Gentle Giant – The Missing Piece – Steven Wilson remix (Chrysalis Records) – I Betcha Thought they couldn’t do it? The sound of a so called prog rock band trying to deal with life on the battlegrounds during the phoney wars of ’77 when the already old farts of the music were busy throwing the baby out with the bath water and everything else that wasn’t the often tedious  pub rock of The Clash as they desperately tried to save their own bacon. Gentle Giant surely had nothing to prove although they clearly thought they did as they blasted through the new wave flavoured Betcha Thought, the third track on what was Gentle Giant’s ninth album.

An album not far behind Interview and apparently their last album to make the US charts and there they were singing of modern times and and betting that you thought they couldn’t do it –  make a short sharp punk rock song that is. The album, The Missing Piece, is re-issued next month with, rather predictably, Steven Wilson fiddling around with like Cousin Kevin or was it wicked Uncle Ernie?

Half the album was Gentle Giant proving they were down with kids (or the critics who themselves were busy desperately trying to prove they were down with the kids), Gentle Giant  trying to prove they could make pop music or at least slightly punk rock flavoured new wave pop music. And in the middle of the rather hit and miss first side of the album is the strangely very (very) Genesis flavoured (rather excellent) I’m Turning Around that followed the rather spiky slightly desperate album opener Two Weeks in Spain.  It is an odd album, you could argue that all Gentle Giant albums were odd but this one does sound very much like an album made during odd musical times and it really is a game of two halves (or an album of two sides). Was it a deliberate statement being made? Over on side two they kind of stopped messing around and got back to sounding like no one other that Gentle Giant, and when they sound like Gentle Giant should do they do of course sound brilliant. 

 As Old As You’re Young  is where Gentle Giant really go for it here, and when they went for it, they sounded as fresh and exciting as they ever did – they sounded sublime, they made art, they were intricate, properly progressive (not that I was there, I discovered all this sometime later when prog rock really was the last musical taboo and you could pick up second hand albums like this in the basement of the Notting Hill Record and Tape Exchange for 10p a go). Actually Steven Wilson, as much as his band Porcupine Tree bore some of us to death these days, has once again done a rather good job here, he hasn’t fiddled around, he’s been respectful, the detail in tracks like the excellent Winning really does come out.

“It remains a polarizing effort amongst fans to this day, some bemused by its diversity, others enchanted by its versatility and sense of humour” reads the press release, Gentle Giant always did have a sense of humour, they’d sometimes hide just how very very serious they were about it all behind a touch of humour, “The Missing Piece certainly proves that Gentle Giant could play anything they set their minds to” so claims the press release – well yes, of course they could but then no, no they couldn’t! Punk rock was and still is a state of mind, an attitude, they might have been able to strip their sound down but no, they were no punks, they were always Gentle Giant, an excellent, properly progressive artful prog rock band with a pretentious streak (and a neon sign that said so!) and well, as much as they might have been trying a little too hard to prove a point they really didn’t need to prove back in 1977, and as annoying as Two Weeks in Spain can be at times, there’s music on here, things like As Old As You’re Young  or the almost-funk of Winning that are as vital (and as prog as flip) as anything they ever did on their earlier albums.

It still might not be fashionable to say it but all of Gentle Giant’s catalogue remains as rewarding (and as vital) as it ever was and that does include this fine album from the wars of 1977. Okay, so there’s a couple of disappointments on the first side Who Do They Think They Are and Mountain Time don’t really do it – actually if Betcha Thought was made by some obscure no-hit-wonder type of band from the squats of West London, one of those bands who had once opened for The Damned at the Roundhouse and if it had come out on a label like Stiff (and didn’t just fade out like it does), then the kind of people who still go out of their way to tell you (or us) how much they hate bands like Gentle Giant would have loved it and pontificated about it for the next half a century. Hey, Gentle Giant were and are brilliant, these remixes are more than welcome, everything about them besides their awful dress sense and the boring artwork for this album (and not sure about the Two Weeks video they just released to go with this reissue either) was and is cool, go check them out. (sw) 

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And while we’re here, rather like this version we just found… more