THE WORLD OF DAEVID ALLEN AND GONG

A fairly complete over view of david allen and his work with Gong and Planet gong. This would make a great anthology for somebody who did not want to purchase all of the album's featured but will make no real friends among Gongs fans. retailing at mid price there are cheaper sets out there which feature most of this material. For Gong Fans the missing tracks will irritate. The Trilogy is very well covered but the david allen albums are either covered well or completely ignored why there are no tracks from the excellent good morning is a mystery. It also has a few of the soft machine tracks that feature allen. Is it worth the money ? If you have no Gong at all then it probably is, if you want to collect the set don't bother with this box.

Well what have we here?

This very generous 3-disc set actually includes THE ENTIRE RADIO GNOME TRILOGY, which makes it a highly recommended purchase for anyone interested in the so-called Canterbury Scene.

On top of that, more than 100 minutes are devoted to other Daevid Allen recordings. Daevid's first solo album, BANANAMOON, is particularly well represented: all the tracks given here (nos. 3 to 7 on the third disc) are gems. 'Memories' is a particularly fine tune, sung by Robert Wyatt (it also exists as a Soft Machine demo), and 'White Neck Blooze' is a delightful parody of the decadent kind of ballad Kevin Ayers used to wrote for his solo career. The selections from CAMEMBERT ELECTRIQUE (nos. 4 to 6 on the first disc) are fine, but strangely enough the album's best known song ('You can't kill me') is omitted. The selections from NOW IS THE HAPPIEST TIME OF YOUR LIFE (nos. 8 to 10 on disc three) are also excellent, but what a shame the compilers left out the title track, which must be Daevid's single most beautiful acoustic ballad.

If you do not own the RADIO GNOME TRILOGY, and are able to find this collection at the same price as its three separate parts added together (or perhaps even for less!) do not hesitate to snap it up. (It comes with an 50-page illustrated booklet.) The trilogy is one of those pieces of music that will give pleasure for a lifetime. Purely on the strength of all the marvellous music, I'd love to award this set five stars, but I simply don't know if the remastering is any good...