Children of the Bong - ‘Sirius Sounds’
No. 44 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
“We wouldn’t want you to think that our music was just about drugs.”
— Children of the Bong in “Chillums of the Revolution,” Nov. 19, 1994
So one half of the Children of the Bong duo, Rob Henry, told one of electronica’s chief journalists, Ben Willmott, for New Musical Express, in 1994. Henry was serious, and making the point that there was much more to the psychedelic music they crafted, fortified by a belief that “serious of mind” was much more important than any substance. And yes, Sirius too, as in stars and clouds and dreamlike vapors.
Cirrus. Serious. Cumulonimbus. Computer winds and computer clouds — or psychotropic computer smoke from a blaze — and fantastical computer storms.* Serious fucking music, that is. Which is how most serious music heads talked about music they loved in those intense early decades of rave. Some of that was abetted by bong hits, but most of it came from something much deeper — the animating force of music as communication with our past, present and future. For the timeless waves of sound that the Children of the Bong billowed and puffed, always drifted skyward.
And yet at the same time, they were not too serious. In fact, they were humorous. Starting with their name, which was both a riddle of sorts and a bold claim: “We heard this Tibetan music and it had a track on it called ‘Children Of The Bong,’” the duo once explained. “We thought why not call ourselves this. But the meaning came afterward. It’s about a more open way of thinking. Music for music’s sake.”* Of course, that was not the complete truth. For the pluming smoke of chillums and spliffs had indeed played its part in the Children of the Bong’s revolution. As Henry, eager to play a quixotic half of the duo, admitted, it represented the “inspiration we got from smoking.” Even so, highs could be fleeting. There was something else rising.
Within the smoke was a fire — a great photo of the inspired duo going gonzo performing at the Marcus Garvey Centre in London, taken by The Mongo Crew, captures the almost holy devotion they committed to playing live, and to finding musical embers that burned deeper down inside everyone’s inner whirling dervish: there’s Daniel Goganian leaning over the controls, in deep concentration, his goatee every bit as much a signifier of Generation X’s rebelliousness in the 1990s; and you have Henry in some kind of state of ecstasy, moving to the music, his hands poised, ready for the next turn, his long hair a swish of mellifluousness, his t-shirt of a one-eyed enlightened fish looking approvingly on the jam; and there, like some blade of righteousness splintering between — the white squalls of a melodic lightning.
In 1995, when their breaks-heavy album Sirius Sounds came out, they were a precocious 21 years old. In fact, they even once joked that underneath all of the psychedelia, they were really just a pop band. Another misnomer of sorts. They were something much more beguiling than a boy band. They were an idea as much as they were a band of ideas, that endeavored to start a revolution by way of trippy “far out” future sounds — children of a new kind of mental freedom. Or rather, an idealism. Similarly to one of their heroes, the Aphex Twin, AKA Richard D. James, who also started out young (21 when his Selected Ambient Works 85-92 was released), Children of the Bong were indeed “children” as it were and hence idealistic, adventurous, hopeful, playful, a bit mischievous — and even a little foolish.
And it was bands like the Ozric Tentacles, Eat Static, and The Orb — with Dr. Paterson’s rambling live ensembles — that they modeled themselves after. They formed in 1992 at the age of 17 in their first year at Harrow College, studying the performing arts, and were captivated by the emerging free festival and rave scenes. Henry was starting a band, playing bass, and they needed a vocalist. Goganian tried out and the two hit it off. “One night we went to a club called Whirl-y-gig and spent the night madly dancing and intensely listening to the music, that spanned every genre of electronic, psychedelic, world, and ambient music,” Henry explained to Backseat Mafia. “We ended up in an after party in a squat in Primrose Hill where someone slipped on a cassette of Ozric Tentacles and a musical door was permanently opened in our minds.” It was a genuinely archetypal moment.
