Ian Anderson interviews

[maddogfagin]

Rhein-Zeitung: 17.11.2014, 13:16

Ian Anderson Interview: Music of Jethro Tull live ever

Link to article

Koblenz. In the late 1960s resembled the probably the only serious rock flutist rather Catweazle, today rather Manfred Krug. The uncomfortable, persisting on independence Ian Anderson Jethro Tull has founded, still playing the old hits, but more diligently composed new works.

The 67-year-old Scot, who in the Koblenz Conlog occurs Arena on Saturday, spoke to our newspaper not only about music topics.

You have begun in 1963, playing in bands, especially blues. It was rather the White British category of Alexis Korner to John Mayall and the African American Robert Johnson to Muddy Waters, you then so attracted?

Mainly acoustic blues. I was never a fan of electric, loud rhythm & blues. But the acoustic side of Muddy Waters and then the Folk-Blues by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, I liked immediately. JB Lenoir was also my particular favorite. But I knew then, I have both been considered in my heart, and in the mirror I realized I'm not really black. And to be an American imitation, that was not a viable long term solution for me to find my own style.

"This Was", the first disc of Jethro Tull (1968) was still partially very bluesy, but folk-jazz elements also already appeared on as the swinging "Serenade to a Cuckoo" by Roland Kirk. The following drives away more and more of these roots. They had probably at that time the amazing idea by the title "This Was" the band so to speak of the future of to consider: The Jethro Tull were in 1968! Now Progressive rock is announced!

Yes, I knew that the name "This Was" was important for me as a songwriter, that this first album, viewed in retrospect, was a warm-up to get the option of a conceptualization. It was not the actual race ... "Stand Up", the second studio disc from the year, then was the first real Jethro Tull-album, on which my songs and my music received more individuality and the tone specified for the nascent Progressive rock. The influences were extensive from classical to folk to Mediterranean and even Far Eastern music. A little bluesy influence was still present, as in the first song "A New Day Yesterday".

Then came Woodstock (1969), and they refused, because to occur. And also the big festival on the Isle of Wight (1970), then played Jethro Tull? What were the reasons?

Woodstock was marked by naked hippies. No one would walk around without clothes in a cold, wet English summer. And more beer and less drugs on the Isle of Wight was consumed. At the time, as Jethro Tull occurred upstream on the south coast island, the band was more strengthened and established. Woodstock was definitely too early for us and would have brought us forever with hippies and drug matters.

Guitarist Tony Iommi had with you made an appearance in the Rolling Stones film 'The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus "(1968). If he were actually entered for you (for Mick Abrahams) and not Black Sabbath had founded, the face of rock music would then not become a something else?

Tony has helped out that day. We had previously taken us to sample, and we played for fun together, Tony and I were. At the idea that he could go into the touring band But his musical style integrated more monotone riffs, as he on his fingers could no longer anything particularly complicated to play because of injuries. And some of my stuff I wrote then (for the album "Stand Up"), had different approaches to the difficult guitar music. Anyway, it was so clearly better for the music world, that Tony stayed with the band Earth, which was shortly afterwards to Black Sabbath.

Prog Rock is challenging music. And with the striking use of flute you have this direction also awarded a special touch to the end of the 60s. How did you come to this instrument?

When I heard Eric Clapton in 1967, I was convinced, as a guitar player from this class, I would never be. Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and Ritchie Blackmore have this feeling intensified. But fortunately none of them could play the flute. The violin was too difficult for me, and the flute seemed more suitable and easier to handle and to be less obvious blues-oriented than the harmonica and to work in a position with folk and classical forms. Since I was 20 years old, I learned the instrument quickly.

Currently you are traveling as Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson and also your new album "Homo Erraticus" before. At the same time her former touring guitarist and second longest Tuller (from 1969) as Martin Barre's Jethro Tull & Band. What are the reasons for the split, and it is final?

There were about 28 members at the annual Jethro Tull. And in my last phase of life I want to make my name known better before I bless the temporal. For many people, I am Jethro Tull or Mister. I do not care if it's worn out after 46 years, but I was always embarrassed given the naming by our former manager and whether the identity theft, the result was the real historical names (English agricultural pioneer) to do business. The music of Jethro Tull lives on - whether by me, Martin Barre or one of the former band members. It is also great that Martin Barre now organized his own musical life. Our interaction in the future is open. In the moment in which we have both projects and tours with own separate new songs as well as Jethro Tull-repertoire, the people themselves are used to it.

Questions by Michael Schaust

Ian Anderson occurs on Saturday, on 22 November, 20 clock, in the Koblenz Conlog Arena.
Tickets for the concert are available at www.rhein-zeitung.de/Tickets and tel. [phone].

[Deleted]

From the future;>) Last updated 05:00, December 7 2014 - MICHELLE DUFF
Jethro Tull frontman: 'Music is what I do'
read more: www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/music/63811274/jethro-tull-frontman-music-is-what-i-do
"You got a problem with that, lady?" Ian Anderson growls down the phone. I try to protest, but he is on a roll.

"Don't expect to get a warm welcome if you tail me to a place I'm staying the night. I think you need to accept it's not on, it's not fun and games to do that. From me it's going to be received with disdain and anger."

It's about 15 minutes into an interview with Anderson...

[maddogfagin]

Dec 6, 2014 16:10:50 GMT @tootull said:

From the future;>) Last updated 05:00, December 7 2014 - MICHELLE DUFF
Jethro Tull frontman: 'Music is what I do'
read more: www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/music/63811274/jethro-tull-frontman-music-is-what-i-do
"You got a problem with that, lady?" Ian Anderson growls down the phone. I try to protest, but he is on a roll.

"Don't expect to get a warm welcome if you tail me to a place I'm staying the night. I think you need to accept it's not on, it's not fun and games to do that. From me it's going to be received with disdain and anger."

It's about 15 minutes into an interview with Anderson...

"Sometimes fans will go beyond what is acceptable and it's not fun and games to see if you can get this information about hotels or email addresses or whatever, you really are encroaching on someone's space. Go to town but if you get a punch in the face, be warned. I'm 67 years old but I can still punch you in the testicles."

[maddogfagin]

www.elsewhere.co.nz/

IAN ANDERSON INTERVIEWED (2014): The view from the top

By Graham Reid, posted Dec 16, 2014

It was over 20 years ago that I spoke to Ian Anderson, the founder of Jethro Tull and the sole constant in that remarkably durable prog-rock band, and I have never forgotten the experience.

That man could talk and talk and talk . . .

Link to interview

[ash]

Dec 6, 2014 18:14:08 GMT maddogfagin said:

Dec 6, 2014 16:10:50 GMT @tootull said:

From the future;>) Last updated 05:00, December 7 2014 - MICHELLE DUFF
Jethro Tull frontman: 'Music is what I do'
read more: www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/music/63811274/jethro-tull-frontman-music-is-what-i-do
"You got a problem with that, lady?" Ian Anderson growls down the phone. I try to protest, but he is on a roll.

"Don't expect to get a warm welcome if you tail me to a place I'm staying the night. I think you need to accept it's not on, it's not fun and games to do that. From me it's going to be received with disdain and anger."

It's about 15 minutes into an interview with Anderson...

"Sometimes fans will go beyond what is acceptable and it's not fun and games to see if you can get this information about hotels or email addresses or whatever, you really are encroaching on someone's space. Go to town but if you get a punch in the face, be warned. I'm 67 years old but I can still punch you in the testicles."

I hope I haven't booked into the same hotel as Ian when I see them at the Holland gig. It could be a painful stay

[nonrabbit]

Jan 8, 2015 18:53:27 GMT ash said:

Dec 6, 2014 18:14:08 GMT maddogfagin said:

"Sometimes fans will go beyond what is acceptable and it's not fun and games to see if you can get this information about hotels or email addresses or whatever, you really are encroaching on someone's space. Go to town but if you get a punch in the face, be warned. I'm 67 years old but I can still punch you in the testicles."

I hope I haven't booked into the same hotel as Ian when I see them at the Holland gig. It could be a painful stay

[ash]

Jan 8, 2015 23:01:18 GMT nonrabbit said:

Jan 8, 2015 18:53:27 GMT ash said:

I hope I haven't booked into the same hotel as Ian when I see them at the Holland gig. It could be a painful stay

Funny thing is I'm staying at the Mother Goose hotel www.mothergoosehotel.com/ which may attract Ian to stay there or a bearded lady

[maddogfagin]

www.forbes.com/sites/jimclash/2015/01/13/space-enthusiast-ian-anderson-still-rocks-the-house-but-not-rr-hall-of-fame/

Space Enthusiast Ian Anderson Still Rocks The House (But Not R&R Hall Of Fame)
Jim Clash 1/13/2015 @ 9:30PM

This past fall, Ian Anderson had the pleasure of introducing Shuttle astronaut Catherine “Cady” Coleman at The Explorers Club. In typical Anderson fashion, the Jethro Tull front man, via Skype, provided a poignant yet humorous opening. “Ladies and gentlemen from the planet Earth, give a warm welcome to that great space rock chick of the flute – cuddly Cady on the outside, but a steely hard-nosed professional underneath. Look out, here comes Col. Catherine Coleman!”

Coleman was delighted with the greeting. She knows Anderson from back in 2011, when the two performed via tele-bridge a live flute duet to celebrate Yuri Gagarin’s 50th spaceflight anniversary. Anderson was on the ground in Perm, Russia – Coleman flying overhead aboard the International Space Station. The tune covered was Bouree, from Tull’s Stand Up album.


Ian Anderson performs Jethro Tull songs at Count Basie Theatre in fall 2014. (Photo: Jim Clash)

A few weeks later at Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank, NJ, Anderson had just completed a two-hour set of Tull’s music, including Bouree, Aqualung, Teacher, Living In The Past and an energized encore of Locomotive Breath. Backstage afterward, the 67-year-old hardly seemed winded.

We discussed the recent death of bassist Glenn Cornick, who had performed on Tull’s early albums (“we knew it was just a matter of time – Glenn’s early days finally caught up with him”), how un-disappointed Anderson is about yet again not being named to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (“I think there are a lot more deserving American artists, like Captain Beefheart, who should be in before you start thinking of British bands”) and about how he falls asleep watching late night talk shows rather than partying after gigs (“it used to be Johnny Carson, now it’s [David] Letterman”).

But our chat inevitably gravitated toward space. Long before Anderson was a rock icon, he was interested in America’s Cold War space race with the former Soviet Union. “By the time I was 10, I was devouring anything to do with rocket-ships and the early forms of science fiction, becoming lovely again as a result of American writers being made available in the UK,” he says. “Into my teens I got to know a lot of fanciful notions about rocketry and interplanetary travel.”


