The Flying Teapot, You and Angel’s Egg LPs are here in all their brainmashed glory should you want them, but the examples of Allen’s output immediately before and after Gong, which bookend the trilogy, give a much better account of his legacy. The scratchy riff that kicks off CD 1 echoes a lineage that runs from Trout Mask Replica to Pere Ubu and Gang Of Four, while the tracks from his Byg albums, stripped of the glissandi gloop and excruciating VC3 synthesisers, reveal a similarly punky outlook waiting to happen?which it did in 1979 when, according to the illiterate sleeve notes, Allen ended up playing some New York club called GBGB’s. Presumably Micks in Kansas City was closed.
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