Interview: Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson on his new album Curious Ruminant, drugs in music and how The Shadows' guitarist Hank Marvin influenced prog rock
Learn how Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson's journey through the music industry has earned him legendary status.
Flute magician Ian Anderson has cemented his legendary status in the music industry.
His signature playing pushed rock in a new experimental direction and gave his band Jethro Tull a huge worldwide audience.
Elements of folk, rock and classical sounds blended with powerful songwriting helped the progressive group - which was a leader and one of the most influential groups in the prog rock genre - to sell over 60 million albums.
Now, Anderson has taken his songwriting capabilities to a more personal level on the band’s new nine-track album ‘Curious Ruminant’ – which is released on Friday, March 7, and features ex-band members, keyboardist Andrew Giddings and drummer James Duncan.
Anderson's current band also features David Goodier, on bass, John O’Hara, on keyboards, accordion and vocals, Scott Hammond, on drums, and Jack Clark, on guitar.
Contact Music sat down with Ian at The Victoria pub in London to talk about the exciting new album, drugs in the music business, as well as his religious beliefs and the afterlife...
What was it like creating Jethro Tull's first album, 1968's 'A Song for Jeffrey'?
It was a long time ago, back in those days, when we first began as a little old blues band at the Marquis Club in 1968 …
I appeared on the stage playing the flute, which was something I actually only managed to get a note out of in the December of 1967.
Six weeks later, I was on stage at the Marquis Club playing an instrument I couldn’t really play.
I think we made the album in June, July 1968 for about 800 pounds.
And that was done in three or four days, obviously.
We couldn’t afford to do two takes of everything, we had to crack on.
What is the difference in making this album with making that first one?
For me there’s not a huge amount of difference because it’s my way of recording in the digital domain, which I’ve been doing for 20-30 years at least.
But I treat it rather like analog recording. I don’t keep lots of takes. I work quickly …
I’ll do a couple of run throughs and then do a take of it all, and I hope to get something out of that take.
What I don’t like, I go over and replace with something better.
When I do that, what I’m covering up, it’s rather like analog take.
You’re rerecording over it. It’s gone forever …
It’s become very much the norm for musicians recording these days to do lots of takes and just keep everything, and then try to find bits of all these takes that they can assemble into a final comped master.
But that takes hours to go through it all.
I certainly don’t have the patience.
What was it like recording then compared to now?
I try and work quickly.
I wouldn’t want to spend more than an hour and a half doing the vocals on a song, and then I’m done.
I know when it’s right. I don’t feel the need to keep going over it.
In a way, what I did back then and what I do now is not so different.
Although I’m recording everything in the latest updated version of software that I use for digital recording.
I treat it in the same way as I would recording in the analog domain with multi-track tape.
I rarely use more than 24 tracks.
That’s what bands do now, isn’t it, bring out every single version of a song because that’s the way they hope they can make money.
There were a lot of recordings done in 1981 that weren’t on the 1982 album ‘The Broadsword and the Beast’ …
We did find a whole bunch of material that was fun to put out there in the expanded box set versions.
I’m told that the fans like that. Personally speaking, it’s not my cup of tea. If something wasn’t good enough at the time, it shouldn’t be good enough now.
Did you and Cat [Stevens] have the same manager?
No. Yusuf Islam, as he is these days.
First of all, when he retired from music, it was a bit of a blur.
I personally tried to persuade him not to do it. He felt it was too much at odds with his Islamic faith. But somehow, he found the way back into it again.
You’re writing about quite topical stuff… Most rockstars don't seem to write about that. They still seem to write about love and June.
That makes up 95 per cent of what song lyrics are about.
From Shakespeare’s sonnets on through to today. It’s the human condition and the sense of emotions. It’s about being in love or out of love.
Same thing with most blues. Blues was always about rolling around in a sack of hay kind of sex.
Back then, that was what lyrics were about.
I’d have rather liked, if you’re going to sing that kind of song to me, it’s got to have some tenderness about it.
Any time I’ve ever done what you might call love songs, they are expressions of tenderness.
