Musician and songwriter with prog-rockers Gentle Giant
RAY SHULMAN, who has died aged 73, was a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and producer who co-founded the progressive rock group Gentle Giant before going on to work with such acts as the Sugar Cubes, the Icelandic band with whom Björk made her name.
With his brothers Derek and Philip he had been a founding member of Simon Dupree and the Big Sound, who rode the psychedelic wave that washed through pop music in 1967 with their enigmatic Top 10 hit Kites. But Gentle Giant, with their complex arrangements, instrumental virtuosity and sophisticated, literary lyrics, were quite different, and though they were never chart-toppers they amassed a sizeable cult following.
Raymond Shulman was born in Portsmouth on December 8 1949; his two older brothers, Derek and Philip, had been born in Glasgow before the family moved down south.
It was a musical family – their father was an Army trumpeter who played jazz professionally – and Ray took up the trumpet, violin and guitar.
The boys formed an R’N’B outfit in the early 1960s, calling themselves the Howling Wolves, then the Road Runners, settling on Simon Dupree and the Big Sound in 1966 (“Simon Dupree” being the name that lead singer Derek was calling himself ).
They were signed by Parlophone and released Kites, which ticked all the psychedelia boxes with its wind chimes, layered keyboards and a whispered interlude in Mandarin. But the band hated it, Derek Shulman describing it as “utter s---”.
Dudley Moore played piano on one session, while Reg Dwight filled in on a tour of Scotland when their usual keyboard player was ill. One night he played them some of the songs that would feature on his debut album. “We thought it was hilarious and offered him no encouragement at all,” Ray Shulman recalled, “especially when he told us he was going under the name Elton John. [But] we got on so well that Reg wanted to stay with us.”
In 1969 the brothers disbanded the group, wanting to take a more serious direction. The result was Gentle Giant, formed the following year, the multi-instrumentalist brothers (Ray specialising in bass guitar and violin) joined by Gary Green, Kerry Minnear and Martin Smith. Their new name was a nod to Gargantua and Pantagruel from the tales of Rabelais, while their music was a sui generis fusion of rock, blues and classical, with a distinctively formal, almost medieval feel.
Which made their first US tour, supporting Black Sabbath, something of a challenge. “We learnt quickly how to deal with unsympathetic audiences,” recalled Ray Shulman. “We kind of rocked our way out of trouble.”
He wrote much of the music alongside Kerry Minnear, who had studied at the Royal Academy of Music. The band set out their mission on the sleeve notes to their album Acquiring the Taste: “To expand the frontiers of contemporary music at the risk of being very unpopular.”
A series of acclaimed albums followed, including
Octopus (which included a track inspired by RD Laing’s book Knots), In a Glass House
and The Power and the Glory,
but as the decade progressed they came under pressure to make more commercial music. The creative juices stopped flowing and they split in 1980.
Ray Shulman went on to write music for commercials, including a couple for Nike’s Air Jordans, and moved into production: he worked with Björk and the Sugar Cubes; on the Sundays’ 1990 debut album Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, which reached No 4 in the UK; and on
Candleland, the debut solo album by Ian Mcculloch of Echo and the Bunnymen.
But with marathon studio sessions taking over his life, he abandoned production work to write for computer games, DVDS and Blu-rays.
Ray Shulman is survived by his wife Barbara Tanner, and by his brothers.