Gilli Smyth

Who is Gilli Smyth?

Gilli Smyth is a musician who performed with the bands Gong, Mother Gong and Planet Gong as well as several solo albums and albums in collaborations other members of Gong. In Gong, she often performed under the name Shakti Yoni contributing poems and space whispers.

Smyth has three degrees from King's College London, where she gained notoriety as the outspoken sub-editor of "Kings News", a college magazine. After a brief spell teaching at the Sorbonne, she began doing performance poetry with well-known English jazz-rock group Soft Machine, founded by her partner and long-time collaborator, Daevid Allen, in 1968.

She co-founded Gong with Allen, a unique outfit that included musicians such as Steve Hillage, Pierre Moerlen and Didier Malherbe. In her spoken-word poetry, especially within Gong's "Radio Gnome Invisible" Trilogy, she portrays a prostitute, a cat, a mother, a witch, and an old woman, and she has been known for wearing such costumes on stage. This became part of the cult mythology, which was written into sixteen albums that were produced. Gong developed into a family of bands, including Gongmaison and Mother Gong. Mother, her 1978 solo album, led to Smyth founding Mother Gong having left the original Gong band in 1975 to have children.