past, present and future

This is going to be an unusual weekend. On Friday I am going take a little trip back in time and go to revisit the mothership. Gong, that cult band of the 1970s, (they define the term cult band as a band loved too much by too few people) are back on tour- with just one date in the NL. I'm going to be there and, while I won't be playing any rounds of Laughing Sam's Dice, it will be interesting to take one more trip on the light fantastic. Jazzy, avant-garde, anarchistic and mystic - all in one package - they were the band that defined my mis-spent youth.

The first time I saw them I was still a schoolboy. They were playing one of those wonderful free gigs in Hyde Park and someone even had the wits to take a photo. As you can see, even by the standards of those days (circa '75-76) they were unashamedly part of the counterculture.
The other bands to grace the stage that day included Kevin Coyne, Chapman Whitney Streetwalkers (with Roger Chapman previously of Family) and the very shorted lived super-group that consisted of Kevin Ayers, John Cale, Nico and Brian Eno (yes I can say I saw Nico perform live-ish!)- Mike Oldfield was guest guitarist with the band if I remember rightly.

But it was Gong that caught our (pre-psychedelicised) imagination. They had a constantly changing line-up, in part caused by so many band members being banned from different countries for various narcotic infringements and insurgent activities. (It's a tradition that, it seems, they haven't given up- recently Daevid Allen - now a spritely 71 years old- was removed from a poetry festival in Queensland, because of reciting a poem that repeatedly invoked the profane / sacred F word).

I used to travel all over the South of England to see them whenever they were on tour. Shit, one night we drove from London to Bath and back - on a weekday- to see them, getting home at 3am and went to work (sort of) the next day. The best memories (if one can call them that) were of a few gigs they played at the Hammersmith Palais (immortalised by the Clash), one of the most beautiful, yet improbable rock venues I ever visited.

One summer the NME ran an essay competition to recruit a new journalist (oh my dream job in those days) and I spent most of an entire month's vacation house sitting a flat in Paris writing about the significance and earth shattering importance of this band. (The joint winners turned out to be Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill who crafted a piece about Patti Smith's Horses). There's a line in a "Cindy Lee Beryhill song: "God made obscurity for safety reasons" I think I am happy that I didn't grow up in the public eye. Anyway, tomorrow I am going to go and relive all those youthful flights of fancy.

Most of the rest of the weekend is going to be spent in church. Yes I know, call the nurse. A Buddhist colleague of mine was invited to arrange a presentation about the Buddhist take on "Mystic power in daily life" at her local church. Naturally, her local Buddhist colleagues have all rallied around and helped build a really good (well it remains to be seen) hour-long presentation with a small play about Nichiren Buddhism , drawn from the Lotus Sutra, a short lecture and an excellent DVD. It's a double challenge for me: appearing on stage, AND, doing a ten line speech in Dutch. Well why not push yourself??

Finally to cap it all - on Sunday afternoon I have been invited to attend an introductory afternoon of an "entrepreneurial boot camp", as a (successful) member of Wageningen's entrepreneurial community, appearing alongside CEOs and Directors of local hi-tech companies. OK I'll go along for the ride and see what I can offer - although it might be a bit subversive - maybe that's what they're looking for....

So in one weekend I seemed destined to travel from 'pot-head' to 'bread-head.' And I am wondering if my entire human evolution is being shrunk into one weekend and that now is a real testing time for me to reconcile these different positions that my life has led me to adopt and to make some coherent sense of them all