INTERVIEW

Interview might have a somewhat self-referential concept - the trials and tribulations of the music industry, how very (not) original! - but it's another competent album from Gentle Giant, though I wouldn't put it on the level of its predecessor - there's no tracks on here as moving as His Last Voyage, for example, and on the whole it feels like a rougher than average Gentle Giant album without the polish or the more nuanced moments that listeners had come to expect from them.

That said, I think it's an album that has been sold short simply because it is a merely very good album coming at the end of a string of truly excellent ones. Taken on its own merits, it's an interesting showcase for the heavier side of the band and on Design and Give It Back they experiment with a few world music and reggae-influenced sounds, suggesting an intriguing new experimental direction which, in the end, they didn't take.

It's a shame really - had they stuck to their guns and not lost their nerve, continuing in the direction hinted at on this album, they might have weathered the changes in fashion admirably, but as it is their subsequent studio albums would find them struggling to find their place in the musical world - as though, for the first time in their career, they started to seriously second-guess themselves. Interview itself, then, ends up rather an oddity - a transitional album between the sound of Free Hand and a potential future sound that the group didn't adopt in the end.