Four posts in a row of marital that one might deem commercial, I’ve earned myself a prog freakout.

Gong
Flying Teapot – Live ’72
Blues For Findlay – Live ’72

Continental Circus is a strange album, and not the way that most other Gong albums are strange. It’s strange because it’s really hard to track down. The album is a soundtrack to a forgotten film of the same name. It was first released in 1971. It wasn’t re-issued on CD until 1994, and that re-issue was only available officially in France. Ditto for the album’s 2010 vinyl re-issue, another France exclusive.

And, of course, if countless knock-off Kraftwerk and Neu! bootlegs have taught me anything, if a label refuses to release an album by a cult act, then the fans will end up doing it for them. Lots of bootleg releases of Continental Circus are out there. Discogs lists at least three different versions. Like a lot of other bootleg editions of out-of-print albums, many of the counterfeit CD pressings of Continental Circus also feature various bonus tracks, also taken from hard-to-find or out-of-print sources.

One version includes several tracks taken from various French TV performances of the early 70s. The version I have, released by the one-off Giacomo Records label in 1994, includes two live tracks, which are what I’m sharing tonight. These live tracks were recorded in Lyons back in 1972, and were only released officially a decade later on the Live A Lyons Part Two album. That was a cassette-only release. I did not know that there were tape-only Gong-related releases. Turns out there are quite a few of them. Thank god most of them are not for sale on Discogs. My Gong habit is bad enough, I don’t need to be the asshole who digitizes out-of-print Gong concerts from tape.

(Let’s be honest with each other, I’m eventually going to be that asshole.)

Thankfully, the asshole who duped these two live tracks were from a tape did a good job with it. It’s a bit muddled, but it’s hard to say that if that’s because it was taken from a tape or if the source material itself was less than ideal. Sounds good enough for my old man ears.

Both these songs are bangers, especially the live version of “Flying Teapot,” which cracks it at nearly 30 damn minutes. I don’t smoke weed. And in the past I’ve said that I’ve never felt the inclination to smoke weed. But if I lived in a country where legal weed was readily available, I’d light up to this motherfucker in no time. They didn’t call themselves the pot-head pixies for nothing.

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