The latest CD release reviewed

STEVE HILLAGE
L/Rainbow Dome Musick/Open Virgin/EMI

Back in the day before punk rock stuck its dirty DM boot into the music industry, hippie festival collective Gong and their ilk governed several alternative strands of music appreciation. From this band came guitarist Steve Hillage, a man later to find a home in the ambient/electronica area with his experimental unit System 7, but who, in 1976, was ridiculed to the point of having to hide himself away for a couple of years lest Sex Pistols fans take to him with a barbed-wire belt. Hillage has proven to be one of the true innovators and survivors of those acid-fried days; his second solo album, L, is a vastly underrated trippy-dippy work that features two bona fide psychedelic classic covers in Donovan's Hurdy Gurdy Man and The Beatles' Tomorrow Never Knows. Later albums, such as 1979 pair Open and Rainbow Dome Musick, presciently highlighted ambient grooves, of which Hillage has become a recognised master. Psuperb psychedelia ripe for investigation.