A Short Bio:
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One of the most
accomplished musicians of the whole Canterbury scene, Pierre Moerlen,
who died on May 3rd 2005 aged only 52, was certainly a world-class drummer,
whose work with Gong and Mike Oldfield, not to mention his 'solo' albums
as Pierre Moerlen's Gong, has attracted wide critical praise.
Pierre Moerlen was born in Colmar into a very musical family,
his father being the resident organist of the Strasbourg
cathedral as well as a piano and organ teacher, and his
mother a school piano teacher. His three sisters and his
brother Benoît are also musicians, although not all
play music professionally. Moerlen started playing
piano until he turned to percussion while a teenager. In
1967, he entered the Conservatoire Régional in
Strasbourg to learn classical percussion under the guidance
of Jean Batigne, founder of the famed Percussions de
Strasbourg.
While studying strictly classical music
at the Conservatoire, Moerlen also developed
an interest for more contemporary musical genres, and soon
found himself involved in rock and fusion groups. The most
notable was called Hasm Congélateur and featured
future Magma guitarist Gabriel Fédérow, and
its main claim to fame was appearing on a regional
television programme alongside Belfort progressive rockers
Ange and an even more obscure band featuring the Lemoine
brothers, Jean-Sébastien and Patrice. The latter
joined Moerlen in Gong around the time of Shamal.
Around that time, Moerlen began to feel
the urge to write and perform his own music, based on the
use of the various tuned and untuned percussion instruments
at his disposal. He rehearsed his pieces with Mireille
Bauer, a fellow Conservatoire student and his girlfriend at
the time (and coincidentally a cousin of Jean Batigne). One
interesting anecdote on this period is that sometime in
1972, Moerlen and Bauer both attended a Gong concert in
Strasbourg, and neither was too enthused about the gig.
Certainly not the shape of things to come!
As a matter of fact, while on a visit to
Paris to try and find work in classical music, an idea he
was not too keen on, he met Patrice Lemoine on the station
platform where he was waiting for his train back to
Strasbourg. Lemoine told him that Gong were looking for a
drummer after the band had broken up during the tumultuous
sessions for Flying
Teapot. Although reluctant at the
start, one listen to the just completed record convinced him
that there was potential in the band and Daevid Allen's
musical concept. After attending a Gong in Malakoff (a suburb of Paris), he joined the band in its Voisines
headquarters.
In the Spring of 1973, with Allen and
Gilli Smyth resting in Mallorca, the rest of Gong toured
under the name of Paragong in French youth centres, and when
the pair came back, the new consolidated line-up went into
the studio to record the second volume of Allen's Radio
Gnome trilogy, Angels
Egg. In the meantime,
Moerlen
had been recruited by Mike Oldfield to appear, alongside an
impressive cast of Canterbury scene musicians like Steve
Hillage, Mike Ratledge, Fred Frith, Kevin Ayers, John
Greaves and David Bedford, at a live performance of
Oldfield's just-released Tubular Bells at the Queen
Elizabeth Hall.
Moerlen's
time in Gong was one of repeatedly leaving the band, then
joining in again, which led to using a lot of replacement
drummers. But he was unsure whether this was the right place
for him to be, and he kept returning to Strasbourg to work
and tour with the Percussions de Strasbourg, as well as
continuing work on his own percussion music. He came back to
the Gong fold in April 1974 to work on the
You album, but left again once it was completed. It was in the
subsequent period that he wrote pieces like "Mandrake" and
"Expresso".
Then in July 1975, Moerlen received a
phonecall from Virgin, asking him if he would agree to
rejoin Gong and lead the band with Didier Malherbe : Allen,
Smyth and Tim Blake had all left the previous Spring. This
offer came as a replacement for the solo project that Virgin
had accepted to release, so it was a tough decision to take,
but finally Moerlen agreed and
brought with him both Mireille Bauer (who in the meantime
had guested on both Angels
Egg and You) and Patrice
Lemoine (who had jammed with members of Gong when they'd played in Strasbourg in
1974). At first, the new Gong tried to maintain a continuity
with the concepts created by Daevid Allen, with Hillage and
his girlfriend Miquette Giraudy taking on Allen and Smyth's
roles, but this approach proved a failure.
