There are many interesting and exciting bands that Daevid Allen has played in during his musical career, and University Of Errors is certainly one of them.
University Of Errors (or U of E) came together by accident. Daevid needed a band to play gigs with that was based in America. His previous American based band was of course the late seventies New York Gong, which included the now legendary Bill Laswell, Kramer and Stu Martin amongst others.
U of E first came about when Pat Thomas and Michael Clare arranged a jam session as a way to spend the night with Daevid before he left San Francisco for Australia. It was never meant to be anything more than a pleasant way of spending a few hours improvising. Fate took a hand and the band grew and mutated with the addition of Josh Pollock, Jay Radford and Erik Pearson. The band went on to record their first album, entitled Money Doesn’t Make It, which was released in America.
Daevid Allen was a founder member of The Soft Machine. While he was with the band they became the darlings of the underground music scene and Daevid Allen recorded one LP with them. Daevid always loved those songs, and U of E seemed the perfect vehicle with which to revisit the older material.
This DVD, recorded live at the Gong UNCON in November 2006, features a number of songs performed by the University Of Errors that covers that Soft Machine era.
This album will be of interest to the large and dedicated Daevid Allen and Gong audience, and also through historic connection to the fans of Soft Machine and the Canterbury scene as a whole.
The Amsterdam performance was the first time that U of E performed most of this material live since recording the songs for their CD Jet Propelled Photographs in 2003. It was a very fitting situation as the entire weekend was a celebration of the 40th Anniversary of Daevid's original vision of The Planet Gong in 1966 while he was still a member of The Soft Machine.
University of Errors played on the last night of the 3-Day Amsterdam UnConvention. Expectations were high and the band rocked and roared through the set.
The performance was professionally filmed using five HD cameras and 48-track audio. Audio mixing and editing and the classy Cubist Video Edit was done by Harry Williamson at his Melbourne Studio with Daevid and Michael Clare contributing artistic and cultural detail. All the wild effects were carefully planned and executed with meticulous precision. The result is not just another concert video.
It is a WORK OF ART in its own right.
