Be Here Now - Here Now Be - Now Be Here - Here Be Now - Now Here Be - Be Now Here
With an evening to spare, I thought I'd knock up this quick little article on Here & Now. There are some excellent sites (see links at the bottom) that deal with personal accounts of the band from their halcyon days, but this page is just a guide to the music that has been made available throughout their career (if you can call it a career).
My own personal experience with Here & Now was from the mid-eighties period (I was too young to have caught the band in the seventies) when they seemed to play Liverpool an awful lot. I came across the band, as most people probably did, through the Gong/Planet Gong connection. In fact, the Floating Anarchy album was a popular album with some of us school kids who weren't adverse to a night of music and a bag of mushrooms (even the non-hippy kids).
Anyway, here goes...
Released in 1999 through Voiceprint, this is a collection of cleaned-up tapes of their free flowing hippy jam period. The performances are loose and capture the spirit of the what the band represented. The quality of the sound is remarkably good considering the origin of the recordings. This is well worth checking out for the authentic nature of the band.
You can get this album here.
In 1977, Gong's head-honcho Daevid Allen was looking for a new project. He hooked up with Here & Now and partner Gilli Smyth to form Planet Gong, and off they went travelling France, recording this Toulouse gig and a studio session (Opium For The People). Similar to Gong but with the jazz leanings replaced by a harder more energetic stance inspired no doubt by the prevalent punk scene, this nevertheless has some wonderful spacious etheral passages.
Their most commercially successful album, this is still available through Charly. Many of these tracks have also been included on Gong compilation albums.
The band hooked up with Mark Perry's Alternative TV for a joint free tour across the Summer 1978 - a strange pairing considering that Perry was a very vocal presence in the punk world with his Sniffin' Glue fanzine. This split LP on Perry's Deptford Fun City chronicles the clash in all its ugliness. Side 1 has Here & Now and their shambolic performance, whilst side 2 has an aggressive ATV. This is either brilliant or rubbish.
A studio offering which combines Kif Kif's nursery rhymes (What You See, This Time), some spacey improvs (Grate Fire Of London and Improvisation which slowly builds into a space rock jam) and a couple of well crafted tunes: Steffe's Nearer Now and Keith's dark and foreboding 70's Youth (a favourite of mine, which always reminds me of a dear friend long since departed).
See Voiceprint for copies of this album.
Recorded, I think, at the same time as Give And Take, certainly with the same line-up, studio and producer. This is mainly Kif Kif nursery rhyme type stuff, with the exception of the punk like re-recording of Floating Anarchy.
Suze, Keith, Anni; Kif Kif, Steffe; Gavin
A single release whose a-side is a slice rock, whilst the b-side is a deep groove perhaps hinting at the band's future reggae inclinations.
Recorded live with a new drummer and second guitarist, this is the band's rockiest offering, although not quite heavy metal or punk. The improvisation still remains with jamming tacked onto Surgeons Knife and on, er, Jam, but it's not quite so wandering.
This was a new band with a new sound, Steffe having departed. The album dispenses with all notion of improvisation and the band lose their heavier side, embracing instead some reggae/dub themes. Telly Song and Ways To Free offer some wonderful deep grooves, but Ludwig (throwaway Beethoven) and the Bowie song (recorded because the producer insisted on a cover) annoy, while the Mega Number's outro spoils an otherwise excellent number.
The band came up with this mini album which took an enternity to get released, then remained on general release for a very short time. It was recorded by Deviant/Pink Fairy roadie Dave Goodman and the sound is, to be quite honest, basic. The music continues in the same vein as the previous album.
Sounds: live review album review news
Err, if anyone from the band sees this picture and would like me to remove it, I more than understand...
Having had enough of not getting very far, the band decided to call it a day and announced this as their last concert. It was duly recorded and video taped for release, the video format being an extended offering (if anyone has a copy of the video, I'd love to see it). By this time the band had been playing live heavily with a standard set and no jamming, so this offering was always going to be tight. Half the album is new stuff which gives it added appeal.
Sounds: album review
I was surprised to come across this when browsing through the new 12" rack at Probe as I'd thought the band had long since given up the ghost, but I thought I ought to check it out. There's no personnel listing, but it certainly sounds like Gavin and Dino are there. The songs on offer lean towards eighties light pop/rock territory.
Another out-of-the-blue offering. I guess Keith and Steffe decided to team up and see what they could produce (I'm not aware of this band being an on-going concern - I don't know if they ever did any gigs). I think this is from around about a time that the pair of them had once again teamed up with Daevid Allen for another incarnation of Gong (they did a 1-hour TV show in the Bedrock series). A couple of remakes from their early 1980s period with some new stuff, these are crafted songs with displaying some modern influences alongside some psychedelic stuff.
You can get this album here.
Twink is not the same Twink (John Charles Alder) that played drums for The Pretty Things, Pink Fairies, Bob Calvert etc... Funnily enough, this Twink was a roadie on Hawkwind's Levitation tour and filled in on synths when Tim Blake up and left, and he also filled Blake's position in a nineties Daevid Allen version of Gong. Similarly, this Dino Ferrari is a different person to the Dino Ferrari (Ermano Erba) who played drums for Mother Gong and Nik Turner's Inner City Unit.
As to why the band adopted pseudonyms, it may have been down to Daevid Allen who also bestowed alternate identities upon all of his Gong compatriots. As for their real identities, Steffe is Lewry, Keith is Bailey, Gavin is Allardyce, Dino is Gaisborough-Watkin and the rest I just don't know.
All sound files are fairly low quality (22Khz 16 bit mono with MPEG Layer-3 compression). The intention of including these files here is simply to give the reader a taste of the band's music over the years. I have avoided sampling any work that is currently commercially available, in fact all of the samples here have never been released other than their original runs. In the unlikely event that any of these recordings will become available again, they shall be removed.
I believe that this is in keeping with the spirit of Here & Now - a band who always said it was about the music, not egos or business. However, if I have transgressed any boundaries of acceptability, then firstly my apologies, and secondly e-mail me and I shall remove the offending articles.
The images have all been scanned from the original record sleeves with the exception of End Of The Beginning, which was taken from Dave Weller's site.
For early Here And Now notes and photographs, visit Kif-Kif's Here Now Be. This site also includes details, sound samples and sales of Ici Maintenants - a jamming band involving Steffe, Twink, Kif Kif plus bassist. The Planet Gong website has a potted history of the band as well as a couple of CDs for sale. Jezaland also has plenty of memories.
There's also a couple of other sites that comprehensively cover Here And Now's recorded output, Orgaz and Dave Weller, which include details of cassette tapes that have been issued.
February, 2004
