we just brought individual ideas that were developed collectively. From ‘The Universe Also Collapses’, we decided to create music all together in the rehearsal room.
Dave: it is definitely the sum of these five musicians, but our experiences include being part of Gong, some of us more than others. I mean I’ve been in it 16 years since I got involved in April 2009. And then Ian was in 6 months after me… And then Fabio’s been steeped in it for longer than even though he wasn’t in the band until later, and Kavus as well was you know as a teenager really into Gong. When I joined Gong it was never like I had to do what Mike (Howlett) had played before. It was all about you. You didn’t have to be a Gong person – you have to bring something to it. When we did the ‘I See You’ album (the last with Daevid), it was a case of everyone being asked to bring ideas.
Fabio: I feel it’s more like a conclusion than a change of direction, I believe it’s an exploration of everything we’ve done, now let’s move to other territories!
Kavus: I would love this idea of being able to perform the entire trilogy back to back as one big thing even if it was just for a one off or two or three things, do ‘Universal Collapses’, ‘Unending Ascending’ and ‘Bright Spirit’, do it all as one thing. I like the challenge of that. We used to open with ‘Forever Reoccuring’ a lot. And it would end with with ‘Eternal Hand’. Maybe we do it like Magma did and do like a little interval between. I don’t know. I mean, I like the idea, why not? I think we could pretty much play all of it live.
Bright Spirit: An album guide
Gong performed ‘Dream of Mine’ and ‘Stars in Heaven’ during their autumn tour with Henge, and, at the time of interview were hoping to incorporate more tracks from ‘Bright Spirit’ into their spring set. Here the band talk through some of the tracks on the album. Whilst what follows is not an exhaustive guide to the riches of ‘Bright Spirit’, it does collate some of the band’s thoughts on individual tracks, starting with the extraordinary ‘Dream of Mine’:
Dream of Mine
Dave: it started with a riff from Kavus which he’d been playing for a while and there was one day I got to the rehearsal studio and he was playing that riff and I said “it wasn’t bad that!” – we were rehearsing for some gigs I think at that point. I said it’s got a real kind of Turkish vibe and because Ian is well versed in all that, I said it could be really good to kind of get Ian to like overblow it on the soprano and really push that eastern thing. That riff that was the root of it and then it kind of developed. I’ve never really talked to Kavus about whether he considers it to have an Iranian connection but he’s always for choosing strange intervals. They might have just appeared under his fingers..
Fabio: During the composition process, after Kavus brought the ‘Dream of Mine’ riff, a complementary “Egyptian” phrase came to my mind, which I called Anubis guitar!
Ian: this is a very interesting track for me. The process began with Kavus playing that riff he’d composed when we were writing together, and it immediately reminded me of the flavour of the music I play at Arabic and Balkan weddings. In those cultures there is a beautiful joyous celebratory dance music that usually accompanies the arrival of the married couple. It’s very exhilarating to experience both as a listener and a performer. The air is electric. I used to play Zourna (aka Mizmar) at weddings sometimes and this is the instrument you hear me play at the beginning of this track. I’m using the flavour and feel of that music with a similar Makam style of improvisation. Also the drums you hear at the beginning are the Davuls (aka Tapan) I bought in Turkey years ago that are also played in this wedding music. Cheb and I laid down those parts based on a drum pattern Cheb wrote to fit Kavus’ riff. It was a lot of fun! And yes we opened the gigs last November with this track although on drum kit and soprano.
Kavus: I wrote the whole tune at Christmas. The previous Christmas at my girlfriend’s house in Newquay. I just brought my guitar down knowing that and I wrote the whole tune then.
I’ve always loved those sort of eastern sounding riffs. It would probably be a little bit of a reach to say that there’s a sort of Persian or Iranian influence there, but why not? I have always loved that, going right back to, for example, hearing things like ‘Stargazer’ by Rainbow when I was a kid, it was just like the best thing I’d ever heard. I always love that harmonic minor sort of stuff. It’s a funny ass riff and it’s one of those ones that when I came up with it, I thought there’s something here.
