Three Friends is Gentle Giant’s first concept album — the story of three schoolboys separated by chance, skill and fate, told across six songs of medieval melody and ferocious rock. Released in 1972, it was also the record that finally introduced them to America.

The short version

Three Friends (1972) is the third studio album by Gentle Giant, self-produced with engineer Martin Rushent. It follows three childhood friends into adulthood: one becomes a labourer, one an artist, one a man of business. The sextet features the three Shulman brothers with Kerry Minnear, Gary Green and new drummer Malcolm Mortimore, who appears on this album alone. Rockier and more direct than Acquiring the Taste, it was their first release in the United States.

Three lives, six songs

The idea, the band explained in the sleeve notes, came out of ordinary conversation among themselves: friends at school, inevitably parted by chance, skill and fate. Each of the three finds his own song. The labourer grinds through ‘Working All Day.’ The artist, disillusioned, gives us ‘Peel the Paint.’ The man who prospered struts through ‘Mister Class and Quality?’ Behind them all, a change had come: drummer Martin Smith departed just before the sessions, and Malcolm Mortimore took his place, bringing a looser, jazzier swing. It would be his only album with the band; John Weathers would follow.

The sound

Three Friends is more direct than the murk of Acquiring the Taste, and rockier than anything they had made. Gary Green’s guitar bites hard, doubled by Kerry Minnear’s buzzing synthesizer; Phil Shulman’s saxophones add grit; Ray Shulman’s violin, multi-tracked and sawing, gives the album its strange, airy centre. Two lead voices — Derek’s hoarse power, Phil’s warmth — trade the story between them. It is the closest Gentle Giant ever came to sounding like their progressive contemporaries, and yet the medieval cadences, jazz turns and sudden dissonances remain wholly their own.

The songs

‘Prologue’ opens on an intricate figure played with the force of a riff, and sets the tale in motion. ‘Schooldays’ is the album’s marvel: vibraphone and electric piano in dreamy crosstalk, a jazzy vibes solo, a child’s voice murmuring beneath the melody, and a piano passage of genuine beauty. ‘Working All Day’ stomps and snarls. ‘Peel the Paint’ begins quietly, almost medieval, before erupting into the fiercest rock the band ever recorded, with Gary Green blazing. ‘Mister Class and Quality?’ struts on a Celtic-blues groove, and the brief title track arrives from nowhere to gather the three lives together.

Reception and legacy

Three Friends broke Gentle Giant in America, where Columbia issued it that autumn and it crept onto the chart — a modest showing, but the beginning of the following that would sustain them. At home it has often been overlooked, caught between the strangeness of Acquiring the Taste and the twin peaks of Octopus and The Power and the Glory. That is unfair. Its second side is among the strongest music they made, and ‘Schooldays’ is a small masterpiece. It also stands as the last album before the classic line-up settled into place.

The verdict

Three Friends is not the first Gentle Giant album to buy — Free Hand and Octopus come first — but it is a splendid record, and more approachable than its predecessor. The concept is handled with unusual restraint, the playing is superb, and the album swings between tenderness and violence in the space of a bar. Come for the dreamlike ‘Schooldays,’ stay for the eruption of ‘Peel the Paint,’ and hear six musicians telling a simple human story in the most extraordinary way.

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