A Conversation with Gentle Giant’s Derek Shulman – HuffPost 7.28.14
Mike Ragogna: The Power & The Glory is getting a huge reissue treatment–expanded with a Blu-ray of remixes and more. How did the idea to majorly celebrate this album begin?
Derek Shulman: It actually started from a fan and a co-conspirator in our musical world, a guy called Steven Wilson who was the leader/main man of a band called Porcupine Tree in the UK. Fantastic musician. For whatever reason he was enamored by our band who in fact hadn’t performed and hasn’t performed since probably about 1980, so that’s thirty four years. He kept asking my brother, who has worked with him on several projects, “If you have the original 24 tracks, please let me remix some albums of yours. I think I can help put a little edge on some things that you might want to have had back in the day and you didn’t have time for, etc.” We figured, look, he’s a very good musician, a guy who we admire, so I said, “Hey, listen Steven, give it a shot, whatever you want to do. Make it the way you want to do it.” We gave him the tapes. We actually had them back in our possession from our license, so we actually own the masters. He basically kept pretty true to what the original style was but amplified and expanded it all with bits and pieces of things we wouldn’t have done back in the day. It came from him, that’s the bottom line. We would never have touched it. He was the propagator of this release and others, which are forthcoming.
MR: There are more coming?
DS: Yes, indeed! The fact that this has gotten so much press and excitement from our four fans out there… [laughs] No, the fact that it sounds better, not the least because we’re having someone look at it objectively. We figured, “Yeah, listen, why not give other albums a shot,” and at the same time utilize my brother’s skills at illustrating via motion graphics and video to highlight the songs and the stories.
MR: Do you feel that Gentle Giant’s music lends itself to visuals and effects like how he approached it?
DS: Yeah, actually. That’s an interesting question, which I’ve never been asked. I think it does because the songs…well, they’re not really songs, they’re music. If you listen to the music of Gentle Giant, you’ll hear the vocal lines are always part of the musical entity. I don’t want to sound pompous or pretentious, but we compose in a classical mode, so there were always themes and even the vocal lines were partly to do with the themes of the musical composition as opposed to a song line and a chord pattern and a bass drum and a kick drum and a bass line, there was always a theme to whatever piece we had. So yes, I think it does.
MR: Would you consider your music to be prog rock?
DS: [laughs] I still am quite scratching my head about that term.
MR: In your opinion, how did “prog” get such a bad rap?
DS: I think the connotation was possibly from artists in the same ilk. I don’t know if we belong in that same ilk or not. We weren’t trying to be any kind of category band. But I think the term was kind of derogatory back in the day primarily because some of the music was pompous, to be honest with you, with mellotron keyboards that dragged on for five or ten minutes and meant nothing except that it sounded like a string orchestra, which it wasn’t. We never did that. First of all, we never took ourselves that seriously. Even though we were fairly decent musicians. I think we’re self-deprecating to a certain degree but we were also musicians who pushed ourselves to be better for ourselves first. That’s something we were pretty cocooned in. As far as wanting to be something or have a title, that wasn’t on our radar at all. However we’re termed, we don’t care as long as somebody enjoyed it. At least we five musicians enjoyed it.
MR: What was the creative process like? Did the lyrics drive the music or vice versa?
DS: They went hand-in-hand to be honest with you. I think usually the musical content would come from Kerry Minnear who was our keyboardist. He was a graduate from The Royal Academy Of Music in composition studying under Sir Michael Tippett. My brother Ray was a classically trained violinist. They’d come up with a couple of ideas and they’d combine them together and then I’d come in with some ideas musically. The ideas, which were paragraphs, would lend themselves to a lyrical topic, so gradually these pieces of music evolved on their own, but it came initially from music first. To be honest with you the actual instruments evoked some other lyrical content and then we’d try to integrate those two things into one piece of music. It was kind of like an ebb and flow of whatever came first. But generally it was from the composition first. Then after a few lines of the composition, a lyrical idea would come together and then we’d integrate the rest of the song and the music into the lyrical content and it would all come together.
