FAIRY TALES

The matriarchal branch on the Gong family tree, MOTHER GONG may have been just one of a multitude of Gong side projects that emerged from Daevid Allen's fertile musical playing grounds but clearly must stand out as one of the strangest of the lot. Led by progressive rock's only space whisper extraordinaire Gillian Mary "Gilli" Smyth whose sensual siren-like cosmic callings haunted the classic Gong years as she elevated the Canterbury jazz infused space rock to cosmic realities. Her presence was the perfect antidote to Daevid Allen's quirky whimsical approach and delivered the perfect divine feminine touch on an otherwise male-dominated scene.

The idea for MOTHER GONG was in the works as far back as 1974 when Smyth left the parent grouping but officially took form in 1978 after the release of Smyth's solo album "Mother" which gathered her political ideologies and poetic inclinations. The next step was yet another offshoot in the Gong universe called MOTHER GONG where this time Gilli steered the ship and took things into arenas never envisaged by Allen and his cohorts. The debut album FAIRY TALES arrived on the scene and found the unlikely pairing of symphonic prog, Canterbury jazz, folk music, Gong inspired space rock and children's FAIRY TALES of all things~! An oddball mix to be sure, FAIRY TALES featured three tales that were subdivided into seven or eight parts.

While most narrated in spoken word prose by Smyth, the backing music features an all-star lineup including Gong saxist Didier Malherbe, Hawkwind woodwind player Nick Turner and a host of other musicians offering various sounds including rock guitar, keyboards, bass guitar, percussion and ethnic touches such as the harp, muzma and Uilleann pipes. Broken up into three major tales: "Wassillissa," "The Three Tongues" and "The Pied Piper," the album features Smyth in story time hour with her own soundtrack of seasoned musicians wailing away in the background. A bizarre mishmash of styles that weave in and out of the background with varying effects while Smyth stoically reads to the audience as if we were in a grade school class.

Despite the oddball combo pack of prog rock and folk mixed with children's FAIRY TALES, Smyth found some interest in the weirdness of it all and toured with artists such as Bob Dylan and Big Brother and the Holding Company as well as recording audio books for children! Perhaps the most out of the box thinking performer in the entire history of progressive rock, Smyth continued the band with various lineups pretty much until her death in 2016 in one form or the other. This music is really hard to categorize as it sounds like nothing else. The music is more like a collage effect sounding more like the whacky spastic tendencies of Frank Zappa than anything in the Canterbury umbrella however there's that too!

Well, it's a novel idea for sure but one i'm not overly excited about as i tend to dislike spoken word poetry accompanied by music with a few exceptions such as Current 93's unique approach. Children's tales offer bizarre subject matter for a prog album but i guess everything should be tried at least once however the music doesn't seem to jive well with the storyline and the monotonous diction of Smyth seems to diminish the overall effect. I wish she would have offered some of these recitals in her classic space whisper mode or at least offered some more musical singing styles to break up the rather uniform presentation at hand. It's an OK album and one that deserves kudos for its brash experimental approach but like many excursions into the unknown doesn't necessarily work out as much as i had hoped. Personally i prefer the following "Robot Woman" to this one.

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