Tim Blake

Timothy 'Tim' Blake (born 6 February 1952, in Shepherd's Bush, London) is a Keyboardist, Synthesist, Vocalist, and Composer working with both Gong and Hawkwind.

Blake is also known for his Synthesizer and Light performances as Crystal Machine, with the French Light Artist Patrice Warrener.
They were sometimes joined on keyboards by the young prodigy Jean-Philippe Rykiel.

Working as a sound engineer in the summer of 1969, Blake gave a group of musicians their first chance to play together during a concert at All Saints Hall in London, and so Hawkwind was born..

It was as an engineer, too, that Blake met Daevid Allen at Marquee Studios, where the latter was recording his first solo album Bananamoon in 1971. At the end of the sessions Allen had invited Blake to come back to France to be Gong's sound mixer, but Blake rapidly moved on to work on his own music, using synthesisers. He eventually joined Gong full-time in September 1972 as the band's synthesizer player, being among the first to bring the synthesizer out of the studio and on to the stage. He appears on all 3 albums of the Radio Gnome Invisible trilogy; Flying Teapot, Angel's Egg, and You, in fact Blake is the only composer, apart from the Allen/Smyth partnership, to have written for all three of the "Trilogy" Albums, making him one of Gong's most important composers.