Just kids at the gates of adulthood, the whole universe opened up before them. Marijuana was unsurprisingly part of those heady college days and the potent power of bongs were particularly ascendant in the ‘90s. The Ozric Tentacles or the “Ozrics” were natural copilots to such water pipe culture — they had come up with their name themselves during such sessions, imagining names for alien breakfast cereals. They were New Age hippie travelers who had brought their musical training to the mix of space rock, progressive synthesizer landscapes, and the new possibilities of the techno frontier. Following in the footsteps of Pink Floyd, Hawkwind, Can, Ash Ra Tempel, Neu!, Tangerine Dream, Yes, Rush, Gong, and Steve Hillage, the Ozrics formed ten years earlier at the Stonehenge Free Festival, chasing the dream.
By the ‘90s, released mainly by cassettes and bootlegs in the ‘80s, the Ozric Tentacles were slowly infiltrating the London rave scene by way of shared social spaces and subcultural interests, such as psychedelic drug experimentation. Their Erpland and Strangeitude albums, of 1990 and 1991 respectively, were otherworldly excursions into the sublime and the whimsical, making inroads with both rock heads and ravers. As rave moved from the confines of Ibiza sojourners and cool-kid clubs like Shoom! and then the more accessible Heaven and outward, along with parallel efforts in Manchester like The Haçienda, it mixed with the larger context of music tribes, including hip hop and rare groove, Northern soul, and psychedelic rock.
The Children were ready. Unconstrained by the strictures of electronica’s more conservative genre calcifications, in the spirit of The Orb — The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld came out in 1991, the year before Aphex Twin’s SAW I — Henry and Goganian’s swoon over Ozric Tentacles coincided with an explosion of creative energy so powerful, it would test the civil liberties that youth took for granted in Britain, straining the alcohol industry's hold on the late-night economy and the tolerance of the “polite” and the “elite” for free expression and dancing itself.
One song in particular probably represents this creaking open of England’s wider psycho-social, techno-hedonistic portal best. The Ozric’s ‘Eternal Wheel’ from 1990’s Erpland is part Rush Hemispheres and part Van Halen 1984, but with the thrumming space bass of Larry Levan’s remix of Gwen Guthrie’s ‘Padlock’ by way of reggae masters Sly & Robbie, with a dash of Herbie Hancock’s Secrets. But besides the instrumental power-playing of the band, its revelation belongs to its synths.
The power of the rave proposition was not just its beat, but its spiritual electronic insinuation, going all the way back to Jamie Principle’s ‘Your Love’ and Larry Heard’s ‘Mystery of Love’ — Heard was himself deeply influenced by the sounds of prog rock, a progressive line winding back between Yes and Rush, Funkadelic and Hancock, Depeche Mode and Sparks, to Giorgio Moroder, Kraftwerk and Pink Floyd.
That the heart-wrenching synth washes of ‘Eternal Wheel’ — aching with a superlatively layered sense of timeless longing — were conjured by Joie Hinton, co-founder of Planet Dog flag-bearer, Eat Static, is one of the keys to the door that would turn Children of the Bong into children of the revelation. Eat Static as much as Ozric Tentacles would help provide the template and context for the Children’s wild deep dreaming — their serious sounds. More than any other artist, Eat Static is the clear reference point for Henry and Goganian’s headlong dive into synth-psychedelia.
Like their heroes, the Ozrics and the Static, they were drawn to imagination-firing sounds and ideas, going wherever their experiments took them. “We had an echo unit with a cheap mixing desk and my Dad's home organ-type-thing when Dan worked out a way of sending the echo back to itself to create some mad effect and every sound you put through it sounded amazing,” Henry fondly recalled years later with a laugh.
As Henry noted, that revelation had been discovered by reggae dub pioneers — like King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry — two decades before. But it was also a sign that they were tapping into the deeper wonders of the electric and the electronic. And it was the initiation of their journey, as they worked for hours on a “mass opus” they titled ‘Hallucinogen.’ Re-released in 2023 on their Sonic Ambulance compilation, ‘Hallucinogen’ is a zero gravity drift into spiral galaxies à la Popol Vuh and the Tangerine Dream entropic ambience that launched a thousand ships of multi-generational crossings into the furthest reaches of the cosmo-psychedelic.
