The Long Play with Al Neff" is a continuing Sunday evening Feature on The GOAT. This year, Every Sunday Evening, Album Rock WXYG, The GOAT will feature a full album at 8:00 PM from the halcyon musical days of 1971.

1971 was Quite an amazing year in Album Rock history. Gonna be a tough choice every week. So many great ones to choose from.

We hope you’ll tune in next Sunday Night, July 25, 2021 at 8:00 PM for “McDonald and Giles”, the self titled album from Ian McDonald and Michael Giles.

The McDonald and Giles album was recorded at Island Studios between May and July 1970, and released in the U.S. in 1971. McDonald and Giles continues to remain popular among King Crimson fans to this day. The duo did not record a second album.
Ian McDonald and Michael Giles were members of the original King Crimson line-up, and were featured performers on the band's debut album, In the Court of the Crimson King (1969). Both left the group at the end of its first United States tour in 1969, although Giles appeared on the second King Crimson album, In the Wake of Poseidon (1970), as a session musician. Two other King Crimson members also worked on McDonald and Giles: Peter Giles and Peter Sinfield.

The music on McDonald and Giles contains many of the pastoral and musically complex elements of King Crimson, while generally avoiding that band's darker tendencies. The song "Flight of the Ibis" has a melody and rhythm similar to King Crimson's "Cadence and Cascade", with different lyrics. The album contains a guest appearance by Steve Winwood, playing organ and piano on "Turnham Green". Winwood's group Traffic were working on John Barleycorn Must Die at Island Studios at the same time.

Michael Giles' drum solo in "Tomorrow's People – The Children of Today" has been sampled by a number of rap and hip-hop artists, most notably the Beastie Boys, on the track "Body Movin'" from the album Hello Nasty.

'McDonald and Giles' is one of the best-kept musical secrets of the 1970's. One wonders if 'McDonald and Giles' was, in some ways, a prototype for Mike Oldfield's 'Tubular Bells' with its multi-sectional, almost one-man approach in recording a complete musical work. Ian McDonald has said that Island records were reluctant to release the album at the time, and that he also had reservations about it. Its strengths lie in its careful structural and dynamic pacing. From a sonic viewpoint the album is excellently produced, with the bass and drums used in a virtuoso-like way, leaving McDonald to add, in places, inventive and economic quasi-improvised instrumental parts. The words, particularly those of 'Birdman', are evocative and colorful bringing into play powerful archetypes, and their musical potential has been fully realized by McDonald.

Tune In and Turn On Next Sunday Evening, July 25th,.and every Sunday evening at 8:00 PM for The GOAT'S "The Long Play with Al Neff.”

Don’t forget, right after the “Long Play”, we do a “Replay” of this week’s GOAT GUEST DJ SHOW.