Gentle Giant

Book excerpt: They lasted for only a decade and never lit up the world's charts, but Gentle Giant belong in the pantheon of great progressive rock bands of the era. At times edgy and experimental, but also capable of great beauty – not to mention some of the greatest riffs known to man – the group's explorations of medieval music gave their sound its unique character. But it was the thrilling complexity of their compositions – which Frank Zappa might have called the 'statistical density' of their writing – together with the instrumental ability of its players, that make their music as potent today as it was at their peak nearly 50 years ago when albums like Octopus and The Power And The Glory helped define the progressive rock era. This book takes a microscopic look at each of Gentle Giant's eleven studio albums and provides fresh assessments of the many live and 'odds and sods' recordings. It also rounds up their existing documentary and performance footage. In doing so, it tells the story of one of progressive music's most fascinating groups and the thrilling – and occasionally tortuous – ride the Shulman brothers and key band-mates like Kerry Minnear and Gary Green experienced along the way. Gary Steel is a New Zealand-based journalist who has developed severe tinnitus from attending thousands of rock gigs in his 40-plus years of rock writing. In that time he has also interviewed a who's who of contemporary music and reviewed just about every record going for whoever would publish his pungent opinions. As a pimply adolescent with Rick Wakeman hair, he tried unsuccessfully to turn his schoolmates away from their obsessions with glam and disco and convert them to ELP, King Crimson and Gentle Giant. He has edited and published several music magazines, run his own record shop and is a late-in-life first-time Dad of young kids.