For many, it was Gentle Giant’s last truly great record, but The Missing Piece came out at a challenging time for progressive rock and didn’t get the recognition it perhaps deserved. Forty-seven years on, the band’s ninth album has been refreshed and reissued, much to the joy of old and new fans alike. Guitarist Gary Green, drummer John Weathers and keyboard player Kerry Minnear take Prog on a time jump back to the original record’s creation and reveal how it got its cryptic title.
In 1977, progressive rock entered a very peculiar year. Although still a great commercial force, circumstances were nudging the genre gently towards obsolescence, as the mainstream gaze was redirected elsewhere. For Gentle Giant, a band with unassailable cult status and a loudly proclaimed disregard for convention, changing tastes presented a significant challenge. Recorded at Relight Studios in Hilvarenbeek, the Netherlands, the Portsmouth pioneers’ ninth album was probably destined to clash horribly with everything around it. A diverse and fractious affair, it was, for some, the sound of a band hedging their bets. For others, it was the last truly great album that they would ever make.
Newly remixed by Steven Wilson, The Missing Piece has resurfaced in 2024: ripe for reassessment and considerably more fascinating than truculent cynics would have us believe. Prog spoke with GG guitarist Gary Green, keyboard player Kerry Minnear and drummer John Weathers, to discover whether this notoriously controversial record was a radical, underrated gem or a confused mess. The answer seems to be a bit of both.
“Yeah, well, punk had hit, hadn’t it?” says Green. “I think that threw everyone into a bit of a whirlwind. It did us, for a bit. It’s hard to remember how we felt at the time. All albums are products of who you are at the time, and if you weren’t there, with an understanding of those circumstances, it’s hard to translate that. But that’s a roundabout excuse for saying that we didn’t know what the hell we were doing!”
The notion that punk rock destroyed prog is, in essence, an absolute nonsense, and yet the realisation that Gentle Giant were dabbling in such simplistic waters was more than enough to incite howls of betrayal from many fans at the time. The Missing Piece is not, by any stretch, a punk or new wave album, but songs like Two Weeks In Spain and, in particular, Betcha Thought We Couldn’t Do It, certainly provided a little smoke, if not actual fire.
“It was interesting, wasn’t it?” grins Minnear. “Because I think it was Ray [Shulman, Gentle Giant’s bassi
