The Pot Head Pixies
Gong record in a mode that sounds like it was assembled by committee at the edge of a forest. The Pot Head Pixies runs three minutes and packs more ideas than most bands use in an album. Daevid Allen’s guitar and voice anchor a texture built from Tim Blake’s VCS3 synthesizer. Didier Malherbe’s sax and flute fill above it, and a rhythm section keeps things moving without ever settling completely. Giorgio Gomelsky produced the sessions at The Manor Studios in Oxfordshire, the residential studio Richard Branson had recently opened, working with engineers Simon Heyworth and Tom Newman. The recording happened in the winter of 1972 to 1973. What came out was not quite rock, not quite jazz and not quite anything that had a name at the time. The Pot Head Pixies does not build to a peak so much as spiral past one.
Daevid Allen was an Australian beatnik who had played with the early Soft Machine before forming Gong in and around Paris in the late 1960s. The Radio Gnome Invisible trilogy was his elaboration of the mythology the band had been building since 1971. The plot followed the growing consciousness of a character called Zero the Hero, guided by the Pot Head Pixies and other inhabitants of Planet Gong. Whether listeners followed the narrative or not was beside the point. A 2025 retrospective in uDiscover Music described the Pot Head Pixies as carrying a directly symbolic significance for fans as a convenient freak flag. If you smoked pot, you were in the tribe. Steve Hillage had joined the band in January 1973 and arrived late to the recording sessions. Allen would later say there wasn’t much space left for him on this record. The song belonged to Allen’s vision but the band that would carry it forward was still assembling.
Flying Teapot was released on May 25, 1973 on Virgin Records, catalogued as V2002. It came out the same day as the label’s first entry, Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells. Q and Mojo’s Classic Special Edition on prog rock later ranked it number 35 in their list of 40 Cosmic Rock Albums. Hillage would go on to play a central role in the next two albums of the Radio Gnome Invisible trilogy before leaving with Allen in 1975. He launched a solo career and later co-founded the electronic duo System 7. Today is his 75th birthday. The song that launched a teapot into orbit also helped launch one of the most distinctive guitar voices in British music.