Class And Quality: Gentle Giant shot exclusively for Prog in Portsmouth, August 2017. L-R: Kerry Minnear, Derek Shulman, Phil Shulman, Ray Shulman.

They sat quite quietly,” Minnear remembers. “It was my teacher’s voice. ‘Now don’t do that again!’”

Recommendations

The fabulous Rabelaisian giant, Pantagruel, discovers a lifelong friend and companion, Panurge.) There coming over Charenton Bridge they escaped all that concentrating in making good, strong, not very long compositions that few artists After a subsequent audition, Green was in, staying with Ray in Portsmouth as the band continued rehearsing and beginning to play shows – their first at the city’s poly in May was billed as ‘Gentle Giant featuring ace singer Simon Dupree’. The Dupree moniker would never fully leave Derek Shulman. “I was a pop star,” he laughs. “I still am.” I keep being strangely reminded of this album lately. A friend of mine was interested in hearing it (via his dad) and a guy I work with

schizophrenic with it's flowing complex vocal harmonies and crazy timings it's a real pleasure to listen to time and again Like Phil Collins in Genesis, Weathers was ideal for Giant. The band were booked to promote Three Friends in the US, but prior to that, WWA had got them the strange gig of supporting the new Jimi Hendrix film, Jimi Plays Berkeley, around the UK. album begins with a catchy little melody. This turns into one of my favorite Gentle Giant songs of all time. 'Just the Same' Mortimore began adapting to the group’s funny ways: “There was a lot of sibling rivalry. Phil, the older brother, was our kind of gangmaster in a way. Derek was the singer and had a lot to say for himself. Ray was gentle, the youngest, nearest to my age. There was obviously a dynamic between the three of them that I just did not understand.” rest of the songs, this is a beautiful ballad that does not seem out of place at all. One of my favorite

seriousness because, creative though they may be, their sound is boring. The vocals are soft, usually emotionless whispers (or are styles. Throughout its existence, it managed to amalgamate a wide variety of musical currents with a vocal polyphony Knots (4:11) (15/10) - the crown of the GG catalog, and of the classic prog era in general. Like the eventually end with him leaving the group and thus finishing this first phase in Gentle giant's career. But The Shulmans, along with Southampton-based drummer Martin Smith, who’d graduated from the Mojos to the Big Sound, needed some like-minded souls to accompany them on their journey. In early 1970, they were to come across Minnear by chance: “Kerry’s arrival was very important to us,” says Ray.

Gary Green later recalled "As I remember it, when Phil announced it at the end of an Italian tour, he said he would leave the band. He couldn't continue on. There was too much stress being on the road and the family. Plus the brothers were having a bit of a difficult time. They're brothers and they argued like hell, sometimes to the point where you thought they were going to hit each other. But I guess it was brotherly love [laughs]. But when Phil said he was going to leave, we were all like stumped, 'Oh! What are we going to do? All right we'll buy a Moog synthesizer!' That's kind of trite; I don't mean it quite like that. We had to do something". [17] less dense and darker than, say, Acquiring The Taste. The vocal parts are really strong and the center Alucard Music is a British music label that releases CDs and DVDs of Gentle Giant. It was founded by Kerry and Lesley Minnear.

Notes

to the varitable free-for-all that is The Boys in the Band, to the spacey, guitar-driven River. This is the Giant that I love. this juncture but true to the unpredictable nature of this group's offerings, for sure. A reprise of the Their style includes significant use of counterpoint. For anyone who doesn't know, counterpoint is basically the use of multiple