Interview is Gentle Giant’s wittiest conceit: an album built as a fake interview, in which snatches of a journalist’s questions are spliced between the tracks, and the songs themselves serve as the band’s replies. Released in 1976, it turns the tedium of promotion into seven pieces of dazzling, spiky music.

The short version

Interview (1976) is the eighth studio album by Gentle Giant, self-produced at Advision Studios and released on Chrysalis. Recorded by the quintet of Derek Shulman, Ray Shulman, Kerry Minnear, Gary Green and John Weathers, it uses a mock interview — conducted by the journalist Phil Sutcliffe — as its connecting device. Beneath the joke lies some of their tightest, most rhythmically fearless music, from the pounding title track to the two-part ‘I Lost My Head.’

Answering the questions

Gentle Giant had a difficult relationship with the British press, which largely ignored them. The exception was Phil Sutcliffe of Sounds, a genuine admirer, and it was Sutcliffe whom the band recruited to play the interviewer here, taping a mock conversation and splicing fragments of it between the songs. The title track is a sideswipe at the unimaginative questions bands are always asked; the album that follows answers them in music. It was made under real strain: after the breakthrough of Free Hand, the group were touring three continents, and writing and recording had to be crammed into the gaps. The UK tour that followed proved to be their last at home.

The sound

This is Gentle Giant at their most angular and rhythmically daring. Metres shift beneath the feet, clavinet and Minimoog stab and squelch, Gary Green’s guitar cuts through in sharp lines, and John Weathers drives everything with muscular precision. Derek Shulman sings with a hard, sardonic edge that suits the subject. The recording itself is exceptional: the band were years ahead of most contemporaries in the studio, and Ray Shulman — later a successful producer in his own right — was largely responsible for the extraordinary clarity of their sound. The old madrigal counterpoint is still there, now set against reggae inflections and jagged funk.

The songs

The title track opens with a pounding organ-and-bass figure in three, Derek Shulman spitting the words over soaring guitar. ‘Give It Back’ twitches through a reggae-tinged introduction into verses that lurch between metres, all muted clavinet and ghostly synthesizer. ‘Design’ hands the verses to Kerry Minnear and builds to intricate vocal counterpoint, while ‘Empty City’ offers the album’s tenderest moment. ‘Timing’ sets a glittering cascade of rhythm against the vocal line, and the closing ‘I Lost My Head’ moves in two parts from delicacy to weight, ending the interview on the band’s own terms.

Reception and legacy

Interview did not repeat the commercial success of Free Hand, and Gentle Giant would soon begin trimming their ambitions in search of a wider audience. Yet the album has aged beautifully. Its concept is among the cleverest in progressive rock, mocking the rituals of fame without a trace of self-pity, and its music is lean, sharp and endlessly inventive. Many fans rank it just behind Free Hand and Octopus, and its rhythmic audacity anticipates a great deal of what later progressive bands would attempt. It is the last album on which Gentle Giant sound entirely unafraid.

The verdict

Interview is not the first Gentle Giant album to hear — Free Hand and Octopus come first — but it is a superb second step, and for some listeners it eventually becomes the favourite. Sharp, funny, rhythmically ferocious and beautifully recorded, it captures a band at the height of their powers using those powers to laugh at the machine around them. Come for the swagger of the title track and stay for ‘I Lost My Head,’ and hear five musicians answering every question but the ones they were asked.

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