NOVEMBER 30, 2020 Updated December 1, 2020

Jim Pinckney aka Stinky Jim is a DJ, writer, broadcaster and producer. His Stinky Grooves show on 95bFM is currently celebrating 30 years on air.

ReadingRoom

Jim Pinckney reviews an ode to a prog-rock band by legendary music writer Gary Steel

I gave progressive rock my best shot on a wet weekend in Barcelona in the mid 1980s. We raided my flatmates older brotherss record collection and proceeded to unscientifically absorb and assess the fiddly fantasies and grandiose virtuosity of the prog-rock movement. Primarily fuelled by criminally cheap gutrot wine from the bodega three floors below, those two days felt so long they may still be carrying on somewhere.

We listened to King Crimson, ELP, Yes, Van Der Graaf Generator and others. It was an arduous and at times ridiculous mission but ultimately time well spent. Prog-rock fans can tend towards zealotry; like conspiracy theorists, if you're going to cross swords with one youd best have some information ammunition.

With a lifetime of keen listening and top-drawer music writing to his name Gary Steel is an excellent man to have an argument with. Over the counter of his much missed Beautiful Music store in K Road we would Statler and Waldorf it on the merits of soporific German ambience versus hectoring dancehall vocalists or a myriad of other musical battlegrounds. Garys got a great mind and formidable knowledge so it was always a respectful, enlightening joust - except when it came to prog, which is where he can get somewhat heated.

Who better then to write a track by track, manual for the faithful, accounting the 10-year lifespan of UK prog legends Gentle Giant. His love for the band is profound, exhaustive and at times wearying. Formed in 1970 after a failed stab at pop stardom as Simon Dupree And The Big Sound, Gentle Giant spent a decade bashing out their own brand of minutely detailed, bumptious baroquenroll. Beloved as a cult outfit, they never really cracked it commercially and a seemingly endless raft of reasons are offered up for that. Curiously an absence of self-awareness and repeated missteps that are only a spontaneously combusting drummer away from Spinal Tap arent among them. By 1980 their final studio album, Civilian, wasnt even getting stocked in some stores and the patience of the press had probably worn out a few years before with the petulant, portentous, anti-media concept album Interview.

Its Garys description of the band as "five hairy, sweaty men on stage going for it" that will be the line that continues to haunt my memory

Gary manages a frugality and focus with his writing that feels refreshingly at odds with the bands why play one note when you can have 15 with a counterpoint in 4/7 time? philosophy. Hoary old rock critic cliches like the incendiary live show or artistic tour de force are pleasantly absent and instead we get "declamatory guitar riffs" and "juicy marimba solos". Tellingly its Garys description of the band as "five hairy, sweaty men on stage going for it" that will be the line that continues to haunt my memory. Its all very very male. Outside of the biographical bookends there isnt a great deal of colour about the players themselves. Presumably the Gentle Giant fanatics already know that form inside out, and theres no mistaking who this is written for.

The oft-trotted out, false dichotomy that casts punk rock as a response to prog and thus its executioner is wisely avoided. Johnny Rotten may have worn an up-cycled Pink Floyd T-shirt with "I Hate" added as a prefix but he was also an avowed fan of Van Der Graaf Generator. There are no absolutes. Punk was as much a reaction to the execrable cabaret mulch polluting the airwaves from the likes of Brotherhood Of Man, Showaddywaddy and the Wurzels as it was to the melanin-challenged boogie of Gentle Giant and their ilk. Unlike Genesis who coalesced in luxury at the centuries old elite Charterhouse School, Gentle Giant were formed around a core of three brothers born in Glasgows notorious Gorbals tenements and raised in Portsmouth. They may well have related to punk's class-battling philosophy considerably better than many of their contemporaries.

Ultimately the wrestling of the zeitgeist from the pompous public schoolers and the dregs of the working mens club scene did everyone a favour, even if its one that Gary sniffs at, saying he first stopped listening to Gentle Giant when he "stupidly bought into (punk), wholesale". Knowing the wide breadth of his taste and knowledge, that's an uncharacteristically disingenuous statement, only really serving to offer up raw meat for the prog balcony and their feelings of victimhood.

After over 120 pages of being on first name terms with Derek, Gary, Kerry, John and Ray I felt I was being lulled into some curious kind of Stockholm Syndrome. It was time to face the elephant in the room - their actual music. Following the authors recommendations and perhaps a little carried away by his eloquent passion I took a curated graze through their back catalogue. I think its kindest to say it very much remains not for everyone.

Gentle Giant: Every album, every song by Gary Steel is available via Sonicbond Publishing

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