Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy: Interview
In this interview, they talk about how they met, the
trippy realities of life with the Gong collective, Giraudy’s experience of
being one of the very few women synthesizer players in 1970s progressive rock, how they got
involved in the acid house scene, and Hillage’s elucidation of the decades-long “quest for the psychedelic experience in music”.
What was your first connection with electronic music?
Miquette Mine was meeting Pierre Schaeffer and
Stockhausen because I was working in French TV. I was working as an editor and
I did an interview with Stockhausen.
One of the films you worked on with director Barbet Schroeder [‘La Vallée’] had soundtrack music by Pink Floyd [released as the album ‘Obscured by Clouds’].
Miquette I did two movies with the Pink Floyd
music - one called More [1969], filmed
in Ibiza, I was editor and I was doing the continuity, and then La Vallée [1972, in which Giraudy also acted].
So how did you come to start playing electronic music?
Miquette I don’t know if I can tell you that... I
started because I started taking acid. And this kind of opened my mind about
music - first it was my eyes and then it was my ears.
Steve, growing up in the UK, you must have been aware
of pioneers like Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop?
Steve I was, because of the ‘Doctor Who’ theme and
things like that. I mean anyone growing up in the sixties was aware of that but
also my cousin was a tape recorder nut and he was doing stuff with tapes and
editing. I think he even showed me how to do echo, when I was in my early
teens, this was a start for me.
I think growing up in the sixties there was a
pre-psychedelic electronic ripple effect – things like Joe Meek’s ‘Telstar’,
the soundtrack of Forbidden Planet,
the Radiophonic Workshop and Doctor Who,
all this stuff was seeping into our consciousness. And then of course you had
all this stuff done with studio work like The Beatles with ‘Tomorrow Never
Knows’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, and of course ‘Good Vibrations’, and
then what Hendrix was doing with a guitar on songs like ‘Third Stone from the
Sun’. And when I first went to university, one of my friends had Switched-On Bach and we used to listen
to that on acid, and then there was Pink Floyd – A Saucerful of Secrets, Ummagumma…
I think that all this work with tapes, with echo and with
feedback and effects and then the synthesizer, was part of a quest for the
psychedelic experience in music; this was the big thing that happened from
1966, 1967 onwards. I mean, once you heard ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, you couldn’t
ever unhear it; it changed your whole
outlook on music completely.
Miquette Rainbow in Curved Air.
Steve Terry Riley, Rainbow in Curved Air. I
first heard Rainbow in Curved Air
played by DJ Jeff Dexter at a concert at the Roundhouse. I was saying, “What’s
that? That loop, it’s fantastic how it’s changing as it goes along.” It really
blew my head off.
The next big breakthrough moment was the Tonto’s
Expanding Head Band album Zero Time, particularly the track with the
synthesized vocal, ‘Riversong’, that was an absolute breakthrough moment. After
I met Miquette and I was in Gong, we used to play that a lot in our room to
enhance our psychedelic experiences. And we ended up working with Malcolm Cecil
actually, in 1977, he produced one of my solo albums [Motivation Radio].
That was after he started working with Stevie Wonder.
And by then there had been another development of course
- we really got into funk. And the mixture of funk and electronics, this is one
of the roots of techno and dance music. Because you have to remember that
Detroit is not just the home of Jeff Mills and Juan Atkins and The Electrifying
Mojo, but also George Clinton and Motown. This city has a tradition that goes way
back – then you add Kraftwerk into the mix and, lo and behold, you get
something new.
Miquette, how did you get to be an electronics player with
Gong?
Miquette I arrived because I was living in Paris and
I was an editor and I was assistant on a movie with a painter called Martial
Raysse [Le Grand Départ, 1972]. Then I had all these completely crazy
stoned guys arrive in my studio when I was editing the film. And then I broke
up with the painter I was with, and Gong told me, “You can come live with us.”
So I came to live with them [in rural France]. There were like 25 people there,
so one more was OK. I first did some kind of dancing, tambourine, singing, you
know, hanging around getting stoned. And then Tim Blake was there with his
synth, and that blew my mind. I wanted a synth like Tim Blake. And that’s how
it went.
And what was the experience of actually being in Gong like,
how did Gong live?
Steve Well, we lived in a community house in
France. That was the best period, when we were there, because we unfortunately
lost the house at the end of 1973 and had to move to England, which wasn’t
quite so good. But it was partly out of practicality that we lived together. It
wasn’t so much a commune ideal. It was just very convenient to have everybody
in one place and we had a really good music room where we could play and
rehearse a lot. So a lot of the time we were in Gong, particularly when we were
in the French house, we were playing music all the time. It was fantastic, we were
just living the music and doing lots and lots of gigs, recording and just music
all the time.
Miquette Music has always been the centre of our
life, between him and me. Always.
The great mid-seventies trilogy of Gong albums [Flying
Teapot, Angel’s Egg, You], were you trying to make music that would recreate a psychedelic experience or
enhance a psychedelic experience?
