By Jeb Wright
Transcription by Eric Sandberg

Part 1

I am, as of this writing, in March of 2018, 51 years old.

Jethro Tull is 50.

Damn…that’s a long time to stick around…for both of us!

Any JT fan worth their salt knows that Jethro Tull is just a case of identity theft by the clever, flautist/guitarist/songwriter/producer Ian Anderson. He is the only guy to be there for every note of music. Jethro Tull is his baby.

Any regular reader of Classic Rock Revisited knows that I am a huge Jethro Tull/Ian Anderson fan.

It was a pleasure, and an honor, for me, once again, to speak to Mr. IA.

It was more of a pain in the butt for him.

It seems some bikers had invaded his home and tore up his lawn the night before…yet he still called…right on time too. What follows is a slotted 15-minute interviewed that turned into the 14-page chat that is below.

In the interview you are about to read Ian and I discuss many topics…including 50 years of Tull. We also learn that Ian has zero Tull memorabilia sitting around his house. In fact, he has given nearly all of it away to charity. We talk about flutes…and Lemmy from Motorhead…and…oh yeah…we talk about urine pouring and tampon flinging.

It is an interesting conversation. 

Jeb: I know you're not a birthday/anniversary type of guy, but you will celebrate the odd anniversary of something from your catalog, but does fifty years get you a little excited or nostalgic?

IA: Well I suppose it's like you're own birthday, it's something you're aware of but not something I get terribly excited about. It's not something I think about outside of the context of doing press and promo or the actual concert itself, which having done a few of them now over the last week or so it's something I've gotten used to by now. That's quite easy. But, as you rightly point out I'm not really a nostalgic person, but I only have to do this for ten months, then I can carry on for the rest of my life.

Jeb: I think you're savvy enough to know that guys like me and Tull fans around the world are thinking, 'Holy crap, I can't believe fifty years have passed.’

IA: Well, that's right, I suppose, if you pay attention to those sorts of things. I think it's possibly because it reminds them of their own circumstances fifty years ago. What they were doing, whether they were at school, the music they listened to, a girlfriend, their relationship with their parents.

It's not just about nostalgia in terms of the band, or the music, but of the way in which they get in touch with their own past. That's what those things are about. It's a little bit like box sets and remasters. It plays a part in people's lives and it connects them in a tangible way to their past lives.

Jeb: Doing press about a fiftieth anniversary, I can't imagine being in your shoes and having to discuss such a limited topic...does it drive you a little crazy to keep getting asked the same questions?

IA: (Deep breath) Not really (laughter). It's the sort of thing I normally buckle down to at 9:00 on the weekday mornings and 5PM when I'm doing American promo. I don't usually do it on the weekend, so you're likely to find me distracted because I have plenty of other things to do…like having just got soaking wet cleaning four motorcycles…getting rid of mud, grass and leaves and mess they were covered in after a little sortie last night with some motorcycling companions who were very badly behaved.

Jeb: So I'm interrupting and you partied a little bit last night. That's a terrible place for an interviewer to be.

IA: I had Norman Reedus, Jeffrey (Dean Morgan) and my son-in-law (Andrew Lincoln) from The Walking Dead and we were doing an episode of a TV series called Ride with Norman Reedus (AMC) with a twenty-strong camera crew. There were loads of people,. It was raining…just dreadful, from mid-afternoon into the evening. It was a long day and a lot of mess and mud and dirt everywhere, so I've been cleaning up the house and cleaning up the bikes and the yard since they all safely went away late last night.

Jeb: Going back to the tour; you've got about three hundred songs that the fans would say they want to hear. Being that this is a fifty year retrospective did you put a little extra effort into the set list? Is there going to be more early stuff?

IA: Yeah, there are a few pieces we haven't played in a long time and a couple we’ve never played at all, which are from the early days. We take it, more or less, from a chronological order with quite an emphasis on the first few albums because that's the period when Jethro Tull became known to the most people…so, broadly speaking you can say it's '68 through the end of the ‘70s…although a couple of pieces go beyond that. It’s about focusing on that period of time that most people got to hear about Jethro Tull for the first time.

I've just put together a fifty-song compilation album for Warner Brothers. When coming down to fifty songs covering all the albums, you're down to one or two tracks from each album and that's being incredibly selective. In many ways it doesn't do justice to some of the songs that people would hold dearest…particularly from albums that mean the most to them like, I suppose, Aqualung, Thick As A Brick, or Songs From The Wood.

