INTERVIEW IN CONCERT

There's a lot of live Gentle Giant albums in the market; some are great, some are poor. "Interview In Concert" is a mixed bag: although this particular performance is great (some songs have versions released here which are actually better than its counterparts officially released in "Playing the Fool"), there are some major flaws: this album is an official release of a bootleg, and suffers from poor quality. Worse, some songs are edited: "Proclamation" begins at least one minute after the beggining, the "five men drums bash" at "So Sincere" was cut off and there's a fade in/fade out at the middle of "Free Hand". This album was recorded in New York in July 1976, a few months before "Playing the Fool", and should be a great addition to this album, since it includes "Give it Back", "Interview" and "Timing", which were not released at that album, but those aforementioned problems make this album unessential. Gentle Giant fans may welcome Ray Shulman's fantastic violin solo at "Timing" (in fact, this prevents me of selling my copy), but casual listeners will be disappointed by this badly recorded and poorly packaged album.

If only this was a better recording this would be essential. Gentle Giant were on absolutely stunning form on the night in question. We are treated to a longer than average excerpts from Octopus. Knots alone makes this a good buy even taking the rather low quality recording into account. The Keyboards and the vocals are not that badly recorded, but the top end is rather lacking. Lots and lots of hiss suggest that the original source was a cassette tape.

There are a few warts including the recorder section of "The advent of panarge", which is artistically messy. Some very nice inter song banter. The Material from Interview comes across as strong, and its really nice to hear Derek blowing the sax. I can understand why this got an official release, on Glasshouse, as for fans it really is a bit of a treat, all be it a rather imperfect one. I picked up my copy for £5.00, which I think is reasonable for a bootleg of this quality. Certainly this is listenable with no major distortion. "give it back" is typically in being slightly reworked with some great vibraphone work. Oh before I forget the start of "proclamation" is missing, but the end is really quite surprising.

So how do you grade this, the music it is worthy of 4 or 5 stars, but the recording whilst listenable is far from perfect and deserving only of a 1 star maybe 2. I think 2 is fair for fans, but if your new to GG avoid this for now. Maybe 2 stars suggests a very poor recording, but whilst this recording is not great it is perfectly listenable. In terms of GG's glasshouse official bootlegs this is one of the better ones.