Photograph: Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Getty Images Global stars … Jethro Tull in Tokyo, 1972. I thought: ‘I want to try to do something like that, something that’s eclectic.’” “The signposts were the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and then Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. “I loved the blues, but for me it was just a pragmatic way of opening the door, because it wasn’t really what I wanted to do musically,” he says of the band’s path to Aqualung. Tull’s 1971 breakthrough album Aqualung presented the layered medieval rock that might have been played in baronial halls and taverns had amplifiers existed in Elizabethan times. Integral to their success was the fusion of Anderson’s folk-tinged voice, acoustic plucking and rasping flute with Barre’s scorching riffs and John Evans’s rococo keyboards, in intricate songs that often ignored the rules of conventional pop composition. But having made two solo albums in the intervening years, Anderson revived the name for The Zealot Gene, since seven of its 12 tracks were recorded live in the studio by the whole band before the epidemic struck.Īlongside other classic-era progressive rock bands still extant – including King Crimson, Yes and Genesis – Tull went global.
When Anderson dismantled the previous incarnation in 2011 – ending guitarist Martin Barre’s four-decade tenure – Tull seemed over. The 22nd Tull studio album is the first the current lineup has recorded under the band’s name. “I fully understand if people look at my meanderings over many years and think: ‘Oh, if you’re making lists of words, the ones that come to mind about Ian Anderson would be pompous, vain, arrogant and self-indulgent.’ But, hopefully, you might also think serious, studious, passionate and, above all, engaged.” If you’re listing words about me, pompous and vain might come to mind, but hopefully also studious and passionate “I’m an observer, which comes from my brief art history education – I see a picture in my head and I want to illustrate it musically. “The interest I have in a whole variety of subjects, from hard science to the cruel world of politics, is part of who I am,” he says. “Already you could see the way he thrived on division and polarisation, but there’s another five or six almost-dictators who represent populism and the extremes of left and right equally well.”Ĭrucified by rock critics for his ambitious conceptual thinking when Tull were in their 1970s pomp, Anderson is loath for The Zealot Gene to be labelled Tull’s biblical album. “Donald Trump was relatively shiny and new when I wrote the songs,” he says, speaking from his Wiltshire home two weeks before Jethro Tull head to Europe for their first post-Omicron shows. The title track talks about Twitter-happy authoritarian leaders damaging use of social media is an Anderson bugbear.
Mrs Tibbetts is named after the mother of the US air force captain whose B-29 dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima Jesus is wistfully evoked in the acoustic songs interspersed among the album’s spiky rockers. The Zealot Gene explores how these emotions govern life today as they did when the vengeful Old Testament God rained sulphur and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah. Jester minute … Anderson in codpiece on stage, 1974. Mick Jagger’s trousers keep going up and down, so all’s well with the world.”
There are others older than me who are still doing their stuff. His troll-like hair vanished long ago, but that passage of time is “both romantic and encouraging, because it means we can keep on paying our grandchildren’s school fees in our old age. But those of us in arts and entertainment get to die with our boots on, like John Wayne in a black-and-white western.”Īppraising Anderson’s face on my laptop screen, I could easily knock a decade off his 74 years, but it’s still hard to reconcile this loquacious, informed analyser of politics and history with the wild hippy dervish he was circa 1970, famous for playing his flute on one leg.
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“If you’re a professional tennis player and fully vaccinated, you might manage to play on until you’re in your late 30s. “I think I was confusing myself with British Airways pilots who, when they turn 65, are out,” he counters today. W hen I last interviewed Ian Anderson, leader of multimillion-selling prog rockers Jethro Tull, in 1993, he told me that 2000 would be a good time to hang up his flute.
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