Book Review: Giant Steps by Derek Shulman

Disclosure: I received an advanced review copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Gentle Giant are one of those bands that intimidated me when I was getting into prog rock in my undergrad years. What exactly makes a band intimidating to me? Usually a long discography, but that’s not really the case with Gentle Giant. They recorded music from 1970-1980, and never reunited or recorded an album again. Gentle Giant aren’t mainstream and they always went against the grain and avoided cliches, and that made it challenging for labels to market them. At the end of the day, record labels care about the bottom line and see music as business, not art. Throughout their 10 year history, they never had a top 40 single. So it’s not likely you’ll get into them through osmosis like you would with The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, or Queen, where the music is frequently heard on the radio and is in adverts and movie soundtracks. They’re really more of a cult favourite with loyal fans, and not all of them are nerdy white guys. In fact, quite a few hip hop musicians sampled Gentle Giant. So I’m going into this book as a new listener and I think there’s something valuable about that perspective. I love progressive rock and I love a good story so I’m going in with an open, curious mind.

What if I told you there’s much more to the Gentle Giant story than that? Who better to hear about that story than a band member? Enter Derek Shulman, lead vocalist for Simon Dupree & The Big Sound and Gentle Giant turned record executive. This is a story of a rock band with many layers and eras. So many connections and surprises throughout!

Humble Beginnings… and I really mean humble

As you can tell from the name, the Shulman brothers are Jewish. Their ancestors fled to the UK from Poland, being among the many Jews who had escaped pogroms. When they left Poland, they thought that they were going to America, and they were surprised to have ended up in the UK. While the brothers weren’t very religious, they still followed a lot of the traditions. Phil and Derek were both born in Glasgow, Scotland. The family were living in a tenement building. Not long after Derek was born, the family moved to Portsmouth, England, on the South Coast. Quite a big move! Ray Shulman was born in Portsmouth. The brothers had grown up in poverty and were much poorer than their peers at grammar school, especially the other Jewish students. They shared a single bed, their home was draughty, their toilet was in an outhouse in the backyard, and they took baths with the same bathwater. Their father Louis was a jazz musician and he lived a life of excess, smoking up to 60 cigarettes a day. In the 60s, Louis had suddenly died of a heart attack. His children saw him dying right in front of him and were traumatised, but they did have an important takeaway: treasure your life, make the most of it, and take good care of yourself. That’s why Derek Shulman eschewed the sex, drugs, and rock and roll lifestyle. It wasn’t until decades later that Derek Shulman found out he had PTSD from it.

Music helped the Shulman brothers get through adversity. This being the 60s, their biggest inspirations were The Beatles, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Muddy Waters, and BB King. They got into R&B music because of the American Forces Radio Network. Much like others of his generation, Derek’s life would change forever the moment he first heard The Beatles, like the world had gone from black and white to Technicolor. Much like their father, they worked hard, honing their craft and playing as many gigs as they could. Their mission was to make music that their dad would be proud of and to help support their mother, who had made so many sacrifices for them. While in secondary school, Derek told his teacher he wanted to be a pop star and his teacher ridiculed him, saying that it will never happen. Instead of giving up, Derek was determined to prove him wrong. He did just that, crossing paths with the biggest names in rock and roll as both a musician and working behind the scenes with record labels.

The 60s: Simon Dupree & The Big Sound

A lot of rock bands with a name in them are a reference to a band member, but there is no one actually named Simon Dupree in the band. Who was Simon Dupree? In the book, it says that Simon Dupree was the first Lord Mayor of Portsmouth, but when cross-referencing, I didn’t find any mayor named Simon Dupree, but I did find there was a Sir William Dupree who was mayor of Portsmouth in the 1900s. Much like other 60s groups, they went by other names before picking the one everyone knows and loves. They were previously called the Howling Wolves and The Roadrunners, homages to their R&B inspirations. While Derek and Ray were only a couple of years apart in age, older brother Phil is a decade older than Derek, being born in 1937, a whole different generation from his younger brothers. He was in a different place in life, having a career as a teacher and a family of his own. Derek was the frontman and took on the role/stage name of Simon Dupree. Quite a common trope among Jewish celebrities is to have a more gentile stage name. Ray played violin, but later learnt bass and he was a talented multi-instrumentalist. Phil played trumpet and saxophone. They started off playing R&B, but jumped on the psychedelic rock train and that’s how they got bigger as a band.

