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.

Words: Dom Lawson Images: Richard E. Aaron/Redferns/Getty Images

Musical renegades: Gentle Giant.

“The cape-wielding progressive rock behemoth was not in vogue at that point. There was aconscious effort to make it simpler, but there was still our own musical identity at stake.”

Gary Green

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.