But what I wanted to say about that tune is that there’s a bit in the middle which we refer to as the payoff – the payoff bit where for me it’s as if certainly the rock side of – obviously I’ve got Utopia Strong stuff, my solo stuff but in terms of rock music, which is everything I’ve been doing since I really picked up a guitar, that payoff kind of condenses everything I’ve been trying to do rockwise my entire life as a as a singer and a composer and a player into that one little section. And I was so adamant about this, like no, “this is the payoff”. It has to go like this. It’s got this singing over this mad bit of guitar playing. And Cheb wrote the harmonies on top of it. Lyrics: ‘ You really got to keep your secret closer’. When I heard the final mixback of it because we had to and froed – “this needs to go up. This needs to go down”. When I heard the mixback, I actually started crying. And that’s what I meant: if I get hit by lightning tomorrow that one little bit of payoff that is what I’ve been trying to articulate musically for the last 50 years or whatever. I was very happy about that, not that anyone would even know. I can sleep easy now. Cheb was a tub thumper on that one. He was like, “Yeah, come on!’ So, I was really glad when it got made.
Mantivule
Fabio: ‘Mantivule’ came from just Kavus playing around with rhythmic delays, a classic Steve Hillage style echoed in many artists, like Manuel Göttsching, Steffe, Ed Wynne… also myself..
Kavus: it was actually one or two things we’ve not done before. One – it was an instrumental, and two – it was using the dotting technique. Do you know about dotting? So what dotting is when you play with a delay, but you play against it. So you’ve got the way that say for example Brian May would use a delay where he kind of plays with it. So it sounds like a big orchestra, but if you play against it, you sort of bounce against, I think you’re like playing in triplets against it. Steve Hillage uses it a lot. Steffe uses it. Ed Wynne uses it a great deal, you know, and I remember reading an interview with Ed Wynne probably from the 90s talking about dotting and he says, “Yeah, it turns you as a guitar player into a human sequencer”, which is a great way of putting it. And I’ve always done bits of dotting right back to my old metal space rock band. But in a way it is, for want of a better word, a space rock cliche or a trope. So we we’d never actually done it before with Gong, but I had that kind of dissonant dotty thing and in band practice turned into this thing and it was one of those ones where I was just like “ah fuck it. Let’s do it. Let’s do it”. I know it’s almost a bit of a Gong/ space rock/ Steve Hillage cliche but we’ve never done it and I love dotting. So let’s do our dotting track.
Fabio: On ‘Mantivule’, the chord progression of course is the echo classic Gong which instantly deserved a gliss. Being a big Steve fan, during the overdubs at home, I thought… hum my hands were itching to squeeze a “snake guitar solo” in this part (before the break) and I did. Later Kavus found a place for his solo too, so I was imagining how his approach would be.
Kavus: ‘Mantivule’ is just a made up word. I had an idea for a song title, ‘Mantivule’s Blacklist’. I’ve got some weird compulsive obsession to make up band names and song titles. And ‘Mantivule’s Blacklist’ was just one that had been around for ages. So it was a working title. It was called that for ages and I was trying to think of a better name for it and I couldn’t come up with one and then Ian at the last moment said ‘I don’t like blacklist – it doesn’t sound very Gong’. Point taken. So we just called it ‘Mantivule’ and I like the mystery – what is Mantivule? Who is Mantivule? Is it is it an adjective? Is it a verb?
It’s one we want to play live. But what is so good about the way that that song ended up is that when I came up with it originally, I was hearing my part as being not exactly the top line, but I was hearing everything as relating to what was happening with the dotting thing which keeps going through the whole track. It’s changing meter, but I keep going. But as the song developed recording wise, that dotting thing just became much more just the foundation and the parts that got built up on top of it. And in fact, hats off to everyone, but especially Ian. Ian started composing these hooks and these melodies on top of it. I stopped listening to what my part is doing, listening to it as a whole, it’s like there’s no way that any one of us individually, I think no way one person could have composed this track, this is truly a band composition, and you can hear all five members’ different takes. I think Cheb’s drumming is just ridiculous – he’s done like these mad roto overdubs and everybody’s just bringing their own flavour to it. And it ends up being this thing.
I think that this more than anything we’ve ever done is the sound of all five of us, just making this strange thing there. There are harmonic decisions and melodic decisions I would never have come up with. And I love it. It’s really exciting and it’s extremely psychedelic because you just can’t hear where’s the focus here? You listen to the drums and bass it’s doing that thing, but then you listen to what Fabio is doing and it’s mental. So it’s a real surprise to me that one.
I wanted to put ‘Mantivule’ as the first single! I thought that will really fuck with people because they won’t be expecting this, you know, a seven or eight minute instrumental!
Stars in Heaven
Kavus: Cheb wrote the bulk of what became ‘Stars in Heaven’. He’s a much more articulate singer than me. So much of what we do comes from him. So many of other people’s parts are written by Cheb. In this band, so many of the arrangements are written by him as well. ‘Stars in Heaven’ was the first one to really get together mixwise. And I thought, this is the obvious choice for a single.