The group were only active between 1967 and 1969, but they had a big hit with “Kites” (which took inspiration from Traffic’s “Hole In My Shoe” with its spoken word bit) and they got a lot to tour in Europe, appear on shows like Beat-Club, and record at the world-famous Abbey Road Studios. Not only that, but when their keyboard player Eric Hine was unwell, a pre-fame Elton John, then known as his birth name Reginald Dwight filled in. While recording at Abbey Road, they took the opportunity to jump on John Lennon’s bed like kids, and suddenly John and Yoko walked in and scolded them.

Fans of my book Crime of the Century: Classic Rock & True Crime will find the mafia parts of the story interesting. Like wait, there’s another sibling group that were only a couple of degrees of separation from the Kray Twins? Yup! Behind the scenes, there are quite a few venue owners and managers who had organised crime ties. When you’re a young rock musician in the 60s, you might be naive and trusting, not only with the people you work with, but also with the contracts you sign. In this book you’ll find stories of Gentle Giant working with Wilf Pine (an associate of the Krays) and Don Arden, the latter being the notorious manager who ripped off The Small Faces and Black Sabbath.

From Simon Dupree & The Big Sound to Gentle Giant

Great musicians aren’t complacent. They’re always evolving, growing, and changing with the times. After recording some psychedelic songs as “The Moles” and having Syd Barrett blow their cover (Derek really wasn’t happy about this), Simon Dupree & The Big Sound were ready to move on. The Shulman brothers were serious about playing rock music and wanted to do something more experimental and complex to feel more fulfilled as musicians. Another objective of their new project was to always try something new and not become a band just playing the hits. Always working hard and always passionate about what they’re doing, that’s the Gentle Giant way.

One thing that both band names had in common is that they were references to how they sounded. The Big Sound came from a gig review Simon Dupree received in the early days and Gentle Giant was a description of how they sounded. Prog rock is famous for having long songs with multiple movements and changing time signatures. One second a song can sound really mellow and soft, but the next second it can sound heavy and loud. That along with the incredible musicianship is the fun and appeal of prog rock. They needed new musicians so they hired Kerry Minnear and Gary Green. They had multiple drummers over the years: Martin Smith, Malcolm Mortimore, and finally John Weathers (who was with the band for 8 years, from 1972-1980 – Derek described him as a Giant among Giants).

What exactly inspired Gentle Giant’s sound? it’s very different from Simon Dupree. Well, the story begins when the Shulmans were chatting with their friend Elton John, telling him they wanted to go in a new direction. Elton John knows his music and he suggested they listen to Spirit, Frank Zappa, and Miles Davis for inspiration. They weren’t the first prog rock band to have a pop or psychedelic era. King Crimson’s Robert Fripp was in a group called The League of Gentlemen and Yes were made up of members of Mabel Greer’s Toyshop and Steve Howe was in a couple of psychedelic rock bands like Tomorrow and Bodast. Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd was psych, but Roger Waters era was more prog and conceptual. Rush recorded a cover of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” early on in their career. Genesis’s debut album had the Bee Gees pastiche “The Silent Sun”. Manfred Mann started off playing R&B before he went into jazz rock with Chapter Three and prog rock with Manfred Mann’s Earth Band. So it’s safe to say there’s a precedent.

Tony Visconti, who was very in demand at that time, as he was working with T Rex and David Bowie, produced the band’s self-titled debut. He also wrote the foreword of the book and spun a great tale in the liner notes, making him a skilled writer. That’s not the only Bowie connection. The distinct looking album cover, which became a big part of Gentle Giant’s iconography, was designed by a friend of David Bowie’s named George Underwood. Yes, that George Underwood who punched Bowie in the eye, giving him a permanently dilated pupil (not heterochromia!). To promote this album, Gentle Giant toured with Black Sabbath and opened for Slade at the Marquee Club. Early on, they got the praise of fellow prog rockers Jethro Tull, heavy metal pioneers Black Sabbath, and their idol Frank Zappa.

The band’s manager Gerry Bron (brother of Help! actress Eleanor Bron) was keen to get Gentle Giant back in the studio to record their sophomore album, Acquiring The Taste. They were incredibly busy performing and this was the first and only time they hadn’t fully written the songs before going into the studio.

