In 2020 Napalm Death vocalist Barney Greenway told Prog how he’d made his way to the genre via Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, and described the connection between his band and Gong.
“My dad was into bands like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, which, if you would, you could consider prog bands. That was probably the start of my understanding of quite complex layers of music.
When I was in my late teens I started to go to central Birmingham and got involved with the punk scene. The scene wasn’t isolated – there were also a lot of hippies involved and a lot of my friends crossed over between the two things.
I started going to those drug-heavy, invite-only parties and I would turn up with these hippie friends of mine, expecting it to be like a reggae party. But a lot of the time they’d be playing really weird stuff, like Ozric Tentacles, Gong or Cardiacs. They really liked their prog!
I’ve been always a fan of Hawkwind. Mötorhead are my favourite band, so I’m obsessed with anything connected to them. But then I started to get a lot into Gong.
Camembert Electrique and the Radio Gnome Invisible Trilogy are incredible pieces of work, in terms of the scope and the strangeness and the sometimes nonsensical stuff that’s going on.
I remember going to this party after eating something that made me trip. At some point I felt my arse going hot. Someone had put heaps of toilet paper in my back pocket and set fire to it! Because I was tripping I didn’t know what was going on, so I went and sat in the sink and fell asleep.
The next morning, I woke up in the same position. A long time has passed but I do remember the soundtrack to that night was Gong!
I like strangeness; I get a bit bored when things start to get very samey. Gong was just the natural thing to gravitate towards, because of their whole freedom of expression, free-living, anarcho way of things. The punks and the hippie Gong fans were closely connected on those lines.
The link between Gong and Napalm Death could be the weirdness. When people expect us to do something, we just do the opposite. Napalm Death are very forward-looking as a band; I think this is the connection.”
