Gentle Giant
Interview

In late spring 1993, DJ Mixo, then a leading name of an Italian TV station dedicated exclusively to music (MTV was just spreading in our parts) hosted a show with a grandiose but fitting title, "Rock Revolution," revisiting the recent and not-so-recent history of rock. It was the height of the grunge explosion, and for someone like me, who at the time could hardly tolerate the excessive fashionable enthusiasm for the still excellent recordings of bands such as Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and Stone Temple Pilots, the call to the glories of the early '70s was nothing but a breath of fresh air. It was in one of those shows that the talented Mixo aired the semi-amateur video of a band completely unknown to me, a certain Gentle Giant, performing a piece from '76, Interview. For me, raised on bread and Deep Purple, seeing the English band was a true revelation: I was astonished by the quintet's extreme technicality, the ability with which the musicians produced intricate, complex, yet concise and essential music, without the excessive over-arrangements that characterized many albums of the era.
The band's image was likewise very different from that of many other formations of the time, offering little to no extravagance or rock star poses. Essentially, it had a minimalistic and amateur approach (in the noble sense of the term) that, I would discover over the years, belonged more to certain jazz circles than to rock ones. Years later, I finally bought the album Interview ('76), with the newfound awareness that it was one of the band's last albums, already active for several years and known, especially in Italy, as one of the cornerstones of early '70s English prog rock.

It should be noted that, in the year Interview was released, prog rock was already a memory, destined to break against the rising tide of the burgeoning English punk rock from bands like Clash, Sex Pistols, Wire and the rise of a new aesthetic that suddenly made the music and image of many successful bands from previous years appear prehistoric. As proof of this, '76 was a year of a "crisis" for bands like Yes, Genesis, Van der Graaf Generator, as well as for Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, close to disbanding or on the verge of breaking up. In this historical context, the Gentle Giant confirmed, in my opinion, their nature as an atypical band and their ability to reinvent themselves without losing an ounce of stylistic and compositional effectiveness. In this light, Interview moved away from the typical prog patterns of previous albums (and the era) to rebuild the band's sound on more essential foundations and with the use of more spartan instrumentation, even though this did not automatically mean abandoning their musical directives.

All the tracks on the album (essentially a concept about the world of music) unfold, therefore, on the intricate rhythmic counterpoints of Ray Shulman (bs) and John Weathers (bt), on which are set the tight phrasings of Gary Green (g) and Kerry Minnear (ky), all supporting the vocal performance and high pitches of Derek Shulman.
The opening Interview represents, in my opinion, the best piece of the work: especially worth listening to is the bass theme, which imperceptibly anticipates the main melody of the piece, conducted by Minnear's hiccuping organ, as well as the guitar and keyboard solos in the central break. Also noteworthy are Another World, Give It Back, Empty City and Timing, characterized by a partially new rock setup for the group, and by the detailed interventions of all the musicians: each new listening to the tracks amazes with the apparent simplicity of the musical accompaniments, which appear at first sparse, but gradually reveal deep sound textures.
Very particular, instead, is Design, a choral song accompanied only by drums (!), in which the group's style draws on those medieval influences that characterized much of their previous production, here re-exposed with particular austerity. Finally, noteworthy is the concluding I Lost My Head, a soft hard piece alternating moments of calm with hard rock explosions, well supported by harmonic acoustic guitar arpeggios and incisive electric guitar riffs. The architecture of the track is reminiscent of some contemporary Jethro Tull pieces, although the track is characterized by the group's typical dissonances, rather than the folk rock blend typical of Anderson's band.

Considered by many as a lesser chapter of the Gentle Giant's discography, Interview is a central album for understanding the "sunset" of prog, with the advantage of containing splendid pieces, excellently composed and even better played.