Their following album Three Friends is a concept album based on their upbringing being working class kids from Portsmouth with themes of friendship and social class. There’s a really scary story related to the recording of this album. While on the way to the studio, travelling in their van, they’d lost control and the van tumbled and landed just in the right place. Just a few inches away and they would have been dead. They remained stoic when recording, incredibly focused and motivated. There were highs when touring this album, opening for Jethro Tull, but also some lows, like an ill-fated tour opening for a Jimi Hendrix concert film Jimi Plays Berkeley.

Octopus, released in 1972 is one of their most famous albums and it has a lot of literary influences including François Rabelais, Albert Camus, and R.D. Laing. Fans often consider it their best album. In 1972, they went on their first US tour, sharing bills with Black Sabbath, Yes, and The Eagles.

You might expect them to be rich at this point – touring overseas and having a major label record deal, but the reality is they were experiencing their own moneygoround. Worldwide Artistes Management owed them six figures. If you know the story of Steve Marriott, you’ll know that one does not simply confront the mafia, especially if they have ties to the British mafia and Sicilian mafia. Their tour manager told them about the ripoff going on in the company and not long after he warned them, he was dead. There’s strength in numbers so Gentle Giant, Black Sabbath, and The Groundhogs banded together and confronted their management. This experience made Derek very well qualified to work behind the scenes as a record label executive, looking after the artists’ best interests. After a tour of Italy, oldest brother Phil felt homesick and left the band, leaving Gentle Giant as a five piece band. Music is very therapeutic and they leaned into Phil’s departure and critics calling them when writing lyrics for In A Glass House.

By the mid-late 70s, the music world was moving on from glam and prog. The music press can be very fickle and always looking for the next hot thing in music and they were moving onto punk, disco, new wave, and the next wave of power pop. Prog rockers were called self-indulgent and pretentious. After 11 studio albums released in a decade, Gentle Giant disbanded and never played again, the end of an era, and very sad news for us Millennial and Gen Z prog rock fans.

Derek Shulman: Radio Promo, A&R, and Record Label Executive

The story doesn’t end with Gentle Giant. After leaving Gentle Giant, both Derek and Ray worked behind the scenes. Ray produced for bands like The Sugarcubes, The Sundays, Trashcan Sinatras, and Ian McCulloch and The Defects. Ray didn’t quit making music entirely. In the 90s, he made some music for video games like Privateer 2: The Darkening and Azrael’s Tear. Ray died in 2023 at the age of 73.

Derek shares many interesting stories of working with the likes of Paul Weller, Bon Jovi (Derek discovered them and gave them their first record deal with Mercury Records), Cinderella, Kingdom Come, Pantera, Dream Theater, and AC/DC. If you’re a fan of 80s and 90s hard rock and metal, you’ll like this section.

My favourite story in this section is when he’s in a conference room with the Insane Clown Posse and Twiztid and the latter are playing their signature song “Diemuthafuckadie” and he hears a familiar riff and the group are bopping their heads to it. Derek innocently asks if they know who they’ve sampled. They tell him, without realising he was in that band, that it’s a song called “Spooky Boogie” by a totally unknown rock band called Gentle Giant. In the end, Gentle Giant got a settlement from Twiztid and ICP’s label Psychopathic Records.

One happy story from this section is when Questlove recognised Derek Shulman and asked him for his autograph.

Conclusion/Final Thoughts

If you’re a Gentle Giant fan, you’ll definitely enjoy the book. It’s got eras, tea spilling (sometimes he names names, but sometimes he doesn’t), and it’s a truly comprehensive look at Derek Shulman’s career from Simon Dupree to Gentle Giant to working behind the scenes in music. If you like the album by album approach, you’ll love this book since there’s stories behind every album. Lots of crazy stories that sound like they’re out of a movie with the way the story was told. An incredible career for sure! Giant Steps: My Improbable Journey From Stage Lights to Executive Heights will be published on October 7. Signed copies can be pre-ordered from the Gentle Giant webstore until July 31, so don’t delay if you want a signed copy! If you’re reading this review after 31 July, you can purchase a copy of the book through Gentle Giant’s official website here.

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