OMG Hillage!!

Sunday November 24th November 2019
The Concorde, Brighton

Bloody hell!! Steve Hillage! "Actual Steve Hillage!" as Gong frontman Kavus Torabi beamingly introduced him after Steve had introduced the rest of them. I'm not even going to attempt to tell you how mindblowing this gig was. At one point during the Om Riff I swear his guitar was gone Hillage was just playing pure light : )

That was the first time I'd seen Gong since Daevid died. It occured to me that it was also the same place I'd seen Daevid (with Gong on the 2012 tour) for the last time. Although I'm still not entirely convinced by the new material (their set was all new stuff apart from a superb "You Can't Kill Me"), as soon as they were jamming I was transported straight off into Gongspace. This was Gong, despite my original reservations about them continuing as a band with that name. I got to stick around after the bouncers had swept all the hangers-on at the bar outside, as Adam from Jouis happened to be working there. This then meant that I got to have a friendly chat with Kavus and Gong wind player Ian East (who lives in Herne Bay and regularly comes along to Crash of Moons gigs).

...and many thanks to Adam and Louis from Jouis for putting me up at their psychedelic crash pad afterwards, the perfect place to come down from an experience like that.