Leamington Spa has a brand new live music venue called the Assembly. It’s a beautiful Art Deco building, and I try to go to as many concerts as possible. Recently I bought tickets for ‘Gong’. I had never heard of them before, but I liked their description as “Music for Pothead Pixies”.

Gong were great. The music was really spacey as promised, and the concert had a lovely feel-good party atmosphere. At one point the lead singer of Gong came on stage with a giant pixie hat on his head. It was very funny.
 
Gong reminded me of another ‘new group’ (they have actually been around since the 1970’s), I discovered at the Assembly; ‘Enid’, though Enid had a more classical music base, whereas Gong were firmly into progressive rock. 

I think Gong are what Pink Floyd would be playing now if Syd Barret their original leader and song writer had not secumbed to mental illness.   

I’m a new convert to Gong, and want to get some of their CDs to play at home. Luckily my friend is in the process of converting his CD collection into MP3 format, so I will be getting his old Gong CDs for Xmas…. I can’t wait!

John McNally