The band stopped after three hours and Ray said to Kerry, ‘Let’s go out and dig the stars.’ They opened the front door and nearly walked up the giant’s nostrils. They jumped back inside shakin’ all over and both said at once, ‘There’s abigfaceoutthereit’sbigit’sbig—oh!’
The others noticed immediately that something was wrong so they all went out to have a look. They saw the head of a great big giant, sleeping peacefully. Phil was at the head of the group. He turned and said, ‘Gary, did you spike our tea again?’
Just then the giant opened his eyes. ‘Be ’ee the boys as were makin’ that good sound?’
Martin, at once put at ease by the friendly accent answered, ‘Yes, it was us. I’m sorry if we made too much noise. You see, we moved out here so we wouldn’t bother anybody and—’
‘Bother anybody? But that’s the gentlest music I’ve ever ’eard apart from thunderstorms.’
Needless to say they all got on very well after the giant had said that. Frank the roadie moved the instruments outside and they played the rest of the night for him. Somewhere in Portsmouth a seismograph reported a mild earthquake when the giant was dancing.
In the morning I drove down from London with the group’s manager Gerry and my friend George the artist. We drove around to the back of the cottage and gaped at the group laying in the grass listening to stories of the giant’s distant past. Derek ran to us as the car lurched into reverse and bade us to halt. He explained everything and soon we were listening to the amazing things the giant had to say.
Before the giant left, it was suggested that he pose for a picture with the group. No matter how I angled my Polaroid I just couldn’t get everyone in the picture. I have some photos of six guys and a big boot, six guys, a big eye and part of a big nose: but I couldn’t get a decent picture of the giant and the band together. George was more successful. The giant placed him at the top of a tall tree and in fifteen minutes George had done the rough sketch.
Well, there you have it. The story of the Gentle Giant. You may think it’s fantastic, but then, so is the music.
We loved Tony’s liner notes and were astonished that, as busy as he was, he’d taken the time to write them just to help us out. I still love thinking about all the people who bought the album and read Tony’s fantastic tale while listening to our eclectic blend of rock, jazz, classical, and folk and then examining the gatefold covert art depicting the head of the smiling giant on the front, and the back, which showed the giant holding the six of us in his outstretched palms. That came from Tony as welclass="underline"
‘I want to introduce you to a guy named George Underwood,’ Tony said to us one day. ‘He’s David Bowie’s best friend from school, and he’s a brilliant artist. I think you guys will hit it off.’
Tony had been right about everything so far, so we thought, Okay, great, let’s meet the guy. We found out that George and Bowie used to play in the band George & The Dragons but broke up after an argument over a girl. George punched Bowie in the left eye, and since he was wearing a ring, the resulting injury caused Bowie’s left pupil to become permanently dilated, accounting for the difference in color between his eyes. The damaged eye couldn’t be repaired, but the friendship quickly mended.
George lived in Putney, so when we came in from Portsmouth to meet him, Tony put us up on the floor of his spare room. We didn’t know what we were going to do for the album cover, so we hoped George would have some ideas. He suggested we base the artwork on the band’s name since we were a new group with an unusual moniker. He drew a picture of the gentle giant, and we loved it. He suggested that the giant gently cradle the band members in order to create a connection between us and get our images on the album without a huge, tacky band photo. It was iconic. It was beautiful. It was Gentle Giant.
Gentle Giant has been called one of the first great prog-rock albums to follow King Crimson’s In The Court Of The Crimson King, which came out in November 1969. It’s a flattering comment, but not one with which I’m altogether comfortable. The problem with many so-called ‘prog’ bands is that instead of making complex passages that fit their multifaceted songs, peaking and dipping in intensity at the right times to provide memorable conflict and resolution, and weaving their compositions together with strong melodies, they want to be musical mathematicians. They make their songs complex because they can, not because they should, and embark on circuitous journeys that never take the listener anywhere, and, therefore, amount to nothing more than treading water. Some of the greats—and I refuse to name them—have fallen into this trap from time to time. And even we came close at moments before we established a firm foundation.
Everyone in Gentle Giant had a low threshold for boredom, and whenever we did something that sounded like something else or was too repetitious, we got sick of it and either created something else to evolve the part or threw it away and started over. We hated bands that put an abrupt three-minute Mellotron part in a song or five minutes of a classical music passage in an effort to emulate the London Symphony Orchestra. Kerry and Ray could compose symphonies if they wanted to, and we could easily smell bullshit when other bands tried and failed. We could have done it well, but that was never going to be our signature.
It might seem strange, but we wanted to be the opposite of grandiose. Other bands made double-album concept records, but the closest we came to that was on our loosely thematic fourth album, Three Friends, which wasn’t about alien civilizations, mythology, topographic oceans, or ancient military conflicts. To us, all that stuff defined pretension, and while naysayers have accused us of being pretentious over the years, I don’t think we ever were. I just think they didn’t try or care to understand our musical goals, which included writing inspiring, forward-thinking music for people who were tired of having everything spelled out for them, but who enjoyed great sing-along vocals as much as accomplished playing. To that end, I was the vocalist, but Ray, Phil, Gary, and Kerry handled complex harmonies with ease, giving us the baroque choir element that separated us from many of the bands to whom we were compared.
If our unwavering desire to be different from everything else made us pretentious to some, so be it, but it was never a result of being arrogant or feeling superior. We just knew what we could do with music, and we weren’t about to sell ourselves short to be more easily digestible. We didn’t want to write or play three-chord rhythms with a vocal on top, then a middle-eight and a guitar solo (we had already done that). We preferred to think of our pieces of music as being like cinematic passages that evolved over the course of the song, creating different images for the listener to latch onto. The instrumental passages and vocal sections were parts of the composition and were structured to make the songs coherent. Each of the parts was essential for the songs to develop and evolve.
‘Quiet And Cold’ would have been a shuffling blues song without Ray’s passionate street-corner violin parts, which set the stage for my yearning vocals and Kerry’s jaunty xylophone solo. The twittering bird and meowing cat sound effects were borrowed straight from the Beatles school of audio overload and contributed to the narrative approach to the song.
‘Alucard’—one of our trademark tracks—included one main hook based around a Pentatonic scale that we intercut with skittering organ lines, abrupt horn blasts, meter fluctuations, and effect-treated vocal harmonies.
The longest song on the album was the nine-minute ‘Nothing At All.’ Kerry wrote the beginning of that and brought it to us at our first rehearsal together. He sang the beginning, and we all liked it. We quickly realized how well it showcased Gary’s Renaissance-style arpeggios and our featherlight vocal harmonies. But we felt like it was a little too fragile, and it went on for too long. So, we combined it with another song we were working on that had a fatter, heavier groove. Suddenly, we had this dense riff, stealthy bass line, and aggressive vocals. Then, Gary let fly with a flailing multitracked guitar solo we panned from left to right channels and then back again.