Gig 017 Steve Hillage
?? October 1976
Oxford Polytechnic
Autumn 1976, I still don’t really know what punk is but I’m reading in the NME about the Clash, the Damned, Patti Smith, Television, the Stranglers. I’m looking for something edgy, transgressive, disruptive. Steve Hillage is playing at the Poly.
I didn’t know much about Steve except he was once in Gong, hippies singing in French about flying teapots and electric cheese and the like, more recently shading into noodly jazz-fusion – that was the version I’d seen at Reading. Steve had tunes with names like Lunar Musick Suite and Electrick Gypsies and had just released his first solo album ‘L’, or ‘Bloody L’ as I prefer to call it.
The vibe was very different to the Graham Parker gig in the same venue just a week or so earlier. Everyone sat cross-legged on the floor, there was a lot of hair and Afghan coats, and… what’s that smell? No not that smell, I know what patchouli oil smells like, the smoky smell. Incense? Ok, now I can see some Laura Ashley-clad girls burning joss-sticks. I’m sure there’s something else, but I don’t know about those things because I’m only 16 and still a bit of a yokel.
Steve’s trousers are flared, but then everything about Steve is flared. Certainly his kaftan, and the sleeves of his kaftan, and he has flared hair, and the way he plays guitar is flared too, sprawling out to gawd knows where. If Dr Feelgood were cubism via the Essex delta, all monochrome straight lines and hard jagged edges, Steve Hillage is art nouveau, verdant intertwining tendrils which seem to have no end. Which is not to say it’s unpleasant, in fact it’s quite agreeable; quite conventional in its self-conscious weirdness. Steve isn’t one of those guitarists who feel the need to play very fast, he’s more Peter Green than Alvin Lee. There are moments when it’s rather lovely, even if Steve’s constipation-sufferer gurning during his solos rather undermines the effect. Most of the audience seem to have their eyes closed so it probably doesn’t matter. The band provide the sort of groove which would later be adopted by the likes of the Happy Mondays, with just the right amount of understated electronic squonkery from Basil Brooks, and there’s a nice take on Donovan’s Hurdy-Gurdy Man. Inevitably it all goes on a bit too long, but that allows for a sense of release when towards the end they play George Harrison’s It’s All Too Much. At this point a lone hippy stands up and does that a-rhythmic flailing thing that hippies do. Take it easy man.
After the show we went backstage and met Steve and the group, who were quite friendly. Steve signed an autograph for me and drew a strange squiggle next to it. ‘Whassat?’ I asked. ‘Om’ he replied, as if imparting arcane wisdom to a peasant. I was none the wiser.
It was a pretty good gig and I enjoyed it, in spite of my inchoate punk aesceticism. Some years later I read an interview with Mark E. Smith in which he related a conversation with his barber where he had observed that The Orb sounded like Steve Hillage. ‘It is Steve Hillage’ said the barber, to which the irascible Smith retorted ‘what, Steve Hillage is still going? I’ve failed!’ Personally I wouldn’t often choose to listen to Steve (or The Orb) these days, but I loved what he did with Franco-Algerian rock’n’raï merchant Rachid Taha, particularly their ace take on Rock The Casbah, so respect to Steve. Obviously it’s easy to make fun of hippies.
If you’re expecting a qualifier to that last statement you could be here for a while.
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