The Ian Anderson Interview - Part 2

I spoke with Martin Barre a couple of months ago, and asked him if there was ever a chance of a Jethro Tull reunion with other line-ups or other members. What's your take?

Well, it would be very difficult, because many of them don't play anymore. I was with John Evans, Jeffrey Hammond and Barrie Barlow last week. Sadly, it was to attend the funeral of Jeffrey Hammond's wife, who died of cancer. It was, again, all the more apparent to me that here I was with three people I had played with, even before Jethro Tull. I think it was back in 1966 when we first played together. Those guys, when they left Jethro Tull...Jeffrey Hammond ceased playing immediately and never ever played again. That was in 75 or 76.

(laughs) So, it was a long time ago. And Barrie Barlow doesn't play although he did say to me that he was going to start playing drums again. John Evan doesn't play and can't play. I think he has some kind of problem with his hands, so he is unable to play the piano. It's actually not practical. So, the guys who joined after the original three and were in the band for most of the 70s -- they just don't play. It's impossible to do when the musicians are no longer musicians, sadly (laughs).

On stage, you mention that Tull were once considered a 'progressive rock band that made concept records.' Do you think you could ever feel inclined to put another concept album together?

Well, the last time for Tull, I could especially say that Too Old To Rock And Roll was a kind of a concept album. It grew out of a concept of writing some music for a stage musical. But the three obvious concept albums are Thick As A Brick, Passion Play -- which went to Number One o n the Billboard charts, only briefly. Then many, many years later, I made a concept album as a solo artist, which also got to Number One on the Billboard charts, an album called Divinities. It got to Number One in the Billboard Classical crossover charts, which is no mean feat. That means it probably sold something like 120 records (laughs). But there it was -- at the top of the Billboard chart, so you can't deny that.

If you're doing a concept album and it's instrumental, then it's much more legitimate. It is removed from the pedantic and the awkward and self-conscious conceptual, lyrical album, which does seem a little overblown and a bit difficult. That's why Thick As A Brick worked. It was a bit of fun. You know, pretending the lyrics had been written by a 12-year-old boy. That caught people's imagination. It was a lighthearted send-up. It was a Mike Myers' concept (laughs). Passion Play, on the other hand, was a bit serious and probably failed for a lot of people because it was too serious. It was too downbeat. It didn't have the humor and the sort of self-deprecating standpoint of Thick As A Brick.

But Divinities was an instrumental album that was free as a bird. You can do things within the instrumental context without being misconstrued. It's whole lot easier for Beethoven to make concept albums, if you can refer to his symphonies as concept albums, which I guess you could. But if he had started writing the lyrics, people would have been saying, 'Hey Ludwig, I think you're getting a bit too clever here.'

So, I guess chances are slim you'll be restaging Thick As A Brick or Passion Play and performing them in their entirety?

I know there are a number of people who would enjoy seeing that. But I don't think I have the stomach for it. Partly because I always have a terrible sense of all the things we leave out of a performance. Even though we change our set list, from month to month. If we were to go on and do all of Thick As A Brick, that would be half of a show, and it would cut down on even more of the things we couldn't play. I'm not sure I would want to give that importance to one particular record. Again, I think you have to recall when that was performed live on stage in 1972 -- all being only for a few months -- it was done by a group of musicians who had a certain stage persona with a slightly more theatrical bent. Those aren't the guys in the band today. Sure we could play the music, but I don't think it would have that extra dimension that it had with Jeffrey Hammond, John Evans and Barrie Barlow in the band. For the reasons I mentioned before, playing again isn't an option for these guys. It's best left alone. If the Who want to do it, they can borrow it.

I just received the new Magellan CD on Magna Carta and noticed you appear on it. What do you think of the new wave of 'progrock'?

There are a lot of great bands out there and I frequently listen to that stuff. I'm given a lot of records and a lot of would-be support bands send me their stuff. I hear a lot of it. There are some great bands in Europe doing the contemporary progressive rock thing. There are some that are pretty awful and there are many that are actually very good. Scandinavia is a real hothouse of progressive rock.

I guess I have a preference for those that aren't trying to clone early Genesis, let alone King Crimson, Emerson, Lake and Palmer or Yes. And I guess you really have the big four there that I just mentioned. The archetypal, progrock band that preceded all of them was, of course, Pink Floyd who, back in 1967, performed songs from Pipers At The Gates Of Dawn. That was progressive rock music by any definition. Jethro Tull may have, at some point in time, been associated with that genre -- but only if you apply that term 'progressive rock' in a loose and general sense, in which case you then have to embrace the likes of Radiohead as a more contemporary act, or perhaps some of the Seattle bands of the late 80s and early 90s would qualify in that way.

Some of the mid 80s bands -- I mean, like the Police when they were in full swing, they were kind of a progrock band. Indeed, they had two musicians amongst them who were progressive rock musicians. Maybe not so much Sting. But as a band, they ventured into elements of progressive rock and then more sort of up-tempo, structured pieces. But by broad definition, there's a lot of progressive rock. If we're talking about that historical, defining genre, then we're talking about King Crimson, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, early Genesis, Yes -- that's probably it. I think that's why Jethro Tull always cultivated and kept a degree of looseness and more improvisation, which sort of kept us a little bit away from that structured and more musically refined kind of performance. Progressive rock -- I would tend to use the broader definition unless we're dwelling on the historical moments of some of the early 70s music.
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