Steve One of the things that attracted me to [Gong
bandleader] Daevid [Allen] - because I was a kind of fan of Gong before I ended
up joining, so it was a great privilege for me being a kind of fan to be able
to join my favourite band - one of the things that impressed me early on about
David was I felt he was holding a torch for genuine psychedelia after the whole
movement had kind of unravelled at the end of the sixties with things like
Altamont and Charles Manson and all those horrible aspects.
He was holding a torch for pure psychedelia and he
gathered around him a disparate band of people all looking for the same thing.
Of course, it was very volatile mix – everyone in the band with strong
personalities, and so in a way it was doomed to disintegrate, which it did. But
at the same time, the spirit of Gong carried on. It’s still happening to this
day. As I once said, Gong is a band you never really leave.
Basically we just were just looking to explore this sound and that was the driving force for us. Obviously, Daevid had his own thing with the lyrics and the artwork and the story, explaining everything in his mythological way, which we found entertaining and amusing. But as far as the musicians of Gong were concerned, we wanted to move forward with the Gong sound. It had elements of trance music – the repetition, the glissandos – and it all was aimed at enhancing and stimulating a psychedelic state of mind.
Miquette, you were one of the very few women involved in
so-called progressive rock at the time.
Miquette I was not examining my position as a
woman, I was just doing it. I was living it. I was in it. I didn’t think about
it or intellectualise it. It was just pure heart, you know?
More recently I got to know there were women like [electronic
composer] Suzanne Ciani and Éliane Radigue, who worked with Pierre Schaeffer. I
didn’t know them before. I had no idea.
Steve Gong also had another female presence as
well, [vocalist and Gong co-founder] Gilli Smyth. She was a very special,
unique element of the Gong sound. She used her voice like it’s a synthesizer.
Miquette Gong really was psychedelia.
Steve In terms of psychedelic bands, Gong was the
real deal. I mean, it really was the real deal. And I think one of the things
that was important about Gong is that we were really good players, technically
I mean. I don’t think there were any other psychedelic or space rock bands that
were also able to play stuff a bit like Weather Report or something like that.
I think we were quite unique in that respect.
I want to ask you about your ambient record Rainbow Dome
Musick because that is an album that’s taken on greater importance as time has
passed. How was it made and what did you want to achieve when you made it?
Miquette We’d stopped all drugs.
Steve Yeah, we were in a ‘not taking drugs’
period. We wanted to make a record that got you really high without taking
drugs. That was one aspect of it. But it was actually a commissioned piece for
the Festival of Mind, Body and Spirit, which happens annually still to this day
in London. They wanted to do a really big one in 1979 at Olympia [exhibition
centre], and basically they had this sculptor-artist gentleman called Rupert
Atwill who was planning to make a central area which was not aligned to any
particular creed or cult or spiritual practice, it was just a sort of place
where you could go and relax from the whole rest of the thing and it was called
the Rainbow Dome. And they hired us to do the music for it. So it really was
music for the Rainbow Dome.
Our sound engineer at the time [John Newsham] later
became one of the founders of Funktion One, which is a well-known sound system
company. There was a pseudo eight-channel octophonic system for playback, and I
was there to play the tape continuously
and that’s what we made the music for. In a way it was one of the first ever
chillout rooms and people would wander in and would lie down, some people would
go to sleep, some people would skin up and chill out.
We were living in the country at the time and we made the
music quite rapidly in our studio, on eight-track, and Rupert Atwill the
sculptor who made the rainbow sculpture as well as the [Rainbow Dome] environment,
he came down and he helped us with it and participated.
The track on the first side of the album [‘Garden of
Paradise’], it was you [Miquette] who did it, it was very innovative, two
sequences playing with the same notes but in a different order at slightly
different speeds, playing together. It was quite unique what you did on ‘Garden
of Paradise’, that sequence, it would be hard to recreate. We were planning to
recreate it for a live thing but it never came off.
I read somewhere that you used to do parties with your
sound engineer John Newsham, who also founded Turbosound [sound system company] with Tony Andrews
before they founded Funktion One.
Steve We used to have parties, Turbosound parties,
in about ’74, ’75, and they were like early raves and he was playing Funkadelic
and we’d have mushrooms.
The thing about Tony and John and Turbosound is that they
got very involved in the very early raves in ’88. They were one of the one of
the various factors that propelled us into eventually doing dance music because
I remember taking a call once from John
saying, “You know we’re doing these amazing events, you ought to come down
sometime, it’s fantastic, it’s really where it’s at.” They were bringing their
personal rig, not even for money, they were just doing it because they thought it was great. And then in ’92 they
did the ‘experimental sound field’ at Glastonbury with Underworld.
I want to ask you about the producing the Simple Minds
albums Sons and Fascination and Sister Feelings Call. They were really
important electronic rock albums. Did the band have an idea they wanted to go
for this kind of German kosmische sound when they started out?
Steve Well, I mean, they already had demos of some
of the songs so it didn’t all come out of thin air. And that’s where we bonded
because when I first met them we started talking about German psychedelic
music. And we kind of bonded over this because I knew some of the guys, the
German musicians I was friends with. This sort of gave me a lot of kudos. And
yeah, we used to play Michael Rother and Neu quite a lot in the studio a kind
of vibe enhancer. They were into it, you know? And I suppose the fact that I
was into it as well meant that we maybe focused on that aspect a bit more than
on their previous records.
