BANANA MOON

ESSENTIAL LISTENING FOR GONG and SOFT MACHINE FREAKS!

This album (with its splendid cover picture) has long been a favourite of mine. If you enjoy Daevid Allen's Gong, you shouldn't be without it. In my opinion it's even more fun than CAMEMBERT ELECTRIQUE, while its original A-side is as brilliant as FLYING TEAPOT (despite the absence of Tim Blake or Didier Malherbe).

BANANAMOON is a predominantly electric album. It seems to have been written and performed in a VERY good mood, and its high spirits are infectious. The opening track, featuring out-of-control drumming by Pip Pyle and ditto lead guitar by Allen himself (I think) sets the pace. The only truly melancholic moment on the album is track No. 2: the definite performance of the lovely Soft Machine ballad 'Memories', featuring Robert Wyatt on vocals and drums, sensitively accompanied by Daevid on rhythm guitar and by Archie Legget on bass. Until BANANAMOON appeared, this song had never officially been released. To my mind, it's as good as anything on the Soft Machine's first two albums. (Which is saying something!)

The album continues with the far out 'All I want is out of here', which sounds just like a performance by Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street. Spirits are raised even more by the faux-Bluegrass of 'Fred the Fish', which has Daevid singing about packing his bags for Australia. This two-and-a-half minute track alone is worth the price of admission.

But even greater stuff is to follow, as the original A-side ends on a hilarious parody of a typical Kevin Ayers-type ballad. Daevid sings in the lowest register he can manage, and he's even borrowed two of Kevin's original backup singers. Fabulous. All that's lacking is one of those pristine Mike Oldfield guitar solos - but they would have prettified BANANAMOON too much.

In fact, this album's forte is that it sounds so spontaneous, and so delightfully messy. Especially on its original B-side, which opens with yet another cheerful rock dittie, 'Stoned innocent Frankenstein', seguing into the all-out psychedelic/space-rock assault of 'And his Adventures in the land of Flip'. 'I'm a Bowl' forms a thoroughly Canterburian conclusion: childlike and whacky.

Daevid Allen's, great Australian beatnik and Soft Machine and Gong musician's debut solo album is a strange thing. Strange not in a sense of Canterbury sound, whenever you're waiting for that. No.

It is strange because there are not too much of this Canterbury sound, what every listener could expect from such album. Possibly it is just my very personal opinion, but I found there on this album heavily psychedelic version of something, what reminded me mostly Captain Beefheart's works. Less bluesy and with more complex music, but kind of avant-proto-prog. Some rock'n'rollin' guitars, shouting vocals, plenty of distorted instrumental sounds. Quite minimalistic music. Many traces of early psychedelic rock, very few - from something, what could be named jazz-rock. Almost no connection with classic Allen's Gong (Trilogy period), possibly some moments, reminding early Gong albums.

For me, it's difficult to valuate this album from Canterbury scene position. Easier to name it original and freaky psychedelic work, with some extended solos and few jazzy inclusions. Not for everyone taste for sure. But raw and fresh example for Daevid Allen fans.

Daevid Allen's first solo album comes across to me like a collection of odds and sods, scraps of songs from here and there which for one reason or another didn't fit in with Gong (which was just getting up to speed at around this time) and so was recorded in a series of sessions with various musical pals (including allies from Gong and old Soft Machine bandmate Robert Wyatt). As a result, it's a bit of a mixed bag, directionless, diverse, often interesting but never quite crossing the line into being *fascinating*.

Ranging from straightforward-ish rock and roll on the opening track to avant-garde playfulness in the closing I Am a Bowl, the album visits every musical space in between. The best song on it is probably the cover version of Hugh Hopper's Memories, sung by Robert Wyatt, but it's essentially an inferior version of the song to the one on Jet-Propelled Photographs (the Allen- era Soft Machine's 1967 demo album). At the end of the day, the album seems to have been thrown together for the sake of a bit of fun, and that's the best spirit to take it in. It's OK, I suppose, but it's absolutely not the first Allen album I'd recommend to a newcomer to the man's work.