Daevid Allen
Banana Moon

Dashiell immersed, with wet trousers among the sea lavenders,

lying among the laughing willows of the Camargue, shouted

“I have a pink Chrysler at the end of the yard, it doesn't drive anymore but that's where I make love“.

Canterbury legends, some carved in lava rock and many others dissolved in mescaline fumes, provincially whispered of that sports car furtively seized from the parking lot of a fatal Barbie, that mobile base and cradle of those fundamentally distracted thoughts and vaudeville of Daevid Allen, his landlord Robert Wyatt and that blond Kevin Ayers.

Ah yes, semi-asleep, let's say so, in that artist's village in Mallorca, asleep among the Deià mountains, within those ancient walls and surrounded by watchtowers to defend against pirates first and then August yuppies.

That village that Daevid admitted imagining in “arabesque and lustful” reveries when he was still a child in Melbourne, fascinated by his pianist father and before being struck by Sun Ra.

Because the dense, viscous foam of that sea, which washed Atona Beach in Melbourne, Cala de Deià in Mallorca, and Piémançon Beach (!) in the Camargue, was not only enveloping phytoplankton but surtout a magical serum and marine squill capable of tricking and mocking the bureaucracies of thought, able to weave harmonious and capillary plots, an artistic perception that was sometimes even arduous, that endless search for harmonious selves in the containers and inserts of the soul.

In 1971 Daevid Allen, with some of his adventure friends and Robert Wyatt, Nick Evans and Pip Pyle, would create “Banana Moon”, an electric and wild one-shot, an extravagant and colorful musical cartoon emerged a few years after leaving Soft Machine and at the dawn of that new cosmic journey among hippie constellations and teapot-shaped space ships which were the Gong universe. Then, as the title of their double live “Gong est mort, Vive Gong“ says, Allen would also leave this band, bored by Virgin's demands, but that's another story. Apparently, or I would rather say with a sober and flexible mind, after carefully evaluating that feasibility study of the superbonus 100 and 10 by surveyor Pincopallo on the condominium of Vattelapesca, after going into raptures for that triple axel of our graceful APE and astonished by that imperious leg lift on the notes of Ravel, listening well to this “Banana Moon” would sound more like a collection of noble knick-knacks, disjointed outtakes that for one reason or another could not get married with Gong. But let's think of avoiding bringing up all those diethylamide compounds, which incidentally are originated, but look at that, from that marine squill foam...because maybe you're not at that age anymore, or maybe when you had the age, you didn't have either the physical or the mind. Instead, let's simply indulge in those floral notes of pink and violet, on that color of that ruby red wine, on that fruity hint of vineyard, raspberry, nutmeg, and black pepper, accompanied by woody aromas of roasted tobacco and vanilla. Suddenly enchanted and intoxicated by that fragrance of young-aged tannin, from that jagged ensemble like a fjord of songs, sounds, and strumming, you enter freak mode and a very thin fil rouge manifests, taking us by hand and through that rickety spiral staircase leading us upstairs, where we joke, laugh, and dance with Daevid's first solo album, the most psychedelic and disjointed of his. On that upper floor, we are at the limit of usability and everyone has been aware of it for years, but perhaps precisely for this reason are even more amused by it, by the idea of being able to fall at any moment, but they know well that they will get away with it once again.

“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.” And it is also useless for the White Duke, years later, to cite the album as one of his all-time favorites and even as an invisible forerunner of glam rock, because there is an eternal difference between being avant-gardists and broke like Allen, and opportunist professionals like others.

And if someone finally, intoxicated or not by that aroma of young-aged tannin, should ever come across the album, I recommend lingering on the splendid version of “Memoires” written by Mk II Softs bassist Hugh Hopper, dating back to the seminal Canterbury band “The Wilde Flowers”, where Gary Wright provides a subtle piano part of support. Or decide to be charmed by the consciously decadent torpor of "White Neck Blooze", that ironic homage to Kevin Ayers and his typically sleepy, baritone vocal style.