Ian Anderson backstage discussing space travel and rock music. Robert
Anderson, right. (Photo: Jim Clash)

In 1969, when Anderson was 22, he penned the song For Michael Collins, Jeffrey And Me about Apollo 11’s historic flight to the moon. “The guy who probably had the most unenviable job was Michael Collins,” said Anderson. “We know that contingency plans had to be there if Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin didn’t make it back [to the Command Module]. He would have had to return home alone to Earth. At that time, I think, he was the loneliest man in the universe facing the possibility he might have to leave his buddies.”

Anderson was also philosophical about the significance of the mission. “In the words of your ex-President John F. Kennedy: ‘We choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy but because it is hard.’ On that momentous day, the world gathered and congratulated America. It is probably as close as America has ever come to having universal approval. Everybody was buying into the little sense of ownership that we, as homo-sapiens, got there. Whether Americans, Brits or Ruskies, we all shared in that moment.”

Would Anderson himself ever consider a trip into space? “If you asked me to climb up steps on a ladder to get something from the top shelf, I probably am going to find a willing alternate volunteer because I have no head for heights,” he chuckled. “I think even getting to the top of a rocket would cause too much vertigo. No, I’m not made of the right stuff. I am pretty much 98% rock star.”

(Note: Speaking of the right stuff, with some dubious band choices in recent years (e.g. Kiss, Rush), the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame might be wise to indoctrinate Jethro Tull. That it has not yet happened, in the eyes of this writer, questions the musical judgment of the institution.)

[JTull 007]

Got lucky and watched most of an interview on AXS tv. This will be on again soon...
       Sound Off With Matt Pinfield Ian Anderson Direct TV LINK

[maddogfagin]

Published on 3 Oct 2014 by 97.1 The River
Kaedy Kiely interviews Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson about his career and his thoughts on music.

[nonrabbit]

Very good find Graham.
Very good advice from Ian re taking up the flute full-time.
Funny when he says that he must fool the old folk in the audience sometime and play Stairway or Smoke On The Water.

"Did Tull do that?" murmurs in the audience

[nonrabbit]

Love finding historical interviews and some of the revealing quotes. Interview 2008


".."When we started, I certainly didn't think we'd still be around 10 years later," he said, speaking from his home office in the south of England.

"But I intended to be around longer because my heroes growing up were all guys of my father's age, people like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, John Lee Hooker and Sonny Boy Williamson.

So it was my hope, if not confident belief, that I'd be around in at least a few decades to come. But I didn't think for a minute it would be with the guys in Jethro Tull, or that even the name Jethro Tull would stick around, because groups came and went back then..."



www.creators.com/lifestylefeatures/books-and-music/pop-talk/ian-anderson-and-jethro-tull-took-on-time-and-won.html

[maddogfagin]

www.panorama.it/musica/ian-anderson-i-jethro-tull-diventeranno-unopera-rock-lintervista/


April 10, 2015 Gabriele Antonucci

The characteristic pose of Ian Anderson in playing the flute is one of the most recognizable images in rock history. Impossible not to identify the silhouette of the musician with Jethro Tull, one of the fundamental groups of the golden age of rock that has stood in as iconic album Aqualung and Thick as a Brick , for its unique blend of folk, progressive and hard rock . Their numbers speak for themselves: more than 65 million records sold and more than 3,000 concerts in 45 countries. The magic of those timeless songs will live again in the Italian tour of Ian Anderson, who will debut April 16 at the Gran Teatro Geox in Padua. Follow the concerts of 17 at the Gran Teatro of Milan Linear4Ciak of 18 at the New Theatre Carisport Cesena and 20 at the Auditorium Conciliazione in Rome . In the show, titled The Best of Jethro Tull & New Album Homo Erraticus , Anderson will be accompanied by John O'Hara, David Goodier, Florian Opahle and Scott Hammond in a progressive ride between past and present. The first part of the concert will be based on the last album Homo Erraticus , the second on the successes of Jethro Tull.

We reached by telephone Ian Anderson, with his English humor and a willingness rare for an artist of his caliber, answered some of our questions.

Mr. Anderson, his latest album Homo Erraticus inspired by English history until it touches universal themes. How did the idea of making a concept album?

" Home erraticus is an album related to a topic that is very hot in both England and by you, that of migration, in particular on what is involved when people move from one place to another, sometimes in a peaceful manner, in times after the wars. At the bottom, moving from one part of the planet, so live in better conditions, has always been the history of man. It 'a sensitive issue, the message I want to convey is that everyone comes from somewhere else, I too have origins dating back to Northern Europe and Armenia, I recently made ​​the DNA test and found out that the two, 5% of my genetic code is derived by Neanderthals. Sometimes we forget that gi immigrants are not making a boat trip, but often are refugees fleeing from dramatic situations in their country. I do not really like the term migration, prefer to talk about people and how we can make sustainable this phenomenon. I like to live in a multicultural society such as the English, but I worry about the huge increase of our population without there being an adaptation of services for citizens. The album is a starting point for a debate on how to balance tolerance and acceptance in a practical and non-ideological. "

The latest songs of Homo Erraticus concern what we should expect in the near future. How do you see the future of Ian Anderson?

"I try to be optimistic. We must find a way to make it easier to move between the cities and increase the production of food, without compromising and worsen climate change. We must get used to concentrate resources and live in the city bigger and bigger, with 20 million inhabitants. The production processes and services will be more efficient, since resources are increasingly scarce. "

His shows are famous for original videos and to find the stage. What can we expect from his Italian concerts? Will be structured as a ladder?

"There's always humor in the way I perform, we have videos that accompany the songs, sometimes literally, sometimes in a more abstract way. They are a tool to entertain, but also to reflect viewers. Some videos are the scariest, funniest and other surreal. Sometimes I present the songs, sometimes longer speak of individual songs, sometimes they are more fun, sometimes not, it depends on my mood. The lineup includes a first part dedicated to my last record, a year after its release, and a second focused on the music of Jethro Tull, who will be 60% of the show, where riproporrò, in addition to the classics, some songs that I did not play for 40 years. "

I read that it is working on a new album, along with a string quartet, to reinterpret classic songs of Jethro Tull. Can you tell us more about the project?

"Actually I'm working simultaneously on three projects: a book with all the lyrics that I wrote over 300 songs, with comments and anecdotes, probably will be released in limited edition. Then an album recorded with a quartet with reinterpretations of classic songs of Jethro Tull, which should be out in 2016, and the most important project that will start in September, The Jethro Tull Rock Opera . The musical, which will have a structure almost operatic, will contain a selection of classics of the band, as well as original songs composed for the occasion, based on the true story of the birth of Jethro Tull, but transposed in the near future. The Jethro Tull Rock Opera will have video of the contributions made ​​by special guests. The idea of the original songs came to me last year, just on a trip to Italy. "

Do not think that Jethro Tull have been categorized as progressive rock because there was not a specific genre to describe your music?

"The term progressive rock was used for the first time in England in 1969 by some journalists, while in 1972 we began to talk about prog rock music to connote a pompous and self-indulgent, like that of Yes and early Genesis. I think the definition of progressive rock fits indicate influences jazz, blues, rock and classical music of Jethro Tull, while I do not really like the term prog rock because we have never played it to show how good we are technically, but always to convey emotions. "

Some viewer these days believe that Jethro Tull is his name and not that of the group. How is this misunderstanding?

"Now I use my name in the shows because I want to know who they are, so that the public distinguishes my songs from those of Jethro Tull, who inevitably are tied and they are very proud. Took turns twenty-seven musicians in the band, but above 300 songs which I am responsible as a composer, flutist, guitarist and producer. I'm not offended if I identify with some Jethro Tull, but I'd like people to distinguish my solo career from the one with the band. "

She is considered an icon for all flutists. How is it that the flute is an instrument so rare outside of classical music?

"The flute has always been used in symphony orchestras, but it is above all one of the oldest instruments that we have, I believe it is the second instrument to have been invented by man. Even homo sapiens blew into the bones of animals to produce a sound unlike any other. I have always been fascinated by the archaic appearance of the flute , an instrument that unfortunately does not lend much to modern rock. Gives me enormous pleasure when I receive the email in which young people tell me that they started playing the flute to the music of Jethro Tull. "

Changing the subject completely, as they were born his passion for the exotic cats and the pounds?

"My interest in the cats goes back to when I was five and I got my first cat, which was very sociable and a bit 'crazy. I've always been fascinated by cats, much more than the dogs. During a trip to Africa I am passionate about the rarest species of cats, about twenty-six, and I am dedicated to the care and protection of them. Today I live with my wife Shona in a country house of the eighteenth century, 150 km from London, with five cats, two dogs, a few horses and some chickens. My interest in spicy chili can be explained because they are a flat and boring English, not like you're a searing and passionate Italian. Italians love the music of Jethro Tull, although it is very different from what we hear. We really like the English ultrapiccanti dishes, typical of Indian and Thai, just because we are boring people. The passion for this spice is about the Indian drummer, who introduced me to a very spicy curry. In Italy you do not have many Indian restaurants because you're already spicy and warm. I like your pasta, but I have to season it with hot spices to make it more interesting. "

[Deleted]

Apr 10, 2015 16:12:22 GMT maddogfagin said:

www.panorama.it/musica/ian-anderson-i-jethro-tull-diventeranno-unopera-rock-lintervista/

April 10, 2015 Gabriele Antonucci

The characteristic pose of Ian Anderson in playing the flute is one of the most recognizable images in rock history. Impossible not to identify the silhouette of the musician with Jethro Tull, one of the fundamental groups of the golden age of rock that has stood in as iconic album Aqualung and Thick as a Brick , for its unique blend of folk, progressive and hard rock . Their numbers speak for themselves: more than 65 million records sold and more than 3,000 concerts in 45 countries. The magic of those timeless songs will live again in the Italian tour of Ian Anderson, who will debut April 16 at the Gran Teatro Geox in Padua. Follow the concerts of 17 at the Gran Teatro of Milan Linear4Ciak of 18 at the New Theatre Carisport Cesena and 20 at the Auditorium Conciliazione in Rome . In the show, titled The Best of Jethro Tull & New Album Homo Erraticus , Anderson will be accompanied by John O'Hara, David Goodier, Florian Opahle and Scott Hammond in a progressive ride between past and present. The first part of the concert will be based on the last album Homo Erraticus , the second on the successes of Jethro Tull.