They are of a romantic proposition. They’re not recounting something that is purely sexual.
Do you think more songs should be political or protest songs?
They’re not really protest songs … I don’t feel in any way compelled to do what I’m not really good at, which is writing love songs.
I think probably from my art school background, I’m more of a pictorial musician in the sense that I work from images, things I remember from visual experiences.
I’m not a landscape painter, I’m not a portrait painter. I like to paint people in a landscape, I like to see people in a context.
That to me is much more interesting than either the closeup face or the empty landscape.
I think that’s what I try to do musically. I try to see people in a context.
You expressed your personal feelings in the songs for 'Curious Ruminant'.
My points of view and my feelings are expressed much more than they would normally be in most of the lyrics I’ve written in my life.
There’s a lot more I/me pronouns than usual. Usually it’s he/she/it. This one’s a kind of I/me album. And yet, ironically, it’s very much a band album, it’s not a solo album. It’s a band album, with all the guys playing properly.
It may seem at odds with that, but my excuse is, well, they never read my lyrics anyway so I can say whatever I want.
‘Interim Sleep’ [song off new album] seems a very brave topic, to take on death. Anything that propelled you to do that?
I actually wrote something along those lines as a poem a couple of years ago. An imaginary poem of comfort for somebody bereaved.
In that poem, I was talking from beyond to the person, saying, ‘hey, cheer up’, and giving some positive thoughts about death not being final. We will be together in another life …
I needed something a bit quieter on the end of the album. With that in mind, I decided it would be a spoken word piece that would be rather intimate, and I based it on that poem I had written.
I’m not sure whether it’s a brave thing to do, or maybe downright embarrassing. People don’t like to think about death.
I like the intimacy and the cadence of the words without actually hitting definite notes of a melody. It seemed more appropriate to the subject material.
Do you believe we’ll come back, that this is not the end?
I don't believe. Belief seems to imply faith, and I am not a person of faith.
I have a tendency to think in terms of possibilities and probabilities but not certainties.
You might call me in broad terms a pantheist, but I prefer the slightly different nuance of a panentheist, which I won’t attempt to explain.
Look it up.
Tell me about your faith.
I am, however, a great supporter of Christianity, the religion in which I grew up and the religion in which I support to this day.
Is there anyone you wished you had worked with at all?
I have actually worked with quite a few in later years that were my musical heroes before I became a professional musician.
Working with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, I’d be on the stage performing with them. It’s something that feels good even close to the end of their lives.
Is there anyone you’d like to work with still?
Well, there are, but they're pretty much all dead.
Out of those that I have worked with, I suppose there's quite a few of them who have passed away or aren’t feeling well.
In terms of any younger musicians, I’m afraid I probably don’t know who they are because I stopped listening to pop and rock music in the mid-70s.
You said you stopped listening, even stopped reading books, because you didn't want to be influenced. I found that quite an odd thing.
I was born into the time when there was this amazing explosion of great talent. … By ‘67, with two albums, ‘Sargent Pepper’ by The Beatles and ‘Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ by Pink Floyd, was the beginning of prog[ressive] rock. They were very important to me because they were signposts in the street ahead …
It pushed me at that point away from wanting to be an imitative, second-rate blues performer or songwriter or guitar-player and wanting to do something a bit more original, where influences could come from a variety of other sources.
When people ask why the ‘60s were so great, sometimes I have a really flippant answer, and I say drugs. Where do you stand on that? … Do you not think that LSD and things made those albums happen?
I have no idea. I can only imagine as a record producer.
I knew George Martin a bit, lovely chap, and I could imagine George probably found it rather difficult being in a studio with the Beatles, whether it was just smoking joints or later on LSD or whatever.
I imagine he found it a bit frustrating, because he, like me, was a straight-laced character.
You were never tempted?
Not so far.
But I’ve always thought one day, I’m not going to mess about, I’m going straight to morphine.
There’s a 50 per cent chance I will spend my final moments in this life under the ameliorative effect of a class-A drug to remove or soften the pain of terminal cancer.
Fifty per cent chance that I will end my days on morphine, and I’m quite happy to wait until then.
