BURIED TREASURE
Magick Father
Rediscovered this month from rock’s MIA list, Gong’s arch-trickster gets real.
Happy chappy: Daevid Allen in the here and now, Entermedia Theatre, New York, October 17, 1978.
Ebet Roberts/Getty
Daevid Allen
Now Is The Happiest Time Of Your Life
AFFINITY, 1977
MEDITATING IN front of an effigy of the moon goddess Diana in Deià, Mallorca, Gong auteur Daevid Allen was confronted with a vision. Having made his name with a baroque pseudo-mythology about beings from a faraway planet eager to bring the New Age to Earth, he was struck by something more humdrum. “Plaster goddess told to me, that’s the way it seems to be,” he sings, minor chords slipping into major ones on Deya Goddess, the luminous closing track to his 1977 solo LP. “Love your life and family; now is the happiest time of your life.”
The delights of Allen’s post-Gong detox LPs might be a little earthly for those whose third eye was opened up by the band’s jazzy cosmic trilogy for Virgin: Flying Teapot, Angel’s Egg and You. However, Allen’s second album made with locally-sourced musicians in Mallorca has an arresting directness he never matched, its New Age Radio Gnome truisms subtly undercut by nagging thoughts of betrayal and an ‘I am 40’ sense of imminent obsolescence.