Allen was always the arch-surrealist of the Canterbury scene, something you could easily glean by following any of the threads he wove with his long-running outfit, Gong – the flying teapot trilogy, the pothead pixies, etc. Marijuana and beat poetry feel like the two driving forces here, but Allen’s performing with a great team of musicians behind him, and it’s a thrill to hear Robert Wyatt behind the drum kit, navigating the curiosities of Allen’s songs with the same quizzical fervor he brough to his playing on Syd Barrett’s The Madcap Laughs. Even better, Wyatt steps to the mic for a lovely, drowsy rendition of Hugh Hopper’s Canterbury standard, “Memories.” David Bowie once said that Banana Moon was one of the starting points for glam, which makes a certain kind of stoned sense: if glam was about performative excess matched with musical oddness, then Allen’s outsize character and the scraping violin and clanging guitar here probably do point towards a couple of Bowie’s classics, at the very least.