Described as a “psychedelic polymath”, Gong’s Kavus Torabi lives up to that title on his timely second solo release, The Banishing. Reflecting on the challenges in his personal life and the “heroic dose” of hallucinogens that led to its creation, The Utopia Strong and Mediæval Bæbes member discusses the healing power of music.
For Kavus Torabi – ravenous musical polyglot, Gong frontman, Knifeworld leader, solo artist and one third of The Utopia Strong – lockdown became unbearable. Deprived of his various creative outlets, he found himself at crisis point. “It made me realise that I do all those things because I go mental if I don’t,” he tells Prog. “And that’s exactly what happened. The interesting thing about going mad is you don’t realise you are. Ultimately, I found that making this record became a way out of the madness.”
He’s referring to The Banishing, his second solo album, which covers a lot of deep psychological terrain from traumatic break-up to self-therapy to healing epiphany, serving as a kind of aural purgation. It’s also unfailingly spectacular – one of the finest albums he’s ever put his name to.
Torabi had begun writing the follow-up to 2020 debut Hip To The Jag at his home in Hackney, East London. “I thought it was going to be quite a positive album,” he explains, “Then my relationship with my wife and daughter just seemed to deteriorate during lockdown. And try as we might, we couldn’t really get it back on track. After lockdown I went on a one-month tour with Gong, and when I came home afterwards it was clear they just didn’t want me back. I think I’d become unbearable to live with.”
The upshot was that Torabi left the family flat and London itself, where he’d lived for the past 30 years. First port of call was his good friend and Utopia Strong cohort, Steve Davis, who put him up for a few months. “His girlfriend gave me their darkroom, which is a kind of outhouse,” says Torabi. "I brought my instruments and bits of my studio with me and started working on the record, just as a way of having something to focus on, really. But as I started getting deeper into it, I realised, ‘OK, I’m making this record about what I’m going through.’ Then I became very focused on the lyrics, wanting to be as honest as I could."
The first post-separation song he wrote was the sorrowful, space-folkish Push The Faders, in which his raw anguish is all too apparent. As writing progressed though, a wider directive started to manifest itself. “I realised I wanted to turn all this pain into something beautiful. With all art, whatever the medium, you’re sort of restructuring yourself in order to explain yourself to the world. And that’s what it felt like. It was healing. I had a pretty miserable childhood, both at home and at school, and music has always been where I’ve gone to. It really was a way out.”
In keeping with the intensely personal nature of its subject matter, The Banishing is entirely written and recorded by Torabi, with the exception of a flute part on Snake Humanis, courtesy of Davis’ partner Katie. The song is typical of Torabi’s musical eclecticism, at times reminiscent of The Byrds, Oranges & Lemons-era XTC and pre-Britpop outliers The La’s. There’s also a dash of twanging country guitar, doused in slap-back echo, for added measure.
After Tim Smith I thought I could deal with anything – but then life had another plan
Elsewhere, The Banishing voyages deep into proggy psychedelia and cosmic abstraction, while its more riffy art-rock passages carry the restless energy of Wire or Cardiacs. The latter influence is a given, in light of Torabi’s five-year membership of Cardiacs, which came to a sudden and distressing end when leader Tim Smith suffered brain damage in 2008. He died in 2020.
The lovely, Syd Barrett-ish A Thousand Blazing Chariots (one of two songs on the album that predate Torabi’s domestic exile) pays tribute to Smith. “I’ve written quite a few songs about Tim and this one just sort of came out,” he recalls. “Those 12 years after his accident, where he was holding on to this strange half-life, was sort of like grieving every single day. It was so hard for all of us. After that, I thought I could deal with anything – but then life had another plan.”
The Sweetest Demon may contain the record’s most cathartic line – ‘You really raise your voice/And set your pain to song’ – but its revelatory moment is the eight-minute Mountains Of Glass. The hallucinatory track was inspired by a visionary episode during the latter stages of the album process, when Torabi was living in Glastonbury.
“Mountains Of Glass originally had different lyrics, which I thought were too self-pitying,” he explains. “But I didn’t know what to write. I’ve always had a good relationship with psychedelics, from being in my late teens, really; so I thought, ‘I’m going to do this heroic dose of magic mushrooms and see where it takes me.’
I thought, ‘I’ve been in Heaven and now I’m biting this apple and returning back into my physical body’
“I had the full-on, atheism-dissolving, mystical experience. It felt wonderful and I made extensive notes while it was happening, undergoing the full sort of dissolution of ego and sense of self and body and time – all those constraints of the material world. Effectively, I returned to the Godhead, as it were, which felt like some big cleansing experience. I wrote the new words for Mountains Of Glass and I wanted them to be quite descriptive. It was only afterwards, reading them back, that it sounded like a hymn. And is that not what hymns are anyway, describing this sort of sacred experience?”
The effects of Torabi’s trip also spilled over into the album’s distinctive cover art. As the drugs wore off, he viewed his almost- completed artwork anew. “It suddenly seemed to be bursting with significance,” he says. “Then it struck me that I was starving, because I hadn’t eaten all day and it was now one in the morning. So I went downstairs and the first thing I saw was an apple. I thought, ‘Oh my God! I’ve been in Heaven and now I’m biting this apple and returning back into my physical body.’
“The cover has also got all these angels on it. I’m not remotely Christian, but the biblical significance really hit me, and I started laughing. And there’s a snake on the cover, which doubled and exploded the meaning: ‘Hang on a minute, the snake and the apple!’ It just seemed extremely profound, and it still does.”
I’ve done everything I can and now I’m left with what I started with
True to its title, Torabi sees the album as a “banishing ritual,” a statement of personal transformation. These past few years have been difficult, he says, but also “kind of liberating in a way.” He explains: “I’ve done everything I can and now I’m left with what I started with: my music and my art. And that’s all I really do. What I’ve learned is that everybody has tragedy in their lives, but I don’t want that to define me. I’m not someone who ever wants to feel sorry for themselves. And I hope the record doesn’t sound like that.”
He needn’t worry. The Banishing is no extended pity party. Rather, it’s an uplifting, multi-faceted and inspirational record, rammed with Torabi’s trademark inventiveness. The same kind of hallmarks, in fact, that characterise his other work. It’s also brought a greater sense of clarity to his immediate future. “I’m 52 years old now and I realise that, going into this decade of my life, I want to really focus on The Utopia Strong, Gong and my own stuff.
I still feel 100 percent committed to each project. And I want to go further
“They all feed into each other – that’s the interesting thing. There’s things on the new Gong album that would never have happened were it not for The Utopia Strong. And then there’s an aspect of what I do in The Utopia Strong and in my own stuff that would never have happened were it not for Gong.
“All three are very different ways of working and I still feel 100 percent committed to each of them. And I want to go further. So if this decade is about really going deeper with those three projects, I’d be very happy.”