MR: And then did the songs drive the concept of the album? Once you found a couple of songs that fit together, was it then time to fill in the blanks?
DS: Well, The Power & The Glory, in particular, was a “concept,” although that is kind of a hack term in certain respects. It was one that I thought was important because it was the days of Watergate and a lot of other things were happening during that period. It was the corruption of power and the people who are hoping that the people who are on top would help them, but ultimately got nothing was something to be said in that day and age, and also something to be said in this day and age. It’s kind of like an overall story. We were fairly educated as people so it came naturally to make the songs sound fairly interesting both lyrically and musically.
MR: Gentle Giant albums were released on a couple of different labels, including Columbia. Did all of those masters return to you?
DS: Just about most of the material did. There are still a couple of albums, which are in Sony’s grubby little hands. [laughs] For the most part, they came back to the band in North America, that is. We were able to extricate them to our own grubby little hands and at least get a few pennies out of the meager sales that are ongoing. We were fairly fortunate in that respect with Capitol and Sony/Columbia. I’m making fun of them, but they’ve been very helpful, actually in that respect.
MR: I remember an international, double disc collection that went back all the way to the beginning. It was a really nice piece. It’s unfortunate that the United States has never had a proper compilation of Gentle Giant. It would be a nice education, and I think you’d probably be surprised at the appreciation of it by old and new fans.
DS: There are plans with me and my brother Ray to put all our grey heads together and say, “Okay, look, apparently we didn’t die, and apparently there’s still interest in this band.” There are a few things we have under our stoles to make happen. In fact some of the more interesting things are a cut that came out of the blue. I want to tell you that this music has affected some other forms, in fact, much more contemporary forms of music. I went by The Tonight Show a couple of times. Jimmy Fallon and Questlove and The Roots were there. Questlove–Ahmir Thompson–is a humongous fan apparently, which I had no idea about. He requested for us to send him the stems of The Power & The Glory. He said he wants to remix the album himself as well as Steven Wilson and do hip hop/contemporary version with–I don’t know if he’s going to bring in the DJs or Jay-Z or God knows what. Whatever it is, there’s lots of things that possibly can happen in the next twelve to eighteen months.
MR: That’s wonderful. What advice do you have for new artists?
DS: Well, obviously, the record business these days is almost nonexistent, but music is still integral to everyone’s life. As far as new music is concerned, I would say don’t just look to get your music on YouTube or Facebook and hope you’re going to be famous because you’ve had a hundred million views, because it doesn’t work that way. What you have to do first is make yourself a better muscian for yourself first. If you’re in a band, make sure your band becomes a better group, musically, in whatever genre you’re working in. Be great, not good. You’ll never have any success if you’re just good. If you want to be the leader in any field, whatever it is, you really have to not look at someone else’s place on the charts and say, “Wow, I could be that,” you have to do it on your own, and you have to do something that is only yours alone and be great at it. In some respects–and this is on an ego push myself–you asked about being a part of a prog movement. We didn’t know what prog was, we were just a bunch of musicians who said, “Let’s get together and make a band.” We had no idea what it would sound like, but we had a bunch of really good musicians making ourselves better for each other. And if we made ourselves better for each other, perhaps the city would like to hear it, and then it went from there. We really worked hard at it and played and toured and, lo and behold, some people came along. The year after that, a few more people came along, and we were able to build a career and make a living. And we didn’t listen to the radio apart from toward the end perhaps. The music I guess still lives in that respect. In so saying, it appears that if you do that, the music will survive.
MR: What does the future look like for Gentle Giant?
DS: There isn’t one, really.
MR: No small reunion?
DS: No. The thing that is important–certainly to me and my brother Ray–is we closed that chapter. You can’t rewrite history and if you try to, it becomes really besmirched. I don’t want to be a parody of myself and I don’t think any member of the band would want to be a parody of themself either. We can teach and, hopefully, younger artists will be enamored by it. But to try and replicate what we did or be who we were back in the day would be impossible. I don’t want to be a grizzled old man trying to jump around on stage and play the same music and smear whatever minor legacy we have. I don’t think that’s going to work at all.
Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne