REVEAL THE UNSPEAKABLE TO STEVE DAVIS
“I have been co-presenting The Interesting Alternative Show with Steve Davis for the last six years or so,” says Kavus Torabi, Gong’s singer and guitarist. “In 2011, Steve rang up excitedly saying ‘You'll never guess who we've got as a guest next week... Daevid Allen.’ I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I'd met Daevid briefly a couple of times with Tim Smith [Cardiacs] but never properly. As a lifelong Gong lover, this filled me with delight. Straight away the two of us seemed to really click, within minutes the conversation had taken a turn for the absurd and I was more than a little flattered when he told me, after about an hour, ‘You're a poet man, I can tell.
And now, Kavus’s radio co-presenter Steve Davis interviews Kavus himself about being the singer of Gong. The film you are about to watch, or are watching, was shot in the Nomadic Community Gardens, in London’s Shoreditch. Davis talks with Kavus and bassist Dave Sturt about carrying on Gong’s legacy, taking it forward and throwing their own take into the fold. Why did they continue? What’s the future? Watch this enlightening interview and you will find out.
Kavus joined Gong in 2014 in time for the last album the “new” band made with Daevid, I See You, unaware of the direction his new gig as a guitar player would take. The following year, with Allen no more he inadvertently found himself in the limelight as Gong’s singer too.
“Rejoice! I'm Dead! came together over several weeks in an East London rehearsal studio. In terms of the writing, the songs became very elastic, what may have been brought to the band as a fixed idea, through experimenting, discarding, expanding and mutating evolved into the songs as you hear them now. Every member was key in the development of each song,” says Kavus. Thus, Kavus (vocals/guitar), Fabio Golfetti (guitar/vocals), Dave Sturt (bass/vocals), Ian East (sax/flute) and Cheb Nettles (drums/vocals) took on the mantle of steering the Teapot further into outer space and the inner ear. Some may say it couldn’t, or shouldn’t, be done. How could Gong exist without Daevid Allen? But it has.
Rejoice! I’m Dead! is available now through Madfish on CD, a double LP and as a limited edition deluxe 3 disc hardback book edition featuring 44-page book, CD, DVD-AV & Bonus CD and digitally.
CD/LP & deluxe edition are available to order http://www.planetgong.co.uk / Digital http://smarturl.it/REJOICE_IM_DEAD
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