Mike Howlett

Mike Howlett (born April 27, 1950 in Lautoka , Fiji ) is a Fijian, overseas musician and producer . He became known in the first half of the 1970s as the bass player for the band Gong . He later brought Andy Summers together with the rest of The Police in his band Strontium 90 . After that he mainly appeared as a producer of new wave bands.

biography

Howlett was born in Fiji and grew up in Sydney, Australia, playing bass for The Affair in the late 1960s . After winning a band competition, he came to England in 1970, where he hired himself out in other insignificant bands, before joining the space rock band Gong in 1973 with guitarist and singer Daevid Allen , his partner Gilli Smyth (1933-2016), the second Guitarist Steve Hillage , keyboardist Tim Blake and saxophonist Didier Malherbe , who re-formed after the recording of their third album Flying Teapot (1973).

Mike Howlett replaced the former bassist Francis Moze ( Magma ) at Gong . Drummer Pierre Moerlen was a new addition to the band . This line-up recorded the two albums Angel's Egg (1973) and You (1974), which together with the previous album form the central Radio Gnome trilogy of the band. After Allen, Smyth, Hillage and Blake left the band and the band turned to purely instrumental jazz rock as Pierre Moerlen's Gong , Howlett also left the band in May 1976.

After leaving Gong Howlett worked in 1977 in the anti-nuclear project Radio Actors , initiated by Nik Turner and Harry Williamson, and their single Nuclear Waste , where Steve Hillage and Gilli Smyth as well as Steve Broughton and Sting were also involved. In the same year he founded the band Strontium 90 , which, in addition to himself and Sting, also included Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland (replacing the originally planned Chris Cutler ). Strontium 90 released only one single and only played a few concerts, one of them on the occasion of a one-time gong reunion in 1977, where Howlett performed with a gong as well as Strontium 90 . Howlett then temporarily ended his career as a musician in order to hire himself out as a producer in the future. Andy Summers joined the band The Police from Sting and Copeland after the guest appearance at Strontium 90 as a replacement for their former guitarists and thus completed their classic line-up.

Howlett has produced hits with Martha and the Muffins , Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark , Blancmange , A Flock of Seagulls (including their Grammy Award- winning DNA ) and China Crisis , and he has also produced successful albums by Joan Armatrading , The Alarm , Gang of Four , Fischer-Z and others.

When the band reformed itself in its classical line-up in 1994 for the 25th anniversary of Gong, Howlett appeared again as a musician after a long absence from the stage. He participated in several tours between 1996 and 2001 and produced the album Zero to Infinity , which was released in 2000 and on which he also plays bass.

After Gong ended touring in 2001, he lectured at South Thames College, the University of Glamorgan, and the Ealing College of Music and Media. In 2003 he appeared in a joint project with Damo Suzuki ( Can ) in the opening act of Daevid Allen's follow-up gong project, Acid Mothers Gong . He played bass again on Gong's studio album 2032, which was released in 2009 .

Web links

• Website by Mike Howlett (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Reviews of 2032 on the baby blue pages