GENTLE GIANT
Front Row Centre: US Dates 1976-1980 MADFISH
THE GENTLE GIANT LIVE EXPERIENCE WAS THAT OF A BAND GIVING THEIR ALL.
A giant box of live vinyl.
Despite having called it a day in 1980, a steady trickle of archival releases over the intervening years has served to enhance Gentle Giant’s reputation. Following 2019’s Unburied Treasure, a sumptuous limited-edition 30-disc live and studio retrospective, this limited-edition 10-LP set of the quintet powering through four North American gigs adds another chapter to their ongoing story.
Like other UK bands at the time, Gentle Giant doggedly attempted to tap into the US market, and, through a combination of hard slog and an ebullient stage show, rippling with an almost precocious level of instrumental virtuosity, their fiery performances garnered them a small but dedicated following despite a somewhat indifferent record company. As is abundantly clear on each of the four LP sets, the Gentle Giant live experience was that of a band giving their all.
Though the music from New York’s Calderone Concert
Hall on July 13, 1976 has previously been issued on CD, its vinyl debut spread over three LPs typifies the ballsy energy the band regularly dispensed, carpet bombing audiences with brutal riffs or dazzling them with disorientating time signatures and truly impressive dynamic leaps and bounds. The next three-LP set sees them return to Calderone Concert Hall in 1977 supporting their ninth studio album, The Missing Piece. Sourced from a previously unreleased tape in guitarist Gary Green’s collection, the rapport between audience and band is carried by visceral edge as they sweep briskly through the setlist.
Although the gig at Pennsylvania’s Widener College on November 18, 1977 was included in Unburied Treasure, here it appears as a two-LP release for the first time. Featuring a photo with the entire band performing a recorder quintet on stage, it shows the wilfully idiosyncratic approach that makes Gentle Giant stand apart from the rest of the groups then doing the rounds. Slipping seamlessly between medieval musicking, five-man drum solos, hocketing and knocking out a polyphonic a cappella canon like they were singing Johnny B Goode, nobody rocked the joint like Gentle Giant.
By their appearance at Georgia’s Agora Ballroom on May 29, 1980 they’d already decided to quit; however, there’s no diminution in the intense onstage forces mustered throughout this double album. Sadly, Front Row Centre is only available in North America, a fact that is understandably a gigantic disappointment for eager European fans. Nevertheless, combined with GG expert Alan Kinsman’s detailed 60-page book and accompanying photos, this is a satisfyingly weighty package.