The confluence of these counter-forces and counter-alliances was in all ways superfluous to the deeper currents of musical change. But the bonding of the musicality between artists from different camps and walks of life was rave. Early experiments like ‘Ambient Suicide (half an oz later…)’ and ‘Symbiotic,’ released on demo tapes, exhibited the live nature and approach of the bong-Children. Most of their compositions stemmed and evolved from gigs and performances at parties and underground events like the Rainbow at the Mellow Farm, a 500-year-old site by the Wey River in Surrey, west of London, or the Global Sweatbox in central Birmingham, sharing billing with other psychonauts like DJ Mushroom Tim and Loop Guru.
It was in Birmingham — where they would also later headline with the Higher Intelligence Agency’s Oscillate crew — that Children of the Bong would get their big break. At that first show, Banco De Gaia headlined — Toby Marks, the globetrotting producer behind Banco De Gaia, heard them play and was deeply impressed. He passed on his enthusiasm to Michael Dog (née Michael Sassen), the mastermind behind the Club Dog — with former partner Bob Dog — and the Megadog events. Surprisingly, the Dog formula of allowing in fans from all across England’s music spectrum, the Dog ethos emerging in 1985 out of the Stonehenge music scene, succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, accelerating new alternative fusions.
“In 1984 there were 50,000 people at Stonehenge for a month, with stages and cafés and everything else you want at a festival,” Michael Dog told Record Collector’s Andy Fyfe, recalling the clash of The Peace Convoy of “New Age travelers” on the way to the 1985 edition with riot police, which broke out into the Battle of the Beanfield — where 537 travelers were arrested; and forcing the need for new outlets of pagan psychedelic energy following the subsequent shutdown of the Stonehenge Free Festival. ”That was the inspiration,” Dog explained. “How can we recreate that madness in a venue? It just worked somehow.” So, hippie agitation met rave.
The Peace Convoy had been a nuclear disarmament and anti-war movement. However, while progressive sentiments flowed through the converging New Age traveler and rave scenes, Michael Dog’s focus was on music and performance. His monthly Megadog events, which functioned like mini-festival nights, ran regularly from 1992 into the late ‘90s, with nights featuring everyone from the Aphex Twin, The Orb, and The Shamen, to Leftfield, Dreadzone and The Chemical Brothers. Megadog also branched into spinoff tours, establishing visits at the Manchester Academy, and co-producing England’s first ever live electronica tour — the Midi Circus, featuring the likes of Orbital, Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia, System 7, Drum Club, Spooky, and Underworld — the tour’s Brixton Academy finale making serious waves.**
Asked by Marks to join him on his own tour in 1993, only 18 at the time, Henry and Goganian were on their way; in 1994, a year before the Midi Circus, they were asked by none other than Andrew Weatherall to join him for his own Sabres of Paradise and Megadog team-up, the “Sabre-Tooth Dog On Tour.” Weatherall was so taken with Children of the Bong, that he tried to sign them to his label. But Michael Dog had already seen the lads tear it up in North London and offered Henry and Goganian seats alongside Eat Static and Banco De Gaia on his Planet Dog Records label.
Planet Dog spawned out of the Club Dog and Megadog nights in London, taking a page from the U.F.O. and Middle-Earth rock clubs of the city’s 1960s acid scene; the Dog lot were a neo-hippie rave collective that pushed out some of the wildest albums and sounds of ‘90s Britain. As the home of psychedelic stalwarts Eat Static, Banco De Gaia, and Timeshard, Planet Dog welcomed Henry and Goganian as its two youngest members, where they felt right at home, getting fast to work on Sirius Sounds.
Musical ideas firing out of their heads, and almost 21, they sat out the Midi Circus tour to work on the album. Their studio was actually Henry’s bedroom where they worked on their music round the clock when not gigging. Their favorite instrument, the Korg MS20, was an older piece of gear, but it was malleable, and over time they found pathways and techniques to make it “sing,” in their words. That instinct to truly connect with others came from their live experience, making their synths and machines crackle and yelp, like a preacher making communion with the pews.
