PLAYING THE FOOL - THE OFFICIAL LIVE

Gentle Giant

Eclectic Prog

4.53 | 499 ratings

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Uruk_hai

Review #104

Gentle Giant's official live album is wonderful; it's a compilation of most of the most popular songs from their better albums: "Octopus", "In a glass house", "The power and the glory" and "Free hand" were played almost in their totalities besides one song from each "Three friends", "Interview" and "Gentle Giant", sadly they didn't play any song from "Acquiring the taste" (or at least none of them was included on the record) but as a whole, this album showed how good they were on stage: as good as in the records.

Probably the best original moment of the album is that beautiful instrumental introduction to "On reflection", they used to play it like that alive but it wasn't played like that in the original "Free hand" record. Some other live records of Gentle Giant were published posthumously but none of them reached the quality and popularity as "Playing the fool" did. The experience of seeing one of the most talented and creative Progressive Rock bands ever playing alive should have been amazing. Boy! I wish I was even alive back in those days but this album was published in 1977 and in that year my mom was born.

Absolutely indispensable material!!

SONG RATING: Just the same, 5 Proclamation, 5 On reflection, 5 Excerpts from Octopus, 5 Funny ways, 5 The runaway, 5 Experience, 4 So sincere, 5 Free hand, 5 Breakdown in Brussels, 3 Peel the paint/I lost my head, 5

AVERAGE: 4.73

PERCENTAGE: 94.55

ALBUM RATING: 5 stars

I ranked this album #60 on my TOP 100 favorite Progressive Rock albums of all time.

Uruk_hai | 5/5 | 2021-10-1

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