If it’s as good as people say drugs are, maybe I’ll try and write a song, see if it works out. I rather think it won’t.
My gut feeling is that drinking and drugs do not help the creative process.
People are a bit hung up or lacking in confidence or just become hit by writers’ block, maybe it’s like a dam-buster’s bomb, opening the dam, a flood of creativity.
Perhaps that works for some people, but I don’t have a problem needing anything to set my mind going in the creative way, writing lyrics or music.
When the time feels right to do it, it comes in a rush and it builds momentum and it’s unstoppable.
When you’ve become so famous and then your life sort of dwindles away because you don’t have anymore hits … It must be so difficult if you’ve tasted fame and lost it.
Even if it’s just diminished by a teensy-weensy bit, some people take it really badly.
Those are people who I guess are a little insecure to start with.
They don't really have confidence in themselves, or they don't have the content and the calm that comes with having enjoyed some success, fame, and been able to sit back and look at it in a fond way whilst they carry on with their life.
Learning to cope is part of the whole big deal, and there are a lot of folks who aren’t cut out for it.
They can’t cope.
Do you think the fact that you’ve been married for so long has anything to do with it?
We’re a working family. We have always worked together as a team.
Not so much my daughter, because she’s got her own team to work with because her husband [Andrew Lincoln] is a good-for-nothing layabout actor who can’t program the television controller or do anything for himself …
I’m kidding, Andy is a great bloke and he’s a fine actor.
Sometimes, you do need to work as a team. My daughter and he are a very good match.
In my family, it’s the same.
You’ve been on the road with other big names: Hendrix, Led Zeppelin. You said one time that those stories of them behaving wildly were all sort of PR stunts.
I’m not saying they're all PR stunts …
They had a good time, but a lot of the things you read about in the media, it really was rather overblown.
I don’t think Zeppelin were more party animals than most people were, including a couple of guys in our band …
It never was my way of enjoying life on the road.
I probably came across to some other artists that we worked with as a bit of a stick in the mud and detached and unfriendly.
But it wasn’t that, I had huge respect and admiration for them as musicians.
I just didn’t want to do the off-duty side of rock and roll.
On rockstars and women
Sometimes it’s the ugliest guys who get the nicest looking girls.
Why is that?
Probably because some of us ugly guys, we come across as being a little more fascinating because we're not as classically good-looking.
On Frank Zappa
He’s the only other person I know of, other than me, who I can be pretty sure, anecdotally, that he never took what’s popularly called drugs.
He smoked like a chimney, and so did I.
Is it true Elvis wasn’t a hero of yours growing up?
It was disappointing because Elvis circa 'Jailhouse Rock', for example, 'Heartbreak Hotel', those two things for me were a step on for where I think some of his roots lay in Black American blues.
It was another of those moments as a child, when I was eight, nine years old, I thought, wow, this is a brave new world that caught my attention.
My very first instrument was a plastic ukulele that I got from the back pages of a mail-order thing from News of the World.
It said, ‘Elvis Presley guitar’. I spent all of my pocket money and saved up and got the Elvis Presley guitar …
It was a horrible plasticky thing. You couldn't keep it in tune for two seconds. It was dreadful, a complete ripoff, but it was the first thing I learned to play.
Who were your musical aspirations?
I have a lot of fondness for Marty Wilde and Cliff Richard … Cliff was our Elvis.
Cliff was important, as were the Shadows, because suddenly these guys were guitar players who could really play. It wasn’t messes of notes.
I remember learning Guitar Tango on a beaten up acoustic guitar when I was 12, 13 years old, and the solo, which is a very Spanish feel.
I could learn to play it. I could play most of what Hank [Marvin of the Shadows] played, except I would make lots of mistakes whereas he never dropped a note.
Hank was the way for so many British great musicians. All the generation of Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Ritchie Blackmore, and all those who came after.
We all owe Hank Marvin a huge amount in terms of his ability to play really nicely …
He seemed incapable of every dropping a note or making a mistake.
Jethro Tull's new studio record ‘Curious Ruminant’ is out now.
