Daevid Allen on DeBaser: Banana Moons and Canterbury Clouds

Daevid Allen

Musician

Forfans of psychedelic and canterbury rock, listeners of gong/soft machine, and adventurous music explorers.
1 Reviews 5 Definitions 2 Charts

The Profile

Daevid Allen (1938–2015) was an Australian guitarist, singer, poet, and bandleader. A co-founder of Soft Machine and Gong, he pioneered the Canterbury scene’s psychedelic, spacey edge and popularized the glissando guitar approach.

Australian co-founder of Soft Machine and Gong; key Canterbury scene figure; noted for glissando guitar; active from the 1960s until 2015.

Conteverde’s review paints Banana Moon as a wild, psychedelic scrapbook—disjointed yet irresistible. It nods to Allen’s Soft Machine/Gong orbit (Wyatt, Ayers, Pyle) and highlights tracks like Memoires and White Neck Blooze. The piece argues its avant spirit over polish, even citing the White Duke’s later admiration.

Notable Quotes

❝ “There are so many, many ideas in that jumble of album tracks, but all those ideas can never be owned, that’s the rule of the game, you can only tune in temporarily, some can sniff them out in the breeze before others. Maybe you get a bit of credit, but in reality, you get nothing because when they become popular you’re already disinterested and have moved on to something else.”