Three Friends

Three Friends follows three boys from the playground into adult lives as a manual labourer, an artist and a white-collar worker, and the story ends on a cliffhanger. It was the first album Gentle Giant produced themselves, with Martin Rushent as engineer, and the only one with Malcolm Mortimore on drums. It was also the first to chart in America, at 197.

Schooldays opens with the sounds of an English schoolyard and the voice of a boy, Calvin Shulman. Ray Shulman told Songfacts the song is about how school friends go different ways. Gary Green's solo on Peel the Paint used an echoplex belonging to Mike Ratledge of Soft Machine, borrowed by Green's brother Jeff, a roadie with that band. On the American Columbia edition the marker for track six was in the wrong place, a mistake that was carried onto CDs and streaming services for decades before it was corrected.