If you narrow it down to only to songs from an album, people are going to say, “Wait a minute, you left out this, you left out that.” It's like that with a set list, only you don't have fifty songs to play with…we probably only have twenty songs to play with live, so you really have to be selective.

By the same token, whilst you may introduce a few pieces not normally played on tour then you still have to make sure you play the heavy hitters. People will be disappointed if you don't do “Aqualung” or “Cross-Eyed Mary” or whatever it might be.

It's a question of trying to please everybody while knowing, without doubt, you will not please everybody. You will please everybody to some extent, but they will all have complaints, saying “you left out this, you left out that.” Well, you can't please everybody and that's something you just have to accept. But, nonetheless, it's a set list that's got some surprises…and a lot of things that will not be a surprise because we played those songs the last time we rolled into your town.

Jeb: What was it like in the early days, forming the band with Mick Abrahams? Did you really have a power struggle with Mick, or did you just naturally become the leader of the band?

IA: There was no power struggle, as such. Mick and I, as musicians, were moderately competitive, but it wasn't a power struggle as such. He and I got on well most of the time, but he could be a little…difficult. He could be a little irritating and he didn't make friends, really, with Glenn Cornick, our bass player. It soon fell out of what was an uneasy camaraderie into a degree of dislike, which made it difficult during the latter months that Mick was with the band.

Only on a very few occasions, possibly as late as October of 1968, were there any disagreeable moments. As much as anything, and it may be a hackneyed old comment, there were musical differences, which would have brought an end to the relationship, I'm sure. The songs I started writing in the summer of '68, just before our (first) album was to be released, were pieces that weren't really easily understood, or adopted, by Mick Abrahams, in terms of there being something he could really add to them.

He had a different style of playing. The first pieces I started to write, that I might've played him a little bit of, he wasn't particularly interested in that kind of thing. He liked blues and that was his unashamed affiliation, musically, then and now and for all of his life. That was never going to work for me.

Prior to Jethro Tull, in the John Evan Band, we were experimenting with music that maybe owed something to blues, but we were already doing the musical form that became known a couple of years later as progressive rock… so we were probably impressed by, for instance, the Graham Bond Organization, who were an underground band at the time, playing an odd mixture of jazzy, bluesy and occasionally almost ethnic-inspired music that was exciting and different and very British.

It wasn't like anything else that was being imported from the USA. Dick Heckstall-Smith, the sax player (Bonzo Dog Doodah Band) and, more notably, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, of course, who went on to form Cream…and Cream was a band, just as we were starting, that were shaping what was to become known as progressive rock.

Although there was a strong blues influence in Cream's music, I think the songs that we will remember them for are more the ones that weren't so obviously blues. For instance, “Tales of Brave Ulysses”, “Sunshine of Your Love” and “White Room”…these were things that had a bluesy feel, but the structure was not blues. Lyrically, they owed almost nothing to the typical subject material of black American blues.

They were much more abstract middle-class-white-boy lyrics and that was something we were drawn to because it felt like it was our music, British music. We didn't want to be just imitating Americana for the rest of our lives, at least I didn't and that's what led to, inevitably, a parting of the ways.

I don't think Mick was enamored with Piper at the Gates of Dawn or Sgt. Pepper in the same way that infused me and some of the guys in the John Evan Band with an enormous sense of excitement because this was much more creative and it was homegrown and it was different.

The progressive pop of the Beatles, in the summer of 1967, and three weeks later, Piper At The Gates Of Dawn by Pink Floyd…It was a real step forward and that was what I wanted to be a part of. Quite clearly that wasn't going to work with Mick's guitar style, long term. You don't know that when you start working with somebody. You think “We are all going to change and grow through some sort of process to other musical levels and interests” but that wasn’t going to be the case with Mick. Another month later it would have been a parting of the ways…whatever had happened.

Jeb: In a hundred years you're going to be known as the guy who played the flute. Do you still have that original flute?

IA: No. The original flute was stolen in America around 1970. I do remember it was a Selma Gold Seal student model flute, which was a bit of a clunker, but it was what I played. I, then switched to an equally not very well engineered student model flute made by a USA company called Artley. They were based in Elkhart, Indiana, which was very much the home of instruments made for high school bands and military bands…so, in Elkhart, Indiana, they made all kinds of stuff; brass instruments and flutes. 

Somebody said, 'This is a company in America where you can buy a flute, you can buy it in the local music store' and in desperation Terry Ellis (Jethro Tull's manager) sent someone out to buy a flute. I put it together and played that on stage that night because mine had been stolen, which unfortunately tended to happen.