One thing that’s very important - Mick McNeil, the synth
player, he was responsible for a lot of the actual electronic sound. And
incidentally, we got him to collaborate with us on the first System 7 album as
well. And he actually came from a family of musicians, traditional Scottish
musicians. He was in a traditional Scottish band before he joined Simple Minds.
And for some reason, he got a synthesizer and was trying to use it playing sort
of traditional Scottish reels and jigs.
When you know that, you listen to some of the synths and
you can hear that Celtic element in there. That’s what makes Simple Minds
really special, they’ve got a really special sort of take on the whole thing.
Of course, at the time as well, there was a sort of a new club boom happening
and there was a there was a lot of interesting stuff around like Cabaret
Voltaire and things. When they called it futurist. That’s what it was called in
the music press, futurist. That’s the thing of thing that whetted my appetite for getting more and more
involved in the clubs because we were actually doing our 12-inch mixes so they
played them in the futurist clubs.
How did you get involved with the acid house scene?
Steve Well, as I already mentioned, it was John
and Tony doing the sound for the early raves. And we were already involved in
the club scene from my experience with Simple Minds and the futurist clubs and
we were going to Heaven when Richard Branson first bought it, meeting the DJ
and watching him playing records in synch and things like that. I've never seen
that before.
But I think two things I’ve mentioned are very important.
One is getting involved with funk and electronics together in the seventies and
working with Malcolm Cecil. I think that’s a very important basis of innovation
- funk meets electronics. You add things like Kraftwerk into that mix, and you’re
practically there.
And the another thing as well, I often say is, when I was
in Gong, particularly in ’73 when we had the house in France, we were playing
all the time in the music room and I was working with echo, starting to get my
echo loop sound and finding that like if I got absolutely perfectly in sync
with the echo on a loop, I’d go into some kind of interesting wormhole. And
that's a very trancey sort of musical state.
And I used to jam with a drummer, Pierre Moerlen, he’s a
brilliant drummer. And I remember very distinctly saying to him, “Pierre, it’s
really nice you playing along with this echo loop but you know, if you can
please keep it the same tempo, you’re slightly speeding up and it's going out
of sync with the echo.” And he turned around to me, a bit pissed off, and he
said, “Look, I’m a human being, I’m not a machine. If you want something that
plays perfectly in tempo all the time, you should be playing with a drum
machine.” And I remember thinking, “That sounds like a good idea.” And that’s
in 1973. So I’d say that was an important step on the way.
Then it was a big catalyst moment when we met Alex Paterson
[of The Orb, DJ in the chillout room at the Land of Oz acid house club night at Heaven in
1989].
It must have been quite surprising to see people from this
new generation picking up on music from your past.
Steve We had the feeling it was all destined to
happen. We just got more and more interested in the club scene and the
development of electronic rhythms and house beats all through the eighties. And
then suddenly it was happening all around us.
Miquette I remember arriving [at the Land of Oz]
and Alex Paterson was playing Rainbow
Dome Musick – but with a beat under it. That was a beautiful surprise.
Did you see the acid house scene as a kind of
psychedelic renaissance?
Steve We were very attracted to acid house because
of the acid in it. That’s the old joke anyway. Basically, a lot of
psychedelically-orientated people moved away from rock music into the
developing electronic music scene in the eighties. We thought, “This is it,
this is what we’ve been looking for.”
It was a time of exploration, wasn’t it?
Steve It wasn’t just a purely hedonistic thing.
There was another dimension to the whole thing, people looking for a higher
meaning. And I remember one of the things I used to like about early dance
music events, having come from a rock band background, was rather than having
the big star on stage and the audience of disciples, there was a much more
feeling of equality. I know that's been lost a bit now in the era of EDM and
all that nonsense, but I mean, at the time, that was something I thought was
really, really cool. There were a lot of egalitarian attitudes.
Funnily enough, on a consciousness level - I wasn’t
really aware of it at the time, but in the nineties I started reading about [New
York DJ] David Mancuso. Very interesting chap. One of the pioneers of disco, he
used to take acid while he was playing [at The Loft club]. And it was like a
sacrament, you know, the whole thing. I think he’s an important figure but I
wasn’t aware of him in the eighties.
What would you say was the link between System 7 and
what you were both doing with Gong?
Steve We had this idea before we met Alex
[Paterson], developing from the mid-eighties. The original idea was some of the
psychedelic guitar sounds and Miquette’s synthesizers put over a really cool
house beat would sound really good and it would give us something unique . That
was basic idea. And that's still the basic idea in some respects.
We thought we might we try and make really cutting-edge
dance music grooves and put our sounds on top of them, which in some ways the
same sounds that we had in the seventies. You obviously develop them and
progress in some ways, but also we’re using some of the same techniques. That’s
what gives our music a fairly unique sound.
Interview by Matthew Collin for ‘Dream Machines’, October 26, 2021.
Photo: System 7 Facebook page.
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