Eternal Hand
Fabio: ‘Eternal Hand’ was an improvisation over an orchestral glissando loop and a guitar arpeggio.
Kavus: ‘Eternal Hand’ we’d already written around the time of the last album, the bulk of it. We felt it was too similar to ‘Asleep Do We Lay?’ So on the last album, that one got shelved. And then Cheb brought in what became ‘Choose Your Goddess’, which is very very different indeed. Thank God he did. It’s such a different vibe. So we said, “Oh, well that one’s for the next album.”
The Wonderment
Kavus: On the last album, the first single we dropped was ‘Tiny Galaxies’. I absolutely love that tune. It’s a kind of 60s sounding poppy tune. And it’s like, people are going to be like, oh, what’s happened to Gong? Are we really going to drop the 60s sounding poppy tune? But there it was. So once we got ‘Stars In Heaven’ out (the first single from ‘Bright Spirit’), I said, “Guys, given how eclectic the album is, I think we should drop ‘The Wonderment’ next”, because they were going, “Oh, maybe we do a radio edit. We maybe we’ll do a radio edit of ‘Dream of Mine’”. Let’s just do ‘the Wonderment’! Because I honestly think people aren’t used to hearing this side of what we do. And we’ve never done anything like that before. And I certainly didn’t do it to placate the people who say, “Oh, there’s no synth in Gong anymore.” It was just that I had this synth and I just wanted to play it all over the new record because I love it. I feel like it’s actually it wasn’t a cynical move but I do feel like already now people have heard it and gone “oh, so Gong are doing stuff like this as well” and while I don’t think it necessarily sounds like old Gong, I mean Fabio sounds probably more like something like Ashra Tempel, once you get Ian involved and Ian playing … and of course with the gliss – so that was based completely on a glissando slide.
Fabio: ‘The Wonderment’ was constructed over my glissando sequence, which I recorded in just one take at the end of the sessions, because I felt that we should have a pure gliss track.
Kavus: We recorded the basic sort of, for one of a better word, rock tracks. Then we did a couple of interludes and one interlude was just this little tune that Cheb had written. We played a variation on the middle bit of ‘Stars in Heaven’ but with a different feel. So we just played that for four minutes and just got a recording of us playing that. And then Fabio said, “Look, I’ve come up with this gliss cycle. Maybe we could use it as an interlude.” So he played this gliss cycle for about 4 minutes. When I was having my meltdown in April 25, I had to put down what became ‘Stars in Heaven’ because I just was getting nowhere with the melody and the words. I couldn’t get the words right. I’ve got pages and pages, this book behind me where I’m just trying to get the right words. I couldn’t do it. And so I thought, well, I need to need to use my time productively – I’ll see if I can do anything with this gliss cycle. A couple of years ago I got given this little monophonic synth called an Arturia Microbrute and it’s all over the new last Utopia Strong album, the first album I’ve played synth on with them, and it’s all over my forthcoming solo album. And it’s all over this Gong album.
So when I look back on this period of my life, that’s when I first got that got given that Microbrute. And so I heard this gliss cycle and I just came up with this synth sequence to go over it which I recorded and thought that’s quite nice. I just left it on the drive. I don’t think I uploaded it or anything. And then after we got back from America and we’re looking at the album, I listened back to it with fresh ears and straight away I heard that vocal melody, “Spirit Bright”. So I sang that vocal melody down. Then I harmonised it. And then it was like, “Oh, hang on. This kind of sounds like a song now.” We’d got the first half which is like instrumental. Then we’d got this bit of singing. I’d just bought this Telecaster and it’s like, “Oh, maybe I’ll do a maybe I could do a solo at the end.” I played it to Fabio because it was his his gliss cycle. I said, “Fab, I’ve made a song out of it. Maybe you won’t like it. What do you think?” And Fabio got it straight away and said, “This is exactly the kind of thing I’m into. This is like this sounds like Ashra Tempel”. So, we uploaded it and Dave put his ebow bass on it. Cheb put some percussion swells and then Ian played some sax and played along a bit with some of my melodies at the end.
And the next thing, because it wasn’t like pulling teeth, this song came out of nowhere really, and I started going, “man, this is my new favourite!”, because it was just so unexpected.
In Parts 2 and 3 of the interview, the band consider their approach to vocals, the glissando guitar, lyrics and talk about Henge, Kozfest and their future solo projects
Buy Bright Spirit at https://www.planetgong.co.uk/ or https://gongband.bandcamp.com/album/bright-spirit-4
Upcoming tour dates are below:
The Canterbury scene(zine) continued.... 