We reached by telephone Ian Anderson, with his English humor and a willingness rare for an artist of his caliber, answered some of our questions.

Mr. Anderson, his latest album Homo Erraticus inspired by English history until it touches universal themes. How did the idea of making a concept album?

" Home erraticus is an album related to a topic that is very hot in both England and by you, that of migration, in particular on what is involved when people move from one place to another, sometimes in a peaceful manner, in times after the wars. At the bottom, moving from one part of the planet, so live in better conditions, has always been the history of man. It 'a sensitive issue, the message I want to convey is that everyone comes from somewhere else, I too have origins dating back to Northern Europe and Armenia, I recently made ​​the DNA test and found out that the two, 5% of my genetic code is derived by Neanderthals. Sometimes we forget that gi immigrants are not making a boat trip, but often are refugees fleeing from dramatic situations in their country. I do not really like the term migration, prefer to talk about people and how we can make sustainable this phenomenon. I like to live in a multicultural society such as the English, but I worry about the huge increase of our population without there being an adaptation of services for citizens. The album is a starting point for a debate on how to balance tolerance and acceptance in a practical and non-ideological. "

The latest songs of Homo Erraticus concern what we should expect in the near future. How do you see the future of Ian Anderson?

"I try to be optimistic. We must find a way to make it easier to move between the cities and increase the production of food, without compromising and worsen climate change. We must get used to concentrate resources and live in the city bigger and bigger, with 20 million inhabitants. The production processes and services will be more efficient, since resources are increasingly scarce. "

His shows are famous for original videos and to find the stage. What can we expect from his Italian concerts? Will be structured as a ladder?

"There's always humor in the way I perform, we have videos that accompany the songs, sometimes literally, sometimes in a more abstract way. They are a tool to entertain, but also to reflect viewers. Some videos are the scariest, funniest and other surreal. Sometimes I present the songs, sometimes longer speak of individual songs, sometimes they are more fun, sometimes not, it depends on my mood. The lineup includes a first part dedicated to my last record, a year after its release, and a second focused on the music of Jethro Tull, who will be 60% of the show, where riproporrò, in addition to the classics, some songs that I did not play for 40 years. "

I read that it is working on a new album, along with a string quartet, to reinterpret classic songs of Jethro Tull. Can you tell us more about the project?

"Actually I'm working simultaneously on three projects: a book with all the lyrics that I wrote over 300 songs, with comments and anecdotes, probably will be released in limited edition. Then an album recorded with a quartet with reinterpretations of classic songs of Jethro Tull, which should be out in 2016, and the most important project that will start in September, The Jethro Tull Rock Opera . The musical, which will have a structure almost operatic, will contain a selection of classics of the band, as well as original songs composed for the occasion, based on the true story of the birth of Jethro Tull, but transposed in the near future. The Jethro Tull Rock Opera will have video of the contributions made ​​by special guests. The idea of the original songs came to me last year, just on a trip to Italy. "

Do not think that Jethro Tull have been categorized as progressive rock because there was not a specific genre to describe your music?

"The term progressive rock was used for the first time in England in 1969 by some journalists, while in 1972 we began to talk about prog rock music to connote a pompous and self-indulgent, like that of Yes and early Genesis. I think the definition of progressive rock fits indicate influences jazz, blues, rock and classical music of Jethro Tull, while I do not really like the term prog rock because we have never played it to show how good we are technically, but always to convey emotions. "

Some viewer these days believe that Jethro Tull is his name and not that of the group. How is this misunderstanding?

"Now I use my name in the shows because I want to know who they are, so that the public distinguishes my songs from those of Jethro Tull, who inevitably are tied and they are very proud. Took turns twenty-seven musicians in the band, but above 300 songs which I am responsible as a composer, flutist, guitarist and producer. I'm not offended if I identify with some Jethro Tull, but I'd like people to distinguish my solo career from the one with the band. "

She is considered an icon for all flutists. How is it that the flute is an instrument so rare outside of classical music?

"The flute has always been used in symphony orchestras, but it is above all one of the oldest instruments that we have, I believe it is the second instrument to have been invented by man. Even homo sapiens blew into the bones of animals to produce a sound unlike any other. I have always been fascinated by the archaic appearance of the flute , an instrument that unfortunately does not lend much to modern rock. Gives me enormous pleasure when I receive the email in which young people tell me that they started playing the flute to the music of Jethro Tull. "

Changing the subject completely, as they were born his passion for the exotic cats and the pounds?

"My interest in the cats goes back to when I was five and I got my first cat, which was very sociable and a bit 'crazy. I've always been fascinated by cats, much more than the dogs. During a trip to Africa I am passionate about the rarest species of cats, about twenty-six, and I am dedicated to the care and protection of them. Today I live with my wife Shona in a country house of the eighteenth century, 150 km from London, with five cats, two dogs, a few horses and some chickens. My interest in spicy chili can be explained because they are a flat and boring English, not like you're a searing and passionate Italian. Italians love the music of Jethro Tull, although it is very different from what we hear. We really like the English ultrapiccanti dishes, typical of Indian and Thai, just because we are boring people. The passion for this spice is about the Indian drummer, who introduced me to a very spicy curry. In Italy you do not have many Indian restaurants because you're already spicy and warm. I like your pasta, but I have to season it with hot spices to make it more interesting. "

Thanks, Graham.
posted: forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/jethro-tull-the-rock-opera-performed-by-ian-anderson.415213/page-2#post-12165229

[maddogfagin]

The Afterword #26: Ian Anderson in One Of Twang’s Almost Legendary Pop Interviews
DogFacedBoy / 01.05.2015

Podcast interview here

Lifelong fan Twang interviews Jethro Tull front man Ian Anderson about the impending Steven Wilson remix reissue of “Minstrel In The Gallery”.

Notoriously prickly interviewee Ian, who has little patience with another dim question about why he plays the flute standing on one leg, gives the AW more time than allocated a genuine scoop about Jeffrey Hammond Hammond. No! Come back! He’s a great talker and holds forth about London, recording studio drama, casually mentions that he built 80s hit factory Maison Rouge studio and how he got to be so good so quickly on the flute. And the remixed album package, which sounds fantastic, includes rare alternative mixes and live tracks which are previewed here.

…always wondered why he stands on one leg though….

The ‘La Grande Edition’ of ‘Minstrel In The Gallery’ is released on 4th May and features BBC session material as well as a performance from Paris Olympia in 1975

jethrotull.com/minstrel-in-the-gallery-40th-anniversary-la-grande-edition/

SUBSCRIBE via ITunes, RSS link or download direct from

theafterwordpodcast.libsyn.com/the-afterword-26-ian-anderson-in-one-of-twangs-almost-legendary-pop-interviews

[maddogfagin]

Ian Anderson Jethro Tull, hippies and Led Zeppelin
May 4, 2015 Panteres

panteres.com/2015/05/04/ian-anderson-jethro-tull-hippies-and-led-zeppelin/

[nonrabbit]

We might have this one lying around. Think this thread might contain a few repeats


Arguing With Ian Anderson 2012


"The conversation below was almost adversarial in that I had interviewed beloved Tull guitarist Martin Barre earlier in the year, and he was clearly upset over not being asked to participate in TAAB2. I knew Anderson, who is one of the more articulate, intelligent, philosophical and literate rock stars, could take my incessant grilling, so I went in with a mission. To his credit, he was a good sport and handled me with patience, professionalism and with a profound zen-like wisdom."


www.theaquarian.com/2012/11/07/arguing-with-ian-anderson-of-jethro-tull/

[maddogfagin]

Ian Anderson on His Upcoming ‘Jethro Tull – The Rock Opera’ Tour, the Original Jethro Tull, and the State of the World
Posted by: Jon Sobel May 9, 2015
blogcritics.org/interview-ian-anderson-on-his-upcoming-jethro-tull-the-rock-opera-tour-the-original-jethro-tull-and-the-state-of-the-world/

For decades Ian Anderson has been synonymous with the name of his band, Jethro Tull. But who was the original Jethro Tull? Anderson and his current band will answer that question beginning this fall in a big, celebratory way with “Jethro Tull – The Rock Opera,” a series of concert tours celebrating the life and times of the English agricultural inventor, Jethro Tull.

The show tells the story of the original Jethro Tull’s life, reimagined as if in the near future and illustrated with Anderson’s best-known songs from the Jethro Tull repertoire.

The quasi-operatic performance features a bevy of songs from the classic Jethro Tull songbook – sometimes with slightly rewritten lyrics or added verses – along with virtual guests on video and a handful of newly-written songs.

The playlist includes “Heavy Horses,” “Farm On The Freeway,” “Songs From The Wood,” “Aqualung,” “Living In The Past,” “Wind-Up,” “A New Day Yesterday,” “The Witch’s Promise,” “Locomotive Breath,” and other favorites. The band features David Goodier (bass), John O’Hara (keyboards), Florian Opahle (guitar), Scott Hammond (drums), and surprise virtual guests. The tour begins in the UK in September, with US shows to follow as well as dates in Russia, Europe, and South America.

Ian Anderson took a few minutes to speak with me about the upcoming tour, the original Jethro Tull, and for good measure, the state of the world.

The original Jethro Tull (1674-1741) was important to agricultural history, but it doesn’t seem that he led a very dramatic or exciting life. How are you approaching creating a rock opera that centers on him?

In fact there are only two or three reputable accounts of elements of his life, not really a huge amount of detail or storyline, and a couple of the accounts are slightly conflicting in terms of timeline. [But reading] up on the original Jethro Tull, I was struck by the fact that there were immediately two or three elements of the Jethro Tull life story which just sounded like: “Hey, I wrote that song!”

And then I thought: I wonder how many other songs I’ve written that tie in with elements of his story. And I started going through my entire catalog of over 300 songs, and time and time again [some] struck me as being very relevant to the story of the original Jethro Tull. So I immediately toyed with the idea: Well, maybe I can tell the story of Jethro Tull using my own songs.

But, and this is the big “but,” it would be a kind of a period piece with men in wigs and tights, and I think I’ve been there, done that, a bit too historical and a bit too twee for the present day, and kind of at odds with rock music.

So I thought: Well, hang on a minute, why don’t I just reposition Jethro Tull in the present day or the near future, where instead of inventing the seed drill and writing a book about basic agricultural improvement to the methodology of the 18th century, why don’t we position him in today’s world as a biochemist, researching genetically modified organisms, developing new technologies and patenting them, as you would in this world of agribusiness, and making a ton of money out of all these patented new developments in food production?

Which is very apt in today’s world, because we’re seven billion people on the planet, soon to be nine billion in 25 years’ time, according to most people’s estimates, and we haven’t got an earthly hope in hell of feeding nine billion people, especially in the context of climate change, which will bring huge stress and difficulty to many conventional historically productive crop-growing areas.

So it’s time to get real. If you don’t want to eat genetically modified foods, then my suggestion is, don’t have babies! Because, you know, if we increase our population at the current rate, we simply cannot manage to sustain [things]. There are two potentials. One: in the rich western industrialized world, we could all agree to eat half of what we eat now and therefore share out the amount of production amongst a lot of people who are unable to afford or unable to access it, including people yet to be born.

But I sure don’t think that folks are gonna go for that. We kind of like our triple burgers and our t-bone steaks and our lobster and all that we think is synonymous with an affluent lifestyle. So I don’t think we’re gonna share things out, somehow, and I don’t think either we’re going to find it possible to persuade people that the responsible thing is to limit family sizes to two or less children.

I mean, you might do it, I’ve done it, my children are on target for staying below [that] threshold, but you can’t tell people how many children they can have, they will become understandably very upset, even more so if they come from cultural and religious backgrounds where large family sizes are part of their tradition. And indeed for a lot of guys, it’s a mark of the man: Hey, I’ve got eight children, what a super-stud I am, look at the length of my penis!

Some folks…judge, or wish to be judged, on the number of children they have, or the capacity of their very large-size motorcycle. Then, you know, we can only really feel sorry for them, [they may] have a bit of a weird inferiority complex in the first place.

But you can’t tell people what to do, and I have to think that the only way we are going to cope with an enlarging world with more demands is through the necessity of agricultural developments and, indeed, increases in the population, particularly in our major cities, which are more easy to sustain and build upon than trying to get people to spread out into rural environments where building a school for 10 kids isn’t really cost-effective. Better to add another 10 children to a city school and increase the facilities and the infrastructure socially and politically for everyone to live in bigger urban developments.
I think these are the things that I’m touching upon in the lyrics, and the amendments to lyrics, in the proposed show that we start in September. They’re all rather weighty and serious and potentially doom-laden, but of course the darkest subjects can be brought to life by presenting them in an upbeat, humorous, entertaining way.

You draw people into these scenarios and subjects not by lecturing them and telling them the foreboding realities of today or the future, but by drawing them in to think about them, to not turn away from them, to consider them as discussion points among friends, family, or a wider public.

And that is I suppose what I’ve been doing all of my life. Writing songs that are sometimes touching upon issues that – if you go back to the Aqualung album – the issues of prostitution, religious powermongering in “My God,” population growth and expansion in “Locomotive Breath” – [and] songs from Warchild like “Skating Away on the Thin Ice of the New Day” about climate change, albeit back then of course we were more in fear of global cooling than global heating!

So I’ve been kind of doing this really all of my life, it’s my stock in trade. I’m not a politician, not a university lecturer; I am a songwriter, an entertainer, I dance around and play the fool for you on stage and you can kind of tap your feet and smile along with me.

You’ve always seemed to have an interest in the Earth and the natural world, back to Songs from the Wood, Heavy Horses, and up to the present day on Homo Erraticus where you kind of survey the history of mankind on Earth. Would you agree that’s been a theme in your creativity all this time?

It’s touched upon quite early on in my songwriting, but I don’t think it found a voice in terms of more sociological subject material until I’d been writing songs for three or four years. But in terms of a natural synergy with the natural world around us, the fields, the woods, stuff like that, it seems to crop up quite a bit, little references.
Going back to the the second album Stand Up, there are elements there that seem to me, looking back on it now when I read the lyrics, to show that my childhood growing up was one where I relished – living as I did on the edge of a big city [Edinburgh] – I relished the opportunity, when I was old enough to be allowed to wander at the age of 11 or 12, and I could go tramping through fields and woods and the open countryside. And that was a huge part of my childhood.

Even younger than that, I remember – as a seven-year-old? – being interested in farming, and reading about tractors and plows. Something that I suppose is amongst the many little influences that as a child you find will be the material you can draw on later in life if you’re a writer.

Here’s a question I didn’t think was related to the original Jethro Tull, but I guess it is: How do you stay creatively energetic as time goes on without just relying on your old, classic material, as some do? Does it have something to do with being open to and aware of the world around you, the natural world and the human?
Well I’m sure it does, because I’m a fairly voracious reader and watcher of news and current affairs and factual literature on various topics including scientific.

But I think it also has to do with – I mean, one of the things that drives creativity is anger. If it wasn’t for the bad stuff in the human arsenal of emotions, the anger, the jealousy, the rage, there would be no Shakespeare. We kind of need that stuff because it’s a huge driving force, a passion, if you like, that is demonstrable in the human spirit through making movies, writing books, and obviously music too. “Rage” is putting it a little on the extreme side, but anger and concern, those fairly dark emotions, often are great driving forces in creativity.

So, of course, is the number one topic of all song lyrics since time began, which is being in or out of love. [So many] song lyrics are driven by the lovey-dovey, being in a relationship, or being out of one, or having difficulty with a relationship. Most of the world of blues is driven by those simple emotions, which very often are quite sexual and quite graphic.

But that’s too easy, isn’t it, really? I mean, you know, we can’t go through life just writing love songs or being-out-of-love songs, we’ve got to go a little deeper and broader into the human story. So I let my humor, my anger, my rage even, come through in songs that are about topics that are less perhaps about human-relationship emotions and more about our relationship with the world around us.

You’ve done a lot of concept albums, and it seems that “Jethro Tull – The Rock Opera” will be almost a concept album for the stage.

Well, it’s actually really a rather weak and pathetic excuse for churning out yet another “Best of Jethro Tull.”

Well, that was my next question!

[We’re] giving it a narrative which ties into a historically different reality. In essence it’s just very much about celebrating my back catalog of songs, but [also] celebrating the life of the person who 47 years ago our agent gave us the name of.
When our agent suggested the name Jethro Tull in February 1968, I, sadly, did not know who Jethro Tull was, I thought it was a name he made up. I didn’t realize we were named after a historical character who invented the seed drill in the 18th century. I just fondly imagined it was some quirky name. I guess I thought of it more somehow as being an American name.

But both “Jethro” and “Tull,” as it turns out, are family names synonymous with the southwest of England not far from where I live. I didn’t, unfortunately, cover that little period of history when I was at school, because we only did a very limited amount of history since I was mostly studying science and maths. I missed out on Jethro Tull completely.

So it’s kind of a way to celebrate his life and his story, albeit turning it into something [about] what Jethro Tull would have been to agriculture if he’d been born some time in the late 1950s, early 1960s, and that’s probably where we would have seen him direct himself.

I try to stick very closely to the original sequence of events of his story, as much as we know of it, but try to give it a little bit more imagined depth through the introduction of five new songs to supplement the 80% of the show which is the “Best of Jethro Tull,” for want of a better term.

Would it be giving too much away to ask you for an example of how you’re adapting a classic Jethro Tull song for the story of the original Jethro Tull?

One of the strange ones was: I thought, how can I possibly tie [in] a song like “Aqualung?” “Locomotive Breath” is easy because it’s about being on the out-of-control locomotive to an ever-expanding and increasing and furious world, not being able to get off this crazy trip to somewhere. But “Aqualung” – I thought, how do I cover that?

Then to my amazement I read that the original Jethro Tull had suffered in childhood and as a young adult from a pulmonary disorder, which was the reason that he took a kind of a health-cure trip in the summer on two occasions to Italy, to get away to a warmer, drier climate where he could try to improve his health and learn a bit about foreign agriculture in the process.

So immediately I had it. “Aqualung” was the name of the guy in my song because he had that rattling breath through bronchitis and sleeping rough on the streets. And so I was suddenly able to fashion the narrative so [that] when a young, modern Jethro Tull goes off to study law in Oxford, and he finds himself, as you do in many university towns, in the streets alongside homeless people, he has this guy kind of shadowing him, following him around, who is Aqualung. It required a tiny bit of rewriting to make it fit.

Some songs, like “Heavy Horses,” are a natural fit. But I wrote a new verse for “Heavy Horses” which talks about [tractor brands] Massey, New Holland, “Nothing runs like a Deere,” referring to modern technology in tractor design and full-suspension cabs and air conditioning and all the things in the modern world of agriculture.

It’s kind of interesting to take things you’ve written before and either modify them a tiny bit, or in some cases not at all, and in some cases write a new verse. And [that’s] part of what I think has been for me amusing in getting to this point. We start[ed] recording [on May 1] all the detail, and video, and our virtual guests on video singing bits and playing bits and so on. It’s taken the last six or eight weeks preparing all the music, all the rehearsal, and to build the detailed arrangements of the entire show. So it’s been quite a bit of work already, and we’ll continue on and off between my tours during May, June, July, and August until our dress rehearsals just before we start touring in September.

Do you feel the effects of the digital age, the age when individual songs are more important than albums and certainly concept albums?

Well, individual songs are the highest form of the art of songwriting, because they’re the hardest. If you can write a three-minute song and get to the heart of a big subject, that’s a very very appealing and very laudable achievement to arrive to as a songwriter.

They are the hardest songs to write, mainly because what you can say in three minutes has got to be very poignant and be very articulate, and the words that you can use, the emotions that you can use, the musical notes and the arrangements you can use, you know, are likely to have been done before.

So when it comes to writing a three-minute pop song that everyone’s going to love, it’s getting increasingly difficult to do in a fashion that is original. The best of what’s been done in the last 50-60 years is a huge and heady mountain to have to climb before you can get to any peak. As a young songwriter you’re going to find yourself inevitably straying into ground that’s been well-trodden before.

It’s very very hard to do that. Writing short, punchy, to-the-point songs is a very good discipline to which to aspire as a songwriter. And the digital age can make it easier, but it can also draw you into endless imitation and repetition, because the buttons you press and the software you work with, you remember: Hey, everybody’s got that [laughs]. Whether they have any musical training or otherwise, they all have access to the same software, the same samples, the endless loops of a rhythmic and melodic nature which are even bundled with a lot of recording software, so everybody’s working with the same tools.
It’s hard therefore to build a different house. You’re working with the same tools as every other house builder and can all too easily follow the natural line, which in some ways is dictated by the tool that you have to hand.

In some ways it’s got easier for folks to be involved in music, but you could say, perhaps ironically, harder to be original. It’s just all too easy to find yourself doing the same stuff as other people. Even though it may be very attractive and very professional and neat and tidy at the end of it, the bottom line is, it’s so hard to find a melody line or string a few words together that haven’t been done to death, particularly over the last five or six decades of contemporary music-making.

But cheer up, everybody has an equal chance to write a new masterpiece, and a few people are going to achieve it. I, like others, have that innate optimism that somebody’s gonna send me a demo, or some music file via the internet, and I’m gonna go, “Wow! That is absolutely brilliant, I’ve never heard anything like that before.” I believe it’s gonna happen.
—
Another thing that’s gonna happen: Ian Anderson’s “Jethro Tull – The Rock Opera” concerts beginning this fall. Check the schedule online.

[JTull 007]

  51 minutes  exploring a Decade of the Early Best of Jethro Tull     TULL Link 

                                                                                       Just push PLAY for audio

[bassackwards]

May 10, 2015 9:09:15 GMT maddogfagin said:

Ian Anderson on His Upcoming ‘Jethro Tull – The Rock Opera’ Tour, the Original Jethro Tull, and the State of the World
Posted by: Jon Sobel May 9, 2015
blogcritics.org/interview-ian-anderson-on-his-upcoming-jethro-tull-the-rock-opera-tour-the-original-jethro-tull-and-the-state-of-the-world/

For decades Ian Anderson has been synonymous with the name of his band, Jethro Tull. But who was the original Jethro Tull? Anderson and his current band will answer that question beginning this fall in a big, celebratory way with “Jethro Tull – The Rock Opera,” a series of concert tours celebrating the life and times of the English agricultural inventor, Jethro Tull.

The show tells the story of the original Jethro Tull’s life, reimagined as if in the near future and illustrated with Anderson’s best-known songs from the Jethro Tull repertoire.

The quasi-operatic performance features a bevy of songs from the classic Jethro Tull songbook – sometimes with slightly rewritten lyrics or added verses – along with virtual guests on video and a handful of newly-written songs.

The playlist includes “Heavy Horses,” “Farm On The Freeway,” “Songs From The Wood,” “Aqualung,” “Living In The Past,” “Wind-Up,” “A New Day Yesterday,” “The Witch’s Promise,” “Locomotive Breath,” and other favorites. The band features David Goodier (bass), John O’Hara (keyboards), Florian Opahle (guitar), Scott Hammond (drums), and surprise virtual guests. The tour begins in the UK in September, with US shows to follow as well as dates in Russia, Europe, and South America.

Ian Anderson took a few minutes to speak with me about the upcoming tour, the original Jethro Tull, and for good measure, the state of the world.

The original Jethro Tull (1674-1741) was important to agricultural history, but it doesn’t seem that he led a very dramatic or exciting life. How are you approaching creating a rock opera that centers on him?

In fact there are only two or three reputable accounts of elements of his life, not really a huge amount of detail or storyline, and a couple of the accounts are slightly conflicting in terms of timeline. [But reading] up on the original Jethro Tull, I was struck by the fact that there were immediately two or three elements of the Jethro Tull life story which just sounded like: “Hey, I wrote that song!”

And then I thought: I wonder how many other songs I’ve written that tie in with elements of his story. And I started going through my entire catalog of over 300 songs, and time and time again [some] struck me as being very relevant to the story of the original Jethro Tull. So I immediately toyed with the idea: Well, maybe I can tell the story of Jethro Tull using my own songs.

But, and this is the big “but,” it would be a kind of a period piece with men in wigs and tights, and I think I’ve been there, done that, a bit too historical and a bit too twee for the present day, and kind of at odds with rock music.

So I thought: Well, hang on a minute, why don’t I just reposition Jethro Tull in the present day or the near future, where instead of inventing the seed drill and writing a book about basic agricultural improvement to the methodology of the 18th century, why don’t we position him in today’s world as a biochemist, researching genetically modified organisms, developing new technologies and patenting them, as you would in this world of agribusiness, and making a ton of money out of all these patented new developments in food production?

Which is very apt in today’s world, because we’re seven billion people on the planet, soon to be nine billion in 25 years’ time, according to most people’s estimates, and we haven’t got an earthly hope in hell of feeding nine billion people, especially in the context of climate change, which will bring huge stress and difficulty to many conventional historically productive crop-growing areas.

So it’s time to get real. If you don’t want to eat genetically modified foods, then my suggestion is, don’t have babies! Because, you know, if we increase our population at the current rate, we simply cannot manage to sustain [things]. There are two potentials. One: in the rich western industrialized world, we could all agree to eat half of what we eat now and therefore share out the amount of production amongst a lot of people who are unable to afford or unable to access it, including people yet to be born.

But I sure don’t think that folks are gonna go for that. We kind of like our triple burgers and our t-bone steaks and our lobster and all that we think is synonymous with an affluent lifestyle. So I don’t think we’re gonna share things out, somehow, and I don’t think either we’re going to find it possible to persuade people that the responsible thing is to limit family sizes to two or less children.

I mean, you might do it, I’ve done it, my children are on target for staying below [that] threshold, but you can’t tell people how many children they can have, they will become understandably very upset, even more so if they come from cultural and religious backgrounds where large family sizes are part of their tradition. And indeed for a lot of guys, it’s a mark of the man: Hey, I’ve got eight children, what a super-stud I am, look at the length of my penis!

Some folks…judge, or wish to be judged, on the number of children they have, or the capacity of their very large-size motorcycle. Then, you know, we can only really feel sorry for them, [they may] have a bit of a weird inferiority complex in the first place.

But you can’t tell people what to do, and I have to think that the only way we are going to cope with an enlarging world with more demands is through the necessity of agricultural developments and, indeed, increases in the population, particularly in our major cities, which are more easy to sustain and build upon than trying to get people to spread out into rural environments where building a school for 10 kids isn’t really cost-effective. Better to add another 10 children to a city school and increase the facilities and the infrastructure socially and politically for everyone to live in bigger urban developments.
I think these are the things that I’m touching upon in the lyrics, and the amendments to lyrics, in the proposed show that we start in September. They’re all rather weighty and serious and potentially doom-laden, but of course the darkest subjects can be brought to life by presenting them in an upbeat, humorous, entertaining way.

You draw people into these scenarios and subjects not by lecturing them and telling them the foreboding realities of today or the future, but by drawing them in to think about them, to not turn away from them, to consider them as discussion points among friends, family, or a wider public.

And that is I suppose what I’ve been doing all of my life. Writing songs that are sometimes touching upon issues that – if you go back to the Aqualung album – the issues of prostitution, religious powermongering in “My God,” population growth and expansion in “Locomotive Breath” – [and] songs from Warchild like “Skating Away on the Thin Ice of the New Day” about climate change, albeit back then of course we were more in fear of global cooling than global heating!

So I’ve been kind of doing this really all of my life, it’s my stock in trade. I’m not a politician, not a university lecturer; I am a songwriter, an entertainer, I dance around and play the fool for you on stage and you can kind of tap your feet and smile along with me.

You’ve always seemed to have an interest in the Earth and the natural world, back to Songs from the Wood, Heavy Horses, and up to the present day on Homo Erraticus where you kind of survey the history of mankind on Earth. Would you agree that’s been a theme in your creativity all this time?

It’s touched upon quite early on in my songwriting, but I don’t think it found a voice in terms of more sociological subject material until I’d been writing songs for three or four years. But in terms of a natural synergy with the natural world around us, the fields, the woods, stuff like that, it seems to crop up quite a bit, little references.
Going back to the the second album Stand Up, there are elements there that seem to me, looking back on it now when I read the lyrics, to show that my childhood growing up was one where I relished – living as I did on the edge of a big city [Edinburgh] – I relished the opportunity, when I was old enough to be allowed to wander at the age of 11 or 12, and I could go tramping through fields and woods and the open countryside. And that was a huge part of my childhood.

Even younger than that, I remember – as a seven-year-old? – being interested in farming, and reading about tractors and plows. Something that I suppose is amongst the many little influences that as a child you find will be the material you can draw on later in life if you’re a writer.

Here’s a question I didn’t think was related to the original Jethro Tull, but I guess it is: How do you stay creatively energetic as time goes on without just relying on your old, classic material, as some do? Does it have something to do with being open to and aware of the world around you, the natural world and the human?
Well I’m sure it does, because I’m a fairly voracious reader and watcher of news and current affairs and factual literature on various topics including scientific.

But I think it also has to do with – I mean, one of the things that drives creativity is anger. If it wasn’t for the bad stuff in the human arsenal of emotions, the anger, the jealousy, the rage, there would be no Shakespeare. We kind of need that stuff because it’s a huge driving force, a passion, if you like, that is demonstrable in the human spirit through making movies, writing books, and obviously music too. “Rage” is putting it a little on the extreme side, but anger and concern, those fairly dark emotions, often are great driving forces in creativity.

So, of course, is the number one topic of all song lyrics since time began, which is being in or out of love. [So many] song lyrics are driven by the lovey-dovey, being in a relationship, or being out of one, or having difficulty with a relationship. Most of the world of blues is driven by those simple emotions, which very often are quite sexual and quite graphic.

But that’s too easy, isn’t it, really? I mean, you know, we can’t go through life just writing love songs or being-out-of-love songs, we’ve got to go a little deeper and broader into the human story. So I let my humor, my anger, my rage even, come through in songs that are about topics that are less perhaps about human-relationship emotions and more about our relationship with the world around us.

You’ve done a lot of concept albums, and it seems that “Jethro Tull – The Rock Opera” will be almost a concept album for the stage.

Well, it’s actually really a rather weak and pathetic excuse for churning out yet another “Best of Jethro Tull.”

Well, that was my next question!

[We’re] giving it a narrative which ties into a historically different reality. In essence it’s just very much about celebrating my back catalog of songs, but [also] celebrating the life of the person who 47 years ago our agent gave us the name of.
When our agent suggested the name Jethro Tull in February 1968, I, sadly, did not know who Jethro Tull was, I thought it was a name he made up. I didn’t realize we were named after a historical character who invented the seed drill in the 18th century. I just fondly imagined it was some quirky name. I guess I thought of it more somehow as being an American name.

But both “Jethro” and “Tull,” as it turns out, are family names synonymous with the southwest of England not far from where I live. I didn’t, unfortunately, cover that little period of history when I was at school, because we only did a very limited amount of history since I was mostly studying science and maths. I missed out on Jethro Tull completely.

So it’s kind of a way to celebrate his life and his story, albeit turning it into something [about] what Jethro Tull would have been to agriculture if he’d been born some time in the late 1950s, early 1960s, and that’s probably where we would have seen him direct himself.

I try to stick very closely to the original sequence of events of his story, as much as we know of it, but try to give it a little bit more imagined depth through the introduction of five new songs to supplement the 80% of the show which is the “Best of Jethro Tull,” for want of a better term.

Would it be giving too much away to ask you for an example of how you’re adapting a classic Jethro Tull song for the story of the original Jethro Tull?

One of the strange ones was: I thought, how can I possibly tie [in] a song like “Aqualung?” “Locomotive Breath” is easy because it’s about being on the out-of-control locomotive to an ever-expanding and increasing and furious world, not being able to get off this crazy trip to somewhere. But “Aqualung” – I thought, how do I cover that?

Then to my amazement I read that the original Jethro Tull had suffered in childhood and as a young adult from a pulmonary disorder, which was the reason that he took a kind of a health-cure trip in the summer on two occasions to Italy, to get away to a warmer, drier climate where he could try to improve his health and learn a bit about foreign agriculture in the process.

So immediately I had it. “Aqualung” was the name of the guy in my song because he had that rattling breath through bronchitis and sleeping rough on the streets. And so I was suddenly able to fashion the narrative so [that] when a young, modern Jethro Tull goes off to study law in Oxford, and he finds himself, as you do in many university towns, in the streets alongside homeless people, he has this guy kind of shadowing him, following him around, who is Aqualung. It required a tiny bit of rewriting to make it fit.

Some songs, like “Heavy Horses,” are a natural fit. But I wrote a new verse for “Heavy Horses” which talks about [tractor brands] Massey, New Holland, “Nothing runs like a Deere,” referring to modern technology in tractor design and full-suspension cabs and air conditioning and all the things in the modern world of agriculture.

It’s kind of interesting to take things you’ve written before and either modify them a tiny bit, or in some cases not at all, and in some cases write a new verse. And [that’s] part of what I think has been for me amusing in getting to this point. We start[ed] recording [on May 1] all the detail, and video, and our virtual guests on video singing bits and playing bits and so on. It’s taken the last six or eight weeks preparing all the music, all the rehearsal, and to build the detailed arrangements of the entire show. So it’s been quite a bit of work already, and we’ll continue on and off between my tours during May, June, July, and August until our dress rehearsals just before we start touring in September.

Do you feel the effects of the digital age, the age when individual songs are more important than albums and certainly concept albums?

Well, individual songs are the highest form of the art of songwriting, because they’re the hardest. If you can write a three-minute song and get to the heart of a big subject, that’s a very very appealing and very laudable achievement to arrive to as a songwriter.

They are the hardest songs to write, mainly because what you can say in three minutes has got to be very poignant and be very articulate, and the words that you can use, the emotions that you can use, the musical notes and the arrangements you can use, you know, are likely to have been done before.

So when it comes to writing a three-minute pop song that everyone’s going to love, it’s getting increasingly difficult to do in a fashion that is original. The best of what’s been done in the last 50-60 years is a huge and heady mountain to have to climb before you can get to any peak. As a young songwriter you’re going to find yourself inevitably straying into ground that’s been well-trodden before.

It’s very very hard to do that. Writing short, punchy, to-the-point songs is a very good discipline to which to aspire as a songwriter. And the digital age can make it easier, but it can also draw you into endless imitation and repetition, because the buttons you press and the software you work with, you remember: Hey, everybody’s got that [laughs]. Whether they have any musical training or otherwise, they all have access to the same software, the same samples, the endless loops of a rhythmic and melodic nature which are even bundled with a lot of recording software, so everybody’s working with the same tools.
It’s hard therefore to build a different house. You’re working with the same tools as every other house builder and can all too easily follow the natural line, which in some ways is dictated by the tool that you have to hand.

In some ways it’s got easier for folks to be involved in music, but you could say, perhaps ironically, harder to be original. It’s just all too easy to find yourself doing the same stuff as other people. Even though it may be very attractive and very professional and neat and tidy at the end of it, the bottom line is, it’s so hard to find a melody line or string a few words together that haven’t been done to death, particularly over the last five or six decades of contemporary music-making.

But cheer up, everybody has an equal chance to write a new masterpiece, and a few people are going to achieve it. I, like others, have that innate optimism that somebody’s gonna send me a demo, or some music file via the internet, and I’m gonna go, “Wow! That is absolutely brilliant, I’ve never heard anything like that before.” I believe it’s gonna happen.
—
Another thing that’s gonna happen: Ian Anderson’s “Jethro Tull – The Rock Opera” concerts beginning this fall. Check the schedule online.

One of the most interesting interviews with ian I have ever read. I love the way he out cynics the cynics by saying the new work some sort of devious way to put out yet another greatest hits album. He knows exactly what he's doing.

[Equus]

May 10, 2015 9:09:15 GMT maddogfagin said:

Ian Anderson on His Upcoming ‘Jethro Tull – The Rock Opera’ Tour, the Original Jethro Tull, and the State of the World
Posted by: Jon Sobel May 9, 2015
blogcritics.org/interview-ian-anderson-on-his-upcoming-jethro-tull-the-rock-opera-tour-the-original-jethro-tull-and-the-state-of-the-world/

For decades Ian Anderson has been synonymous with the name of his band, Jethro Tull. But who was the original Jethro Tull? Anderson and his current band will answer that question beginning this fall in a big, celebratory way with “Jethro Tull – The Rock Opera,” a series of concert tours celebrating the life and times of the English agricultural inventor, Jethro Tull.

The show tells the story of the original Jethro Tull’s life, reimagined as if in the near future and illustrated with Anderson’s best-known songs from the Jethro Tull repertoire.

The quasi-operatic performance features a bevy of songs from the classic Jethro Tull songbook – sometimes with slightly rewritten lyrics or added verses – along with virtual guests on video and a handful of newly-written songs.

The playlist includes “Heavy Horses,” “Farm On The Freeway,” “Songs From The Wood,” “Aqualung,” “Living In The Past,” “Wind-Up,” “A New Day Yesterday,” “The Witch’s Promise,” “Locomotive Breath,” and other favorites. The band features David Goodier (bass), John O’Hara (keyboards), Florian Opahle (guitar), Scott Hammond (drums), and surprise virtual guests. The tour begins in the UK in September, with US shows to follow as well as dates in Russia, Europe, and South America.

Ian Anderson took a few minutes to speak with me about the upcoming tour, the original Jethro Tull, and for good measure, the state of the world.

The original Jethro Tull (1674-1741) was important to agricultural history, but it doesn’t seem that he led a very dramatic or exciting life. How are you approaching creating a rock opera that centers on him?

In fact there are only two or three reputable accounts of elements of his life, not really a huge amount of detail or storyline, and a couple of the accounts are slightly conflicting in terms of timeline. [But reading] up on the original Jethro Tull, I was struck by the fact that there were immediately two or three elements of the Jethro Tull life story which just sounded like: “Hey, I wrote that song!”

And then I thought: I wonder how many other songs I’ve written that tie in with elements of his story. And I started going through my entire catalog of over 300 songs, and time and time again [some] struck me as being very relevant to the story of the original Jethro Tull. So I immediately toyed with the idea: Well, maybe I can tell the story of Jethro Tull using my own songs.

But, and this is the big “but,” it would be a kind of a period piece with men in wigs and tights, and I think I’ve been there, done that, a bit too historical and a bit too twee for the present day, and kind of at odds with rock music.

So I thought: Well, hang on a minute, why don’t I just reposition Jethro Tull in the present day or the near future, where instead of inventing the seed drill and writing a book about basic agricultural improvement to the methodology of the 18th century, why don’t we position him in today’s world as a biochemist, researching genetically modified organisms, developing new technologies and patenting them, as you would in this world of agribusiness, and making a ton of money out of all these patented new developments in food production?

Which is very apt in today’s world, because we’re seven billion people on the planet, soon to be nine billion in 25 years’ time, according to most people’s estimates, and we haven’t got an earthly hope in hell of feeding nine billion people, especially in the context of climate change, which will bring huge stress and difficulty to many conventional historically productive crop-growing areas.

So it’s time to get real. If you don’t want to eat genetically modified foods, then my suggestion is, don’t have babies! Because, you know, if we increase our population at the current rate, we simply cannot manage to sustain [things]. There are two potentials. One: in the rich western industrialized world, we could all agree to eat half of what we eat now and therefore share out the amount of production amongst a lot of people who are unable to afford or unable to access it, including people yet to be born.

But I sure don’t think that folks are gonna go for that. We kind of like our triple burgers and our t-bone steaks and our lobster and all that we think is synonymous with an affluent lifestyle. So I don’t think we’re gonna share things out, somehow, and I don’t think either we’re going to find it possible to persuade people that the responsible thing is to limit family sizes to two or less children.

I mean, you might do it, I’ve done it, my children are on target for staying below [that] threshold, but you can’t tell people how many children they can have, they will become understandably very upset, even more so if they come from cultural and religious backgrounds where large family sizes are part of their tradition. And indeed for a lot of guys, it’s a mark of the man: Hey, I’ve got eight children, what a super-stud I am, look at the length of my penis!

Some folks…judge, or wish to be judged, on the number of children they have, or the capacity of their very large-size motorcycle. Then, you know, we can only really feel sorry for them, [they may] have a bit of a weird inferiority complex in the first place.

But you can’t tell people what to do, and I have to think that the only way we are going to cope with an enlarging world with more demands is through the necessity of agricultural developments and, indeed, increases in the population, particularly in our major cities, which are more easy to sustain and build upon than trying to get people to spread out into rural environments where building a school for 10 kids isn’t really cost-effective. Better to add another 10 children to a city school and increase the facilities and the infrastructure socially and politically for everyone to live in bigger urban developments.
I think these are the things that I’m touching upon in the lyrics, and the amendments to lyrics, in the proposed show that we start in September. They’re all rather weighty and serious and potentially doom-laden, but of course the darkest subjects can be brought to life by presenting them in an upbeat, humorous, entertaining way.

You draw people into these scenarios and subjects not by lecturing them and telling them the foreboding realities of today or the future, but by drawing them in to think about them, to not turn away from them, to consider them as discussion points among friends, family, or a wider public.

And that is I suppose what I’ve been doing all of my life. Writing songs that are sometimes touching upon issues that – if you go back to the Aqualung album – the issues of prostitution, religious powermongering in “My God,” population growth and expansion in “Locomotive Breath” – [and] songs from Warchild like “Skating Away on the Thin Ice of the New Day” about climate change, albeit back then of course we were more in fear of global cooling than global heating!

So I’ve been kind of doing this really all of my life, it’s my stock in trade. I’m not a politician, not a university lecturer; I am a songwriter, an entertainer, I dance around and play the fool for you on stage and you can kind of tap your feet and smile along with me.

You’ve always seemed to have an interest in the Earth and the natural world, back to Songs from the Wood, Heavy Horses, and up to the present day on Homo Erraticus where you kind of survey the history of mankind on Earth. Would you agree that’s been a theme in your creativity all this time?

It’s touched upon quite early on in my songwriting, but I don’t think it found a voice in terms of more sociological subject material until I’d been writing songs for three or four years. But in terms of a natural synergy with the natural world around us, the fields, the woods, stuff like that, it seems to crop up quite a bit, little references.
Going back to the the second album Stand Up, there are elements there that seem to me, looking back on it now when I read the lyrics, to show that my childhood growing up was one where I relished – living as I did on the edge of a big city [Edinburgh] – I relished the opportunity, when I was old enough to be allowed to wander at the age of 11 or 12, and I could go tramping through fields and woods and the open countryside. And that was a huge part of my childhood.

Even younger than that, I remember – as a seven-year-old? – being interested in farming, and reading about tractors and plows. Something that I suppose is amongst the many little influences that as a child you find will be the material you can draw on later in life if you’re a writer.

Here’s a question I didn’t think was related to the original Jethro Tull, but I guess it is: How do you stay creatively energetic as time goes on without just relying on your old, classic material, as some do? Does it have something to do with being open to and aware of the world around you, the natural world and the human?
Well I’m sure it does, because I’m a fairly voracious reader and watcher of news and current affairs and factual literature on various topics including scientific.

But I think it also has to do with – I mean, one of the things that drives creativity is anger. If it wasn’t for the bad stuff in the human arsenal of emotions, the anger, the jealousy, the rage, there would be no Shakespeare. We kind of need that stuff because it’s a huge driving force, a passion, if you like, that is demonstrable in the human spirit through making movies, writing books, and obviously music too. “Rage” is putting it a little on the extreme side, but anger and concern, those fairly dark emotions, often are great driving forces in creativity.

So, of course, is the number one topic of all song lyrics since time began, which is being in or out of love. [So many] song lyrics are driven by the lovey-dovey, being in a relationship, or being out of one, or having difficulty with a relationship. Most of the world of blues is driven by those simple emotions, which very often are quite sexual and quite graphic.

But that’s too easy, isn’t it, really? I mean, you know, we can’t go through life just writing love songs or being-out-of-love songs, we’ve got to go a little deeper and broader into the human story. So I let my humor, my anger, my rage even, come through in songs that are about topics that are less perhaps about human-relationship emotions and more about our relationship with the world around us.

You’ve done a lot of concept albums, and it seems that “Jethro Tull – The Rock Opera” will be almost a concept album for the stage.

Well, it’s actually really a rather weak and pathetic excuse for churning out yet another “Best of Jethro Tull.”

Well, that was my next question!

[We’re] giving it a narrative which ties into a historically different reality. In essence it’s just very much about celebrating my back catalog of songs, but [also] celebrating the life of the person who 47 years ago our agent gave us the name of.
When our agent suggested the name Jethro Tull in February 1968, I, sadly, did not know who Jethro Tull was, I thought it was a name he made up. I didn’t realize we were named after a historical character who invented the seed drill in the 18th century. I just fondly imagined it was some quirky name. I guess I thought of it more somehow as being an American name.

But both “Jethro” and “Tull,” as it turns out, are family names synonymous with the southwest of England not far from where I live. I didn’t, unfortunately, cover that little period of history when I was at school, because we only did a very limited amount of history since I was mostly studying science and maths. I missed out on Jethro Tull completely.

So it’s kind of a way to celebrate his life and his story, albeit turning it into something [about] what Jethro Tull would have been to agriculture if he’d been born some time in the late 1950s, early 1960s, and that’s probably where we would have seen him direct himself.

I try to stick very closely to the original sequence of events of his story, as much as we know of it, but try to give it a little bit more imagined depth through the introduction of five new songs to supplement the 80% of the show which is the “Best of Jethro Tull,” for want of a better term.

Would it be giving too much away to ask you for an example of how you’re adapting a classic Jethro Tull song for the story of the original Jethro Tull?

One of the strange ones was: I thought, how can I possibly tie [in] a song like “Aqualung?” “Locomotive Breath” is easy because it’s about being on the out-of-control locomotive to an ever-expanding and increasing and furious world, not being able to get off this crazy trip to somewhere. But “Aqualung” – I thought, how do I cover that?

Then to my amazement I read that the original Jethro Tull had suffered in childhood and as a young adult from a pulmonary disorder, which was the reason that he took a kind of a health-cure trip in the summer on two occasions to Italy, to get away to a warmer, drier climate where he could try to improve his health and learn a bit about foreign agriculture in the process.

So immediately I had it. “Aqualung” was the name of the guy in my song because he had that rattling breath through bronchitis and sleeping rough on the streets. And so I was suddenly able to fashion the narrative so [that] when a young, modern Jethro Tull goes off to study law in Oxford, and he finds himself, as you do in many university towns, in the streets alongside homeless people, he has this guy kind of shadowing him, following him around, who is Aqualung. It required a tiny bit of rewriting to make it fit.

Some songs, like “Heavy Horses,” are a natural fit. But I wrote a new verse for “Heavy Horses” which talks about [tractor brands] Massey, New Holland, “Nothing runs like a Deere,” referring to modern technology in tractor design and full-suspension cabs and air conditioning and all the things in the modern world of agriculture.

It’s kind of interesting to take things you’ve written before and either modify them a tiny bit, or in some cases not at all, and in some cases write a new verse. And [that’s] part of what I think has been for me amusing in getting to this point. We start[ed] recording [on May 1] all the detail, and video, and our virtual guests on video singing bits and playing bits and so on. It’s taken the last six or eight weeks preparing all the music, all the rehearsal, and to build the detailed arrangements of the entire show. So it’s been quite a bit of work already, and we’ll continue on and off between my tours during May, June, July, and August until our dress rehearsals just before we start touring in September.

Do you feel the effects of the digital age, the age when individual songs are more important than albums and certainly concept albums?

Well, individual songs are the highest form of the art of songwriting, because they’re the hardest. If you can write a three-minute song and get to the heart of a big subject, that’s a very very appealing and very laudable achievement to arrive to as a songwriter.

They are the hardest songs to write, mainly because what you can say in three minutes has got to be very poignant and be very articulate, and the words that you can use, the emotions that you can use, the musical notes and the arrangements you can use, you know, are likely to have been done before.

So when it comes to writing a three-minute pop song that everyone’s going to love, it’s getting increasingly difficult to do in a fashion that is original. The best of what’s been done in the last 50-60 years is a huge and heady mountain to have to climb before you can get to any peak. As a young songwriter you’re going to find yourself inevitably straying into ground that’s been well-trodden before.

It’s very very hard to do that. Writing short, punchy, to-the-point songs is a very good discipline to which to aspire as a songwriter. And the digital age can make it easier, but it can also draw you into endless imitation and repetition, because the buttons you press and the software you work with, you remember: Hey, everybody’s got that [laughs]. Whether they have any musical training or otherwise, they all have access to the same software, the same samples, the endless loops of a rhythmic and melodic nature which are even bundled with a lot of recording software, so everybody’s working with the same tools.
It’s hard therefore to build a different house. You’re working with the same tools as every other house builder and can all too easily follow the natural line, which in some ways is dictated by the tool that you have to hand.

In some ways it’s got easier for folks to be involved in music, but you could say, perhaps ironically, harder to be original. It’s just all too easy to find yourself doing the same stuff as other people. Even though it may be very attractive and very professional and neat and tidy at the end of it, the bottom line is, it’s so hard to find a melody line or string a few words together that haven’t been done to death, particularly over the last five or six decades of contemporary music-making.

But cheer up, everybody has an equal chance to write a new masterpiece, and a few people are going to achieve it. I, like others, have that innate optimism that somebody’s gonna send me a demo, or some music file via the internet, and I’m gonna go, “Wow! That is absolutely brilliant, I’ve never heard anything like that before.” I believe it’s gonna happen.
—
Another thing that’s gonna happen: Ian Anderson’s “Jethro Tull – The Rock Opera” concerts beginning this fall. Check the schedule online.

Wonderful interview with Ian!! I can't help fantasizing about a new concept album entirely dedicated to the original historical person, Jethro Tull... and though Ian thought, when he first heard the name Jethro Tull, that it was just a name, and not the name of our agricultural hero, it's mind puzzling to me that Ian always had an interest in farming, animals, etc, etc... even before the discovery of the real historical seed-drill inventor... Well, Ian... Maybe it was meant to be? ... Okay... that's probably a bit over the top... but it sure fits pretty nicely, doesn't it?

[maddogfagin]

May 11, 2015 5:43:20 GMT Equus said:

Wonderful interview with Ian!! I can't help fantasizing about a new concept album entirely dedicated to the original historical person, Jethro Tull... and though Ian thought, when he first heard the name Jethro Tull, that it was just a name, and not the name of our agricultural hero, it's mind puzzling to me that Ian always had an interest in farming, animals, etc, etc... even before the discovery of the real historical seed-drill inventor... Well, Ian... Maybe it was meant to be? ... Okay... that's probably a bit over the top... but it sure fits pretty nicely, doesn't it?

May 10, 2015 17:42:51 GMT bassackwards said:

One of the most interesting interviews with ian I have ever read. I love the way he out cynics the cynics by saying the new work some sort of devious way to put out yet another greatest hits album. He knows exactly what he's doing.

When you think about it, the JT Opera is a neat piece of thinking. He will appease the concert goers who only ever want to hear older songs from the back catalogue and also those attendees who have more open minds will get some new compositions and re-arrangements of older songs to hear. The name "Jethro Tull" will be prominent within the advertising and as such keeps the name alive and in doing so, the concerts can still be advertised as "Ian Anderson" without ruffling any feathers.

A live album featuring the "Opera" will be a must have.

[Equus]

May 11, 2015 9:06:11 GMT maddogfagin said:

May 11, 2015 5:43:20 GMT Equus said:

Wonderful interview with Ian!! I can't help fantasizing about a new concept album entirely dedicated to the original historical person, Jethro Tull... and though Ian thought, when he first heard the name Jethro Tull, that it was just a name, and not the name of our agricultural hero, it's mind puzzling to me that Ian always had an interest in farming, animals, etc, etc... even before the discovery of the real historical seed-drill inventor... Well, Ian... Maybe it was meant to be? ... Okay... that's probably a bit over the top... but it sure fits pretty nicely, doesn't it?