Their early free-drifting sound — Henry’s popping bass guitar funk on ‘Ambient Suicide’ and Goganian’s incantations on ‘Symbiotic’ — now gave way to a honed in, focused process. “Minimalizing is really important; controls between black and white, silence and noise,” Goganian explained to NME’s John Perry. “Especially if the noise is a bit weird!…On [Interface Reality] we used one of those kiddie’s toys that makes a gurgling noise when you turn it upside down.”*** Henry also pointed to Brian Eno’s album with David Byrne, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, as a particular influence.
Ready to record Sirius Sounds, they loaded their gear into a van and headed for a cottage in the Black Mountains of Wales. Critical to their production would be Andy Guthrie, who would engineer, tighten and help arrange the tracks; also along for the trip was their friend Derek “Dhubba” Dibs, who offered to cook meals for the crew over the 14 days. Banco De Gaia also let the Children borrow some of his more professional gear while he was on vacation. And so they arrived in the snow.
There, they got to work, each day playing and recording one of the songs live, sleeping on the results — then mixing and re-arranging with fresh ears the next morning. The cottage’s electricity meter needed to be fed coins to operate, going out at inopportune times, so they had to hack into the main wire to keep their sessions continuously flowing. Cold as it was, they had a lovely time and their camaraderie permeates the album, giving it an unfussy yet rich and joyous character. A photo documents their wide-open arms to the future, the word “BONG” in huge letters carved into the snow outside the cottage, Henry rejoicing in what was to come.
Lovers of nature and science, the cottage crew also infused the album with the openness of the Celtic sky and its rolling landscapes. The album lifts off with the endlessly scaling ‘Polyphase’ — a stairway to the heavens climbing with a driving beat and rumbling, resonant bass. They started it with a backwards Roland 808 drum loop, inspired by The Beastie Boys’ ‘Paul Revere,’ and traveling back in time via their shared love of electro and hip hop, evoking Paul Hardcastle’s 1985 synth-pop classic, ‘19.’ The breakbeat romance of the mid-’90s was in full swing and without falling into cliché, they subtly drew on childhood influences like Stetsasonic and the Bronx’s Boogie Down Productions. Throughout Sirius Sounds, the funk is ever present.
Brooklyn’s Newcleus is a salient analog, though warped through a magic mirror: Newcleus’s most famous song ‘Jam On Revenge (The Wikki-Wikki Song)’ with its shuffling riffs and weird “wikki-wikki” wobbles, is kindred in spirit with Sirius Sounds groovers like ‘Ionospheric State’ and ‘The Veil…,’ taking its time to arrive at its glorious destinations, melodies scrawling and wiggling like cartoon scribbles and flashing zaps of onomatopoeia. (Unknown by most at the time of its release, a more emotive side of Newcleus’ Ben Cenac, as Dream 2 Science, in some ways prefigures the overarching ethereality of Sirius Sounds, tying their spacey soul-funk from London to Brooklyn.)
‘Ionospheric State’ jams on to skanking keys and “singing” synth lines jawboning as if possessed by acid solos of Jimi Hendrix’s ghost. The Children of the Bong excelled at zigzagging noodles of warm, ooh-aah sounds; placid visions breeze in with ‘Interface Reality,’ its lead sound that sample of an upside down gurgling toy. And on it builds to a rocking breakdown of exploding modulations and drums — inspired by the Ozric Tentacles song that first turned them on, ‘Kick Muck’ from 1988’s Gliding Sliding Worlds, a song that saws and hacks and ranges over through the storm clouds.
Worshippers of the freak and flow of breakbeats and funk, their rich percussive designs perfectly mirror their intertwining melodies, pulsing with sub-bass tremors on ‘Underwater Dub’ or rattling the air amid winding trails of bliss on ‘The Veil…’ A kind of tribute to Augustus Pablo, the former would get two alternate mixes, the ‘Analogical Roots Version,’ with its melodica reminiscent of The Orb’s ‘Towers of Dub,’ and the ‘Full On Drums And Bass All Hands On Deck Roots Mix,’ all three of them — Henry, Goganian and Guthrie — working the mixer together, dropping sounds in and out.
