Gentle, trippy and charmingly homespun. Magick Brother is Gong’s 1970 debut: a whimsical psychedelic album where the whole Gong story begins.

The short version

Gong’s first album, recorded in Paris in 1969 and released in 1970 on the French label BYG Actuel. It is the sound of the band taking shape around Daevid Allen — the Australian guitarist and Soft Machine co-founder who, unable to return to Britain, built a new group in France with vocalist Gilli Smyth. Lighter and more folk-tinged than the cosmic Gong to come, Magick Brother mixes gentle psychedelic songs, ethereal vocals and the first hints of the band’s Planet Gong mythology. It is rougher and more modest than their classic work, but full of charm — and, for fans, a fascinating glimpse of where it all started.

Where it all began

The roots of Gong lie in Daevid Allen’s exile. A founder member of Soft Machine, Allen was refused re-entry to Britain in the late 1960s over a visa problem and settled in Paris, where he and Gilli Smyth assembled a band for the adventurous French label BYG Actuel. The Magick Brother line-up was loose and jazzy: alongside Allen on guitar, bass and vocals and Smyth on her soon-to-be-famous ‘space whisper,’ it featured saxophonist Didier Malherbe and drummer Rachid Houari, with a rotating cast of guest jazz musicians from the BYG stable. Allen even played the bass himself when the band’s intended bassist was not ready in time. Recorded across late 1969, the album already sketches the outlines of the Gong universe — the peaceful Planet Gong and its Pot Head Pixies — that Allen would spend the next decade bringing to vivid life.

The sound

The sound is pastoral, freak-folk psychedelia, gentler and more song-based than the wild space-rock Gong would later become. Acoustic and lightly fuzzed guitars, Didier Malherbe’s woody sax and flute, and Gilli Smyth’s eerie whispered vocals give the album a dreamy, slightly ramshackle charm. There are flashes of free-jazz looseness from the guest players and the first stirrings of the cosmic whimsy to come, but much of the record is surprisingly tuneful and warm. Reviewers tend to describe it as a modest, likeable debut — less essential than the classic albums, but disarming in its gentle, homemade psychedelia.

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The songs

‘Mystic Sister / Magick Brother’ opens the album and introduces Gilli Smyth’s otherworldly space whisper for the very first time, drifting over a gentle psychedelic backing. ‘Change the World’ shows the band’s lighter, more melodic side, a warm and hopeful song of its hippie moment. And ‘Gong Song’ is the real seed of everything to come — a charming tune about a Pot Head Pixie descending from the Planet Gong, the very first telling of the mythology that would define the band.

Reception and legacy

Magick Brother made little impact on release — it is a rare and somewhat obscure record, and even Gong fans often come to it last. But its importance is undeniable: this is where Daevid Allen’s Gong was born, and where the Planet Gong mythology and Gilli Smyth’s space whisper first appeared. Heard today, it is a gentle, likeable curio, more folk-psych than space-rock, that rewards listeners who already love the band. As the starting point of one of prog’s strangest and most joyful sagas, it holds a special place in the Gong story.

The verdict

Magick Brother is Gong before the legend: pastoral, freak-folk psychedelia, gentle, dreamy and full of promise. Come for the whisper-launching ‘Mystic Sister / Magick Brother,’ the melodic ‘Change the World’ and the myth-making ‘Gong Song.’ It is lighter and rougher than the classics that followed — this is a band still finding itself — but as the first chapter of the Gong adventure, and a charming slice of 1970 psychedelia in its own right, it is a lovely place for the curious to dig into the roots.

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