A Gong for real-world music

AMONG the artists on the playbill for The Big Jam in Brisbane this week is bass guitarist Mike Howlett, who joined British-based band Gong in 1973 and still plays with them. Howlett is also an associate professor and the new head of the music program at the Queensland University of Technology.

AMONG the artists on the playbill for The Big Jam in Brisbane this week is bass guitarist Mike Howlett, who joined British-based band Gong in 1973 and still plays with them. Howlett is also an associate professor and the new head of the music program at the Queensland University of Technology.

He left Gong in 1976 but returned in 1994. At the moment the group, whose style he describes as "psychedelic space rock," is promoting its new album, Gong 2032.

Howlett was born in Fiji, schooled on Sydney's northern beaches, joined a band straight out of school and went to Britain at the age of 20. Gong prospered and Howlett settled in London, but at 26, he was ready for a change of pace.

"The trouble with bands is you get to know each other too well, it's worse than with brothers and sisters", he says. He set out to produce records, preferring "music for short periods of time at an intense level".

He produced bands for Richard Branson's Virgin label from its early days and was the first person to put Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland in a studio, in 1977.

They later achieved world fame as the Police and Howlett became a successful producer, scoring a Grammy award in 1982 for his work on the Flock of Seagulls track DNA.

He had his own studio and produced a string of top 10 hits. Despite this full life, in the 1990s he became intrigued with the possibilities of the academic life after universities began to pursue him as a speaker at conferences and seminars about contemporary music.

The University of Glamorgan offered him a doctorate program based on his portfolio of work.

"It seemed appropriate and the experience was fantastic, to have a reason to look back at my life and say why and how I did what I did when I did it. It brought out some side of me that had not been needed much."

QUT headhunted him to help devise and run the new bachelor's program colleagues Julian Knowles and Andy Arthurs were creating, which will take its first enrolments in February.

"I have this balance of the music industry and the academic and there are not a lot of those people about."

The course includes modern progressive music, some jazz, and of course, the ever-evolving technology. "We made a clear decision to pull ourselves away from the standard conservatorium-style training."

He is unfazed by the assault on the power of the major recording companies brought about by the digital revolution.

"The story of the music industry is that it gets wrongfooted every decade. In the end, it survives because music is about youth articulating its existential angst. They have to do it and do it their own way."

The course aims to ready students for the real world of the music business.

"We are trying to structure a course so that people understand it's not like there's a big daddy out there who is going to make their career happen.

"You have to make a noise about what you are doing, even if you are not from the mainstream, finding the people for whom your music will resonate.

"And it's not that the audience has to be huge, but if it is, great! I come from the very commercial end of the music business but my own music is very esoteric, and Gong still, strangely, has a following."