Gentle Giant
Betcha Thought We Couldn’t
Noah Shulman explains how he pulled off the impossible: a Gentle Giant reunion!
It was the moment that Gentle
Giant fans thought would never happen: in July, the surviving bandmembers reunited for the first time in 40 years for a virtual recording of
Proclamation. Prog catches up with filmmaker Noah Shulman to find out how he managed to get his dad’s band back together
with the help of their fans.
There are many splendid things about the new version of Gentle Giant epic Proclamation that the band posted online on July 15. But the biggest and best is surely the sight of all seven surviving members of the classic line-ups bellowing ‘Hail!’ onscreen together (albeit remotely, as is the way in 2020).
Conceived and organised by Noah Shulman, filmmaker, Sony Music creative and son of Gentle Giant frontman Derek, the video is an absolute joy. Primarily performed by fans from all over the world, but featuring cameos from Jakko Jakszyk, Billy Sherwood and ARW/Steve Hackett bassist Lee Pomeroy, its chief selling point is the unexpected sight of Derek, Ray and Phil Shulman, Kerry Minnear, Gary Green, John Weathers and Malcolm Mortimore all performing together for the first time in four decades. Given the band’s notorious reluctance to even contemplate a full-blown reunion, Noah deserves a huge pat on the back for pulling off the seemingly impossible.
“Yeah, I’ve done it!” he says with a laugh. “It’s been great. This has struck a chord with my dad and with the whole band. I think they were all much more enthusiastic about it than they expected. It came out better than they hoped, and I’d say the reaction has been pretty incredible. A lot of people have sent me messages, and then if you look at all the comments, it’s clearly hit a nerve. Whether it’s the 40-year gap or whether it’s the turmoil that we’re living in right now, it’s just something positive, with no politics. It’s just a bunch of people from around the world, getting together to play music. Like we said when we announced it, music has the power to bring us together and that message seems to be getting through.”
Pieced together over the last few months, the new version of Proclamation does a superb job of celebrating the intricacy and the strangeness of Gentle Giant’s music, while also bringing a smile to the face of everyone that sees it. It turns out that the band have
“I started sending my dad some of the fan submissions and he realised this thing
was real and it could be a really fun video. So I asked him to sing a few lines and, to be honest, I was surprised how excited and willing he was. It was one of the few times I’ve heard him sing
Gentle Giant music!”
a huge number of talented fans, from all walks of life, and it was just that revelation that seems to have convinced Noah’s father to get involved and deliver his first Gentle Giant vocal in several decades.
“Once I started getting submissions, I started sharing some of them with the band,” Noah recalls. “I think it wasn’t until I started sending [them to] my dad that he realised this thing was real and it could be a really fun video. So I asked him to sing a few lines and, to be honest, I was surprised how excited and willing he was. It was one of the few times I’ve heard him sing Gentle Giant music!”
Noah explains that his motivation for creating the new Proclamation was primarily to find a new way to keep the Gentle Giant legacy alive, hopefully by re-engaging old fans and drawing in new ones too. But, as he admits, there’s also the underlying fact that his dad’s band was done and dusted before he was born. Although members of Gentle Giant have collaborated and even taken the GG material out on the road, there’s never been any serious talk of a reformation and Derek Shulman, in particular, has remained stoically resistant to the idea. Noah rolls his eyes and chuckles.
“I would say I’m probably the one that has nagged him the most about it, probably since I was born! [Laughs] Part of that was never seeing him play or even hearing him sing, apart from maybe a few times when we jammed at Thanksgiving… and that would usually be a Beatles song! [Laughs] It’s a side of my dad that I never got to know or to see, apart from what everyone else sees on videos and old films and stuff, so I think the fascination was with discovering that part of my dad’s life, before I was born. I kept seeing people uploading their renditions of Gentle Giant songs on YouTube, and that slowly brewed over the years into making it an official thing and then making a moment out of it.”
Getting the rest of the band involved deserves a bonus round of applause, too. While not exactly the full reunion that fans continue to hope for, Proclamation comes about as close as anyone is likely to right now, particularly in the midst of a global pandemic.
“It was just an important part of it for me, to get that moment with them all together,” says Noah. “I asked Ray and Kerry, but I didn’t give them any direction, I just said: ‘Pick a moment!’ They ended up with matching
outfits and doing a whole thing with those strange instruments, whatever they were! [Laughs] Gary gave me basically the entire track on guitar. John, I’ve never met and only spoken to about twice, and with his health conditions I knew he wouldn’t be able to play drums, but he gave me a few ‘hail’s, which was good enough!”
It must have been a logistical nightmare to piece the video together, not least given what a complex song Proclamation is!
“Yeah, it wasn’t easy, that’s for sure,” says Noah. “I didn’t know what to expect, how many submissions we’d get or which bits and pieces would come. Some people sent the whole seven minutes and some just sent one or two bars. So yeah, it was complicated. When I eventually got it about 75 per cent right, I sent the files to Ray [Shulman] and he was not happy! [Laughs] He had over 100 layers of audio to deal with, but he really rounded it out and it sounds much better than I was expecting.”
Another unexpected benefit of the Proclamation project was the realisation that Gentle Giant’s fanbase is incredibly diverse and ranges from some very nimble-fingered septuagenarians to sprightly youngsters. It speaks volumes about the durability and quality of the band’s music that they are still mesmerising and inspiring people 40 years after their last album was released.
“It’s a very common comment I keep seeing, that the older fans are feeling really refreshed by seeing younger faces,” Noah notes. “In a way, the next generation is learning and keeping the legacy going. Obviously I didn’t target specific people, it was whatever came in, so it was refreshing to see a wide variety of faces, including women. I know women aren’t so common in prog sometimes. [Laughs.]”
As fans will have noticed, an increasing amount has been going on in Gentle Giant World of late. Following on from the recent series of remixes and remasters, Noah’s animated video for Peel The Paint, multiple vinyl reissues and the colossal Unburied Treasure box set, there will be more unreleased material and new versions of live and studio recordings unveiled during 2021. These will include new mixes of Gentle Giant’s classic 1975 album Free Hand and at least one new album of live material from their heyday. Meanwhile, Noah is keeping the band’s legacy alive online, via the Gentle Giant Instagram page, and also working on a number of other projects to bring the band’s music to a whole new audience that’s grown beyond measure in recent years. It may have taken 40 years to get the ball rolling again, but it would be a shame to stop now, wouldn’t it?
“Well, hopefully we’ll never run out of stuff to release and new things to do,” Noah says. “For instance, I was cleaning out my old room, because my parents had recently redone their apartment, and I was going through some old cassette tapes and I found one that had ‘Gentle Giant, Atlanta’ on it, or something like that, but had nothing else written on it. It was another live show that I think we will eventually put out, amongst all the other live stuff that we’ve found. There’s always a new way to tell an old story and engage new people along the way, you know?”
For more, see www.gentlegiantmusic.com.
“It’s a very common comment I keep seeing, that the older
fans are feeling really refreshed by seeing younger
faces. In a way, the next generation is learning and keeping the legacy going.”