But what is most striking to the mind is the unfurling synth melody, how it billows shimmering overhead the ‘Underwater Dub’ like watching a wave crashing on the ocean surface from below in slow-mo. If ‘Underwater Dub’ is the stoned, chilled lubba-dub of Sirius Sounds, then ‘The Veil…’ is its gentle yet most urgent heart. Tranquil yet alert, its happy baby sounds and giggles echo its happiness onto a righteous dub groove set to readings of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, using a synthesizer to “sing” the melody. It curls and weaves with an exultant joy.
But Henry and Goganian outdo themselves with ‘Life On Planet Earth,’ one of the highest of high electronica tracks of all time. The climax of Sirius Sounds, it slowly opens its arms to the dawn, its deep bassline rolling over the land to a firm backbeat. A winged melody circles about like a bumbling UFO before soft chords invite a new contemplation. Then, charmed into worship and the Sun peeping through the early morning clouds over the mountains, an incandescent synth line howls at the fading Moon, lifting off into the wide blue yonder. With more of a band feel, tipping its hat toward their live and roots leanings, it was their favorite track on the album — “The name comes from the feeling it gave us,” Henry told Backseat Mafia in 2021. “Like looking down on the Earth and seeing everything objectively” — life as a miracle.
And like Grandmaster Flash at the knobs, Children of the Bong greet the Sun by turning synthesizers into a scratch-a-thon for the ages with ‘Squigglasonica.’ It’s one of the funkiest UK breakbeat tracks of all time — it giggles and laughs and yelps as a barrage of drums slam and egg on a call-and-response of supersonic funk. Building it up to a relentless high, the boys drop it right down into a bouncy pit of psychedelic Jello that’s equal parts Bronx block-party and hillbilly jam down. Squiggle, scribble, sizzle, ‘Squiglasonica’ would travel all the way to San Francisco, where breakbeat innovators The Electroliners would sample it heavily for their remix of M5’s 1996 ‘Sanctuary.’ At the two-thirds mark, ‘Squigglasonica’ drops out, awakened by a “remember reality!” — waking back up to what sounds like a cartoon duck that swallowed liquid fire, eyes bugging, bill belching, wings flapping, holy of holies.
If ‘Squigglasonica’ and ‘Life On Planet Earth’ collectively represented the inner sanctum of the Children of the Bong, at once daffy and miraculous, then the last song on Sirius Sounds wraps it all up into the lyrical and the mystical. A comedown closer of sorts, yet also a riser, ‘The Visitor’ blasts off in slow motion, calling to mind big desert visions of pyramids and spaceships, lulling in the expanse of a giant vista. Goganian on drums, Henry on bass, its intertwining synth lines shine like sun rays or strike like lightning. Calling to mind Pink Floyd’s ‘Shine On’ and Brazil’s Jorge Ben, here at last we’ve reached escape velocity. Visited, it’s a fitting sayonara from the clouds…
Traveled, they had. But where now would they go? From the beginning, central to Children of the Bong was their dynamic twin power. Henry and Goganian were similar — both embraced the hippie “zippie” trappings of the time, with tie-dyed bucket hats, long hair, swirly colored polymer clay bead necklaces, baggy shirts and dungarees. To mainstream society they already looked like they were from another planet. In the ‘90s, this pan-psychedelic outlook had not yet found its apotheosis in more commercialized incarnations like Tomorrowland, Coachella, Burning Man…
The Children’s era was more innocent and more anarchic — though the many mutations of the social web would prove particularly contorted by comparison, trading in similar but more impactful conspiracy theories and curious human oddities. Also more pure, as the Sirius Sounds artwork by Emerald Mosley expressed — that minimalization Goganian spoke of but also the weirdness Henry was fond of.
Swirling twins, like Gemini from outer space, floating underwater in an azure bubblebath or a vat of amniotic fluid, the two beings that Mosley drew are different yet exactly the same, one green and one red. They are ostensibly the Children inside the bong. And connected by some kind of sci-fi hookah nurturing them through tubes going into their bellybuttons — umbilical dub pulses maybe — they’re spinning yet suspended it seems, in a perfect balance of awaiting, awaking, and becoming.
Sirius Sounds was in its own way a sensation. Melody Maker’s Push AKA Christopher Dawes had pegged the duo for great things before its release, declaring that “Dance music has rarely sounded so warm, so organic, so human.” Released at the apex of Planet Dog’s power — Eat Static going strong, Banco De Gaia touring and touring, Timeshard making a mark with the excellent Hunab Ku, and latest signee to the growing pack, the drum ‘n’ bass artist Future Loop Foundation edging into new territory, Sirius Sounds was a kind of plucky charm. It exuded a brash, and yet promising idea: young people taking the future into their own hands, by then collaborating to create the world in their own image, by way of hard work, an idiosyncratic talent, and equipped with a few sparky gadgets — and weed.
Temporarily banned from Wal-Mart shelves because of the band’s name, and its heady artwork — amid corporate concerns over alarming America’s anti-abortion activists — Sirius Sounds went strong in Europe and even bigger in North America in part because it was so weird and so human. Its improbable mix attracted ravers, beat junkies, space rockers, and psy-heads alike. And yet the revolution had its limits. Through 1995 and into 1996 they jammed and gigged nearly nonstop, the buzz around them including plans for a possible tour of the US and a second album.
But in 1994, the same time Push was singing their praises, the Children played a benefit show with Timeshard and 808 State for the anti-Criminal Justice Act Action group, who were trying to prevent the passage of a bill that would greatly limit the free party and rave scenes. Fatefully, the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 would receive Royal Assent just days later. The infamous Castlemorton Common Festival in 1992, which ran for a week in bucolic Worcestershire, attracted an estimated 20,000 to 40,000 people, sparking a draconian clampdown, abrogating most British raves.
Like Stonehenge Free Festival before it, Castlemorton was a watershed event for free spirited partisans. The government ruled that the balance between chaos and order was out of whack and that raves were the problem. Castlemorton was a seminal moment in UK youth culture. It made the renegade rave collective Spiral Tribe a national tabloid sensation, taking 13 of its members to public trial. They were eventually acquitted but their freedoms and activities were curtailed.****
The confluence of artistic energies — and the portal that it had opened — had exploded. In the years to come, the livelihoods of many artists would dwindle as a result of the government’s actions, including the fortunes of Children of the Bong. The streak of bad luck continued as Planet Dog’s distribution partner, Ultimate Records, a subsidiary of A&M Records, sank after A&M was bought by Seagram and dissolved, dragging Planet Dog’s catalog and publishing rights into receivership. It seemed the establishment could strike back harder after all. The crash of Planet Dog sealed the Children’s fate, as Henry and Goganian split over stress and growing differences.
Was it just a dream? A tantalizing proposition, Children of the Bong was an ideal thriving in an idealistic time. When the eternal wheel turned, they simply spun apart. They were a band that made their fans always wonder, “What if?” In 2022, they would resurface as a duo and play reunion shows while releasing two full-lengths from their archives, Sonic Ambulance and Not Sirius. The latter featured dub epics like ‘Eleven Dimension Super Gravity’ and the rare ‘U.V.F. (Ultraviolet Frequencies),’ along with fierce stormer, ‘Ultrascope.’ A triple expanded edition of Sirius Sounds would also arrive courtesy of Cherry Bomb, with an electric live rendition of ‘Squigglasonica.’
If ‘Squigglasonica’ was Children of the Bong at their most jovial, then the poignant grace note of their trajectory and travels is best captured with ‘Life On Planet Earth,’ the almost excruciating beauty of its lightning melody boomeranging around life’s eternal drift. It was as if the gods had gifted them greatness but only at the peak inflection of the timeless. If Henry was the earth, then Goganian was the wind.