May 10, 2015 17:42:51 GMT bassackwards said:

One of the most interesting interviews with ian I have ever read. I love the way he out cynics the cynics by saying the new work some sort of devious way to put out yet another greatest hits album. He knows exactly what he's doing.

When you think about it, the JT Opera is a neat piece of thinking. He will appease the concert goers who only ever want to hear older songs from the back catalogue and also those attendees who have more open minds will get some new compositions and re-arrangements of older songs to hear. The name "Jethro Tull" will be prominent within the advertising and as such keeps the name alive and in doing so, the concerts can still be advertised as "Ian Anderson" without ruffling any feathers.

A live album featuring the "Opera" will be a must have.

Diplomacy at a very high level!

[steelmonkey]

5 new songs and a few modifications on older songs...I'll take it! Not quite that flickering flame of 2012,2013 but much better than greatest hits of many other years.

[JTull 007]

                                   n-tv   Tuesday 05 May 2015

   Must be heard "Well, that Clapton had not the same idea"   TULL Link 
With albums like "Aqualung" create Jethro Tull classics of prog rock genre.

 Frontman Ian Anderson gave the flute a place in rock music.

With n-tv.de the 67-year-old Scot speaks about the Blues, the Beatles

                                                                                   and the importance of flute hygiene.

Ian Anderson, year 1963, he already had his first band, The Blades. How it all started?

We went to school, John Evans, Jeffrey Hammond and I. We heard more jazz and blues as pop music.
We played cover songs of Muddy Waters and Howlin 'Wolf in the local youth club, but were largely
ignored by the public. The conversed prefer.

What was so special about the blues?

Somehow we came before the subversive and dangerous. We do not really discussed,

but the culture clash in the US and especially the racial unrest that time were absolutely aware.
The only store that had imports, was a small record shop in Blackpool.

Then I saw a documentary about Muddy Waters' tour of England.

Thus joined me full circle to classics like "Heartbreak Hotel"

and"Blue Suede Shoes" or old jazz recordings from shortly after the war.
Everything came from the black American blues.

Whether Punk or pop star or Motörhead Lemmy - at the end all say: The Beatles were the beginning.

I had it. Until "Sergeant Pepper" on the screen Together with Pink Floyd's "Piper At The Gates of Dawn"
from the same year, which was the forerunner of Prog.

As the step from the early days took place towards Jethro Tull?

That went rather slow. A crucial step was, instead of once in the school to play the week a gig
with an amateur band, towards the involvement in the blues clubs of London and the rest of the UK.
We played the week five times. Suddenly it was a real job. Albeit one who did not like my parents as well.

Tull had a clear idea of the sound of the band?

Never. That was all out of the creativity.
To this day, I have been following when composing no concrete plan.
No mission statement, if only to rule out something like a sell-out.
Thankfully, our record company had over the years a lot of understanding for us.

Was Tull ever geared to commercial success?

We had some simple, catchy pieces recorded as singles to be played on radio and TV.
But that had been different from the other material that was back in the charts.

When did you first hear the term "progressive rock"?

The music press in England used the term to 1969/70 for the first time, if I remember correctly.
Much earlier so when one thinks today. The abbreviation "Prog" was only some years later popular.

Where did the idea with the flute begin?

A hollowed bone, about 60,000 years ago. I remember as if it were yesterday.
Seriously: There were so many guitarists at that time. Only Hank Marvin, later came Jimmy Page,
Eric Clapton, Ritchie Blackmore and Jeff Beck. I knew that I would never play in the league,
so I looked around. The flute struck me in the summer of 1967 in the eye.
By December I brought out no reasonable tone. From February 1968, I played every day.
Well, that Clapton did not come to the same idea.

Did the band like it at first because it was good?

No - were not impressed. Much less our manager.
But the audience in "Marquee Club" immediately rose a plan. That was our trump card.
One detail that from all other blues bands different from us back then.

What is your personal favorite band "with Flute"?

The Berliner Philharmoniker. I'm not a fan of rock flute ...

Do you ever regret not having played in Woodstock?

Well, definitely not in 1969. Too many stoned, naked hippies for my taste.
It would also mean too much success at too early a stage. We were just very young and still looking.

Prog Rock is so popular today than ever before - what are your favorites among the new bands?


Porcupine Tree and Steven Wilson solo. Dream Theatre, although are not new of course.
The Project RnL is a hot tip, consisting of American and isrealischen musicians and
not only mistaken ideas, but also the relevant technology.

Tell us something about the "Homo Erraticus", your current project.

The Homo Erraticus, is a kind of survivor, a wanderer between worlds, in search of the best option.
Whether Syrian refugee or a stockbroker on Wall Street - We are all trying to get to where it goes better for us.
We are still seeking that lies in the nature of man, but also says a lot about our thinking,
our drive and our longings.

Tell us something you have not told to any interviewer!

I wash myself very carefully. All the dirty locker rooms and comic Hotels have let me be careful.
I need lots of soap. I wash my hands before the show, during the break and then again before I
un-pack my flute again.
And even though I'm so careful I land then again in the worst Indian restaurant in town. So far,

I've never become sick, including high standards in terms of hygiene of the chef needs wealthier.
Or am I too optimistic?
Anyway, I hope that he also always tidy washes his hands when he played with his flute.

                                          Ian Anderson spoke with Ingo Scheel

Ian Anderson on tour in Germany:
May 15, Weimar Hall      May 16 Regensburg, Donau Arena      May 17 Fulda, Esperantohalle
May 19 Frankfurt, Alte Oper   May 20 Berlin, Admiralspalast   May 22 Leipzig, Haus Auensee
                   May 23 Munich, Circus Krone           May 24 Bremen, Die Glocke

[maddogfagin]

radio.foxnews.com/2015/06/02/ian-anderson-living-legend/

Jethro Tull Rock Star Ian Anderson – Thinking Of Greta?

For people of a certain age, the name Ian Anderson brings to mind long, beautifully complex flute solos. A man of many talents, Ian Anderson was a valuable piece of the puzzle that was Jethro Tull. In fact, he was the lead singer for nearly five decades. These days, Anderson is far from idle – he has been doing the solo run for about a year now… which may explain his keen eye for business that differentiates him from other artists. Despite working gig to gig, he has not forgotten his roots of the British rock group that started it all, and he even triggers the On The Record host to reminisce back to her high school days… but why was this world-renowned musician thinking of Greta?

In this edition of Greta Talk, we not only get a glimpse of a day in the life of this multi-instrumentalist but also a peek into his equally complex mind, including his views on why performing in the Middle East requires something special for him.

[maddogfagin]

Anyway, hot on the news/link about the recent interview with the headmaster by Greta Van Susteren (who seems a bit of a TullHead), IA on BBC Radio 2 last night on the programme "Prog Rock with Charles Hazlewood" and, if that wasn't enough, the episode of Neil McCormick's programme "Needle Time" with IA which was aired again on Vintage TV (Sky 369) at 4am in the morning here in the UK (glad I've got a Sky+ box) comes the following news from Grumpy Old Webby who says, and I quote,

"IA will be doing a 5 minute interview at 2pm tomorrow (Wed 3rd June) on Arise TV (Sky 519, Freeview 136). That'll reach the masses, then..."

[Message to self - must get copies of the GOW pics ]

[Deleted]

Jun 2, 2015 13:20:09 GMT maddogfagin said:

radio.foxnews.com/2015/06/02/ian-anderson-living-legend/

Jethro Tull Rock Star Ian Anderson – Thinking Of Greta?

For people of a certain age, the name Ian Anderson brings to mind long, beautifully complex flute solos. A man of many talents, Ian Anderson was a valuable piece of the puzzle that was Jethro Tull. In fact, he was the lead singer for nearly five decades. These days, Anderson is far from idle – he has been doing the solo run for about a year now… which may explain his keen eye for business that differentiates him from other artists. Despite working gig to gig, he has not forgotten his roots of the British rock group that started it all, and he even triggers the On The Record host to reminisce back to her high school days… but why was this world-renowned musician thinking of Greta?

In this edition of Greta Talk, we not only get a glimpse of a day in the life of this multi-instrumentalist but also a peek into his equally complex mind, including his views on why performing in the Middle East requires something special for him.

Openly admitting that the Jethro Tull rock opera is a way to recycle Tull tunes note for note certainly demands that Tull fans have a sense of humour. Ian must be reading this Forum. YOU JOKE-STERS!

[JTull 007]

Jun 2, 2015 13:20:09 GMT maddogfagin said:

radio.foxnews.com/2015/06/02/ian-anderson-living-legend/
Jethro Tull Rock Star Ian Anderson – Thinking Of Greta?

Many thanks to Graham for this very fine interview in spite of Fox News...
I'm just glad they allowed Ian 21 minutes of air time so he could explain what
Jethro Tull The Rock Opera is all about including some thoughts on other topics.

I understand what this is now : The TULL Rock Opera is about making Jethro relevant in 2015.
With agricultural innovation and climate change we all could 'benefit' in the future.
This is a semi-educational form of musical indulgence which only TULL Fans can relate to.
With tongue in cheek he seems to be self deprecating at times and that makes this fun.

It's a good thing Tony Snow was a TULL Fan and Greta seems just as cool!

[maddogfagin]

myglobalmind.com/

INTERVIEW WITH IAN ANDERSON, JETHRO TULL
Published on June 5th, 2015
Interviewed by Karen Hetherington (Journalist/Writer/Contributor) Myglobalmind Webzine

Trying to grasp and indeed convey the essence of Jethro Tull is a difficult task which I’m not sure has been successfully accomplished in full biographies on the band, and is certainly impossible in few short paragraphs.

Jethro Tull first broke onto the music scene in 1967. The late 60s were a time, which, in my opinion was the most exciting and revolutionary in music history. A time which seen Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page playing the guitar with a violin bow, Jimi Hendrix playing the guitar with his teeth and Pink Floyd playing music heavy with psychedelia. It seemed that everyone was looking for a new sound, the next best thing and something with an edge to make their mark on the industry. The music of these artists and many others of this era is undeniably timeless, however, Jethro Tull have stood the test of time and weathered the winds of change better than most. It was the introduction of the flute which gave Jethro Tull the sound by which they became instantly distinguishable. Their early sound was very blues orientated but their musical diversity became quickly apparent and seemed to have no boundaries.

The complete article/interview here