Piece Be With You

For many, it was Gentle Giant’s last truly great record, but The Missing Piece came out at a challenging time for progressive rock and didn’t get the recognition it perhaps deserved. Forty-seven years on, the band’s ninth album has been refreshed and reissued, much to the joy of old and new fans alike. Guitarist Gary Green, drummer John Weathers and keyboard player Kerry Minnear take Prog on a time jump back to the original record’s creation and reveal how it got its cryptic title.

Dom Lawson

”The cape-wielding progressive rock behemoth was not in vogue at that point. There was a conscious effort to make it simpler, but there was still our own musical identity at stake.”Gary Green In 1977, progressive rock entered a very peculiar year. Although still a great commercial force, circumstances were nudging the genre gently towards obsolescence, as the mainstream gaze was redirected elsewhere. For Gentle Giant, a band with unassailable cult status and a loudly proclaimed disregard for convention, changing tastes presented a significant challenge. Recorded at Relight Studios in Hilvarenbeek, the Netherlands, the Portsmouth pioneers’ ninth album was probably destined to clash horribly with everything around it. A diverse and fractious affair, it was, for some, the sound of a band hedging their bets. For others, it was the last…

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Prog Italia (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 149

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