By the time work started on
Shamal
in November 1975, after an extensive British tour with
Clearlight supporting, a new direction had been defined, and
Steve Hillage was not too enthusiastic about it. Having
enjoyed reasonable success with his first solo album,
Fish Rising, he decided to concentrate on a solo career.
Recruiting Clearlight violinist Jorge Pinchevsky as
replacement, Gong finished the album and embarked on a long
European tour. But the line-up didn't last long, and by the
Summer of 1976 only Moerlen, Bauer and
Malherbe were left. The latter recruited guitarist Allan
Holdsworth, while Moerlen decided to
further increase the percussive dimension of Gong, adding
his brother Benoît to the line-up. Bassist Francis
Moze, late of the Flying
Teapot line-up, came back to the
fold, alongside his friend Mino Cinélu, a promising
young conga player. This new team toured Europe in the
Autumn of 1976, then headed to the studio, recording Gazeuse! before splitting up again soon after its
completion.
Following the split, Pierre Moerlen went
to live in New York for a few weeks and met bass player
Hansford Rowe, aged 22. 'Hanny' was involved in a band whose
drummer had to leave to join the army, so Pierre replaced
him for a few weeks and the pair forged a very special
musical relationship. Back in his hometown of Strasbourg,
France, in early 1977, Moerlen decided to
form a new line-up of Gong with Rowe, and recruited former
members Mireille Bauer (vibes and percussion), Jorge
Pinchevsky (violin) and Benoit Moerlen (vibes), his younger
brother, along with a youthful newcomer, François
Causse (on percussion also).
During the following months, this line-up
often toured under the name Gong-Expresso, making its début
performance at the Gong family gathering of Paris, Porte de
Pantin, May 1977, which witnessed the reformation of the
'classic' Gong line-up. Following Pinchevsky's departure,
several lead players guested on album and gigs (although at
times only the basic percussion-led quintet performed),
including Didier Malherbe, Darryl Way (violin player of
Curved Air), Bon Lozaga, Allan Holdsworth and Mick Taylor.
The last four guested on the Expresso II album, which was recorded in the summer of 1977 and released early in 1978. This was the band's final release
for Virgin and its release coincided with the name change to
Pierre Moerlen's
Gong.
This period saw the departure of Mireille
Bauer to the jazz-rock band Edition Speciale. Her
relationship with Moerlen had by then
become a purely musical one (she now lived with ex-Gong bass
player Francis Moze while Moerlen was married
with a child) and she felt she needed a bit of fresh air.
She was not replaced. Moerlen took the Spring off to write new material, record drum and percussion tracks for Mike Oldfield's Incantations, and record the title-track of his next album, "Downwind" (with contributions by Oldfield, Steve Winwood, Mick Taylor and Didier Malherbe), at Oldfield's studio. In the Summer, band rehearsals resumed with a permanent guitarist, Ross
Record, and the remainder of Downwind was recorded in September with major contributions by Didier Lockwood
(of the French bands Magma, Zao and Clearlight, not to
mention his own Surya),.
It
soon became apparent that Ross Record was suffering from severe
stagefright, and he left following completion of an Italian tour in late 1978 for which Lockwood reinforced the line-up. In early 1979, Moerlen summoned back
Bon Lozaga, who in the meantime had gone back to live in the
US. The trio of Lozaga, Rowe and Moerlen would be the
mainstay of PMG until its demise in 1981. The band kept
touring, but it had to be put on hold for a couple of months
while the Moerlen brothers were touring Europe with Mike
Oldfield. This marked the end of Benoït's involvement
in the band, and for subsequent tours François Causse
came back.