Cirrus. Sirius. Cumulo-nebulous. Winds of nebulae, the heaven sent, Sirius the brightest star, the Dog Star, a binary star, twin stars, the head of the constellation Canis Major, harbinger of the flooding of the Nile, symbol of fortune and misfortune to the ancient Greeks — “star-struck” by its flickering on the horizon — and the wings of a star bird to the ancient Polynesians, guiding them on Pacific navigations.
Less anchored down and living in the forests of Wales, Henry’s “Bong Brother” was pursuing some greater answer when they reunited, still making music but also when free, paraflying in the clouds. It seems Sirius Sounds is like Castlemorton and Stonehenge — a portal in time that opens minds and lifts us sky wise.
Track Listing:
1. Polyphase
2. Ionospheric State
3. Interface Reality
4. The Veil…
5. Underwater Dub
6. Life On Planet Earth
7. Squigglasonica
8. Visitor
*Who can say where the greatest artistic inspirations comes from? Some are random and some are intrinsic. When it comes to the Sirius Sounds name, what we know is that “Sirius” is the Latin name for the Dog Star, the brightest star in the night sky.
It held a lot of significance in ancient times. In particular, and this goes to my play on clouds and vapors — in addition to the near homonymous association of “cirrus” and “Sirius” — in ancient Greek astrology, the clouds and vapors on the horizon could cause Sirius to twinkle or not twinkle if the atmosphere was clear; misfortune was imminent if it twinkled; or if it did not twinkle, it was a good omen.
I’m also playing with the nature of psychedelics which can spark from fired plants, the ingestion of mushrooms or powders, or the absorption of liquids. Either way, they can bring novel thoughts, hallucinations and sometimes deep intellectual connections. The random associations can be distracting and/or illuminating. It’s a dice roll. Technically speaking, the passage of smoke through water in a bong, and its sublimation then from plant to fire to smoke to vapor is literally inspiration.
This sense of chance or fate I believe permeates the story of the Children of the Bong, in that they were channelling a massive charge of social change and musical change through their youthful enthusiasms. Another example of their openness to almost cosmic or comic signs in their experience is the name of the band itself.
In fact, given that the haze of time and ganja may have clouded their memories of how they came up with the “Children of the Bong” name, Henry seemed to later correct the record on their official website many yeas later from a Tibetan source to an Andean source, illustrating a search beyond the norm (although I wonder):
“I had a new-age tape of music from the Andes and one of the tracks was called Children of the Bong – what a perfect name we thought; pretty much sums up the music ;) We made a cassette cover for it and even managed to sell a few at the Whirl-y-gig club queue!”
Though one cannot be too sure, since Tibetan chants, given their timelessness, were very much in circulation among ravers, hippies and travelers of the ‘90s, the same can be said for Andean pan flute music, with South American buskers performing, promoting and entertaining in various cities like Paris and London at the time.
I should know and can relate because I saw such performers at the Sacre Coeur with my mother in Paris in 1991 and we bought our own such tape. Though there was no ‘Children of the Bong’ name on it that I can remember or can imagine.
Of course, one also wonders, could it have been a typo and should have been ‘Children of the Gong’? I guess we may never know for sure.
**The conclusion of Megadog’s Midi Circus tour at Brixton Academy holds historic significance for various reasons, one of them being that it ended strongly. It was also one of Underworld’s most important performances, coming on the heels of the release of their breakout album, Dubnobasswithmyheadman.
***In the original story, Goganian is recorded as saying that ‘Ionospheric State’ was the song that used the toy sample. But Henry years later in the Backseat Mafia article identifies ‘Interface Reality’ as the song, with more detail and reference about where and how the sample is used. It is likely that Goganian misspoke or he was misquoted.
****It cannot be overstated how important Castlemorton was to the trajectory of the ‘90s music and rave scenes. Both Matthew Collin and Simon Reynolds spend a lot of thought on its implications in their respective books about the history of UK rave culture. In Collin’s Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House, Castlemortion forms something of the book’s climax with its riveting drama.
And in Reynolds’ more polemical Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture, Castlemorton represents a key image for the journalist when Reynolds recalls multiple times how it was seared into his memory when he saw a fierce female dancer standing on top of a parked van riding a groove with total commitment.