Exhausted from incessant touring,
Moerlen
rented a house in Ireland with his wife and son, and wrote a
complete album there, which would surface as Time Is The Key,
considered by Pierre to be his best. It was recorded by
Moerlen, Bon and Hanny with help from Peter Lemer on
keyboards and various guests (Allan Holdsworth, Darryl Way,
Nico Ramsden). This effort highlighted Moerlen's talents on a
variety of tuned percussion instruments, making good use of
overdubbing facilities. Of particular note was the superb
introduction, "Ard Na Greine", with its intertwined
vibraphone, glockenspiel, marimba and tympani over layers of
synthesizers. During the following months, both Moerlen
and Hansford were employed by Mike Oldfield for session work
and touring, so there was no new album from Pierre Moerlen's
Gong until 1981's Leave It
Open. This final effort carried
on in a similar vein to its predecessor. Following a change in the management of
the band's label, Arista, PMG were dropped and split up following tours of the USA and Europe in late 1980.
There followed a period of uncertainty
for Moerlen. After failing auditions for a couple of French
pop singers, he briefly joined Magma but didn't get on well
with Christian Vander and opted to return to Strasbourg, where he taught drums. In 1982 and 1983, he
worked again with Mike Oldfield, mainly in a live
setting (although he does appear in the video of "Moonlight
Shadow", miming to Simon Phillips' drum parts!).
Then in the spring of 1985,
Moerlen
received a call from Tribute, a Swedish band he'd already
been in touch with three years previously. At the time, the
band wanted to hire him to play drums on an album but had to
give up the idea. Now Tribute was a well-established gigging
band and had both a Swedish and European tour in sight. This
sounded good to Moerlen who joined
Tribute, ultimately staying for two years and playing on two
albums : the studio effort Breaking Barriers (1986), to which he contributed the beautiful closing piece "I Felt Like It"; and the live album Live - The Melody, The Beat, The
Heart (1987). While in Sweden, he
also recorded an album of his own compositions (one of
which, "Far East", was played live at Tribute gigs) with the
help of Tribute musicians. However, he asked Hansford Rowe
to add bass parts to the tapes, and thus released the album
under the Pierre Moerlen's Gong name.
In 1987, Tribute ground to a halt (it
later reformed under Gideon Andersson's sole guidance) and
Moerlen formed a new PMG line-up back in France, with Hansford Rowe,
Benoît Moerlen, ex-Tribute guitarist Ake Zieden and
new members Frank Fischer (keyboards) and Stefan Traub
(vibraphone). That line-up would tour Germany twice between
1987-89 (as documented on a forthcoming live CD), and record
yet another album, Second
Wind (1989), the band's most
democratic effort to date, and one of their best.
Unfortunately, things weren't as great from a financial
point of view, and PMG broke up for good during 1989.
Both Moerlen and his brother
Benoît returned to teaching, while Rowe crossed the
Atlantic again to settle in Montréal. Eventually, Moerlen
began to work as resident drummer in several big musicals
(Evita,
Les
Misérables, West Side Story) and
toured in Europe and the US with them, while Rowe formed Bon
with Bon Lozaga, who in the meantime had quit the music
scene to run a restaurant. There was talking of reviving PMG in 1994, but eventually the project became Gongzilla, a band featuring Lozaga, Rowe and Benoit Moerlen, but not Pierre, who would however join the band on a temporary basis for a German tour in 2002.
In March
1997 it was announced that Moerlen was joining Brand X for a tour
of Japan, which regular drummer Frank Katz had declined to
do. This series of gigs proved successful and he stayed for a further tour of Europe in May and June. In the
meantime, he had also agreed to rejoin Gong following Pip
Pyle's departure, in August 1997. He stayed on for a further
French tour in 1998, but left two dates into the spring 1999
European tour, never to return.
After leaving Gong,
Moerlen resumed teaching and worked on compositions for a new album
and a new incarnation of PMG. Spring 2000 saw a couple of live
appearances (with a quartet line-up including his brother Benoît) which proved unsatisfactory. In 2001, he performed in St.Petersburg, with a line-up of Russian musicians, recording the live album Pentatine (2005). He had just begun rehearsing
a new group when he suddenly died in May 2005.
There is a chronology of Pierre Moerlen's Gong on this website. |