I, then went on to play Artley flutes because they were relatively cheap. I actually owned, at one point, nineteen Artley flutes in various states of disrepair. They all went off to various charity auctions. I held one back which I gave to my daughter. I think I might have one that is not exactly playable in a box of old flutes…that is what I played for ten years.

I didn't switch to more advanced [chuckles] student instruments until the ‘80s when I started playing a slightly better quality of student model flute, a Japanese flute made by Pearl, who had a presence in the USA. Then, I switched to Sankyo flutes around 1991, then Powell flutes. For most of the last twenty-five years I’ve played Sankyo and Powell flutes.

Jeb: I wasn't a big fan of Motorhead, but I was a big fan of Lemmy because he was such a fun guy to talk to. He knew I was a Tull fan so, every time I talked to him he would bring up that he was the reason you got that flute, that it was his guitar you had traded.

IA: Well that's right. It’s nice to know that Lemmy had heard the stories. I wonder if you spoke to Eric Clapton and also might have heard that he was the reason I quit playing guitar to find something else to play that he couldn't play. There are other slightly apocryphal stories, which are indeed not exaggerated and not made up - they're perfectly true.

The whole history of flute in popular music goes back to obviously before I started playing, but it was usually in a rather more pretty, or decorative, way that the flute was heard in rock music. It was quite common to find tenor sax players switching to the flute as a second instrument because the fingering was quite similar. There were quite a few Jazz sax players that would double on the flute...that was not uncommon and, of course, there was ethnic folk music although usually rather more primitive flutes, was something that was well established for thousands of years.

The flute I play is the classical flute as designed by Böhm (Theobald Böhm, 1794-1881) about a hundred years before I was born. Perhaps my little bit of a breakthrough was to use the concert flute in a rock setting and give it a more authoritative tonal quality and a musical style that gave it an equal importance to the electric guitar as a solo instrument and an instrument to play motifs or riffs. That's what I did and I guess that's earned me a place in the history books for a while to come...perhaps, all the more so because, over these last fifty years, there haven't been a busting amount of rock flute players that have come to attention.

A few people have done it, but it must be a bit of a thankless task to be a flute player in a rock band. You're just going to have endless comparisons to me. Even though you might be a much better player than I am, you're still going to suffer from people making that inevitable comparison, which is a bit boring.

It must have been bad enough for poor Robin Trower, an electric guitar player from Procol Harum, who had a relatively short solo career being endlessly compared with Jimi Hendrix who, unfortunately, he had a tendency to sound rather like and that's an uncomfortable place to be if you're a musician; to always feel as if you're in the shadow of somebody else who got there and did that first.

I can imagine people taking up the flute in the context of rock music are probably going to feel a little awkward about it. And if they're any good, if they're great players, then I'm going to feel awkward about it too. So…it's best that that they stick to some other instrument. It's better for all of us.

Jeb: You've done a lot of things with orchestras where the players you are leading are maybe more technically advanced than you. Have you ever felt discomfort in that situation?

IA: Well, yes, but then I know there is stuff I can do that they can't do…you have your little area of musical ease and ability which is something they probably can't do. I'm not saying that none of them can, but I have obviously played with a lot of classical flautists in an orchestral setting. I'm well aware of the huge expertise they possess in terms of embouchure, sound production, their technical skill and their ability to play quite difficult passages of music. That goes without saying, but they struggle to play in a heartfelt, improvisational way.

A very few classical musicians can improvise. I know of classical flute players who said, "Oh, I'm learning improvisation." But what they mean is that someone has written them a development of some tune that's not just the original melody, but something that's a bit more creative and they've written it down and scored it and they call that improvisation…but it's not. Improvisation is when you don't have any music, you're playing by ear and you're making it up as you go along.

A few weeks ago, I had a meeting with James Galway, the most famous living classical flute player. He's 78 and he announced to me that he is taking flute lessons. I thought he might be taking up some exotic Indian flute, but he said he's studying improvisation with a jazz flute player from Brazil. I said, "Wow, that's great". He said, "I just thought, at my age, I should learn to do this because it's something I've never done. I've never played the flute, ever, without reading it from music." That's a big departure when you get to that age.

I said, "That's great news, James, I hope you have fun with it. The one thing you've got to be prepared to do is just play lots of wrong notes." Because if you concentrate too hard on not making mistakes it will be rotten improvisation, it will be too self-conscious. You've got to be naive and childlike when you approach that way of playing. You've got to make lots of mistakes and play a lot of bum notes in order to find out which are the right ones.

You can study, and have the Theory of Improvisation put in front of you, but it will likely become so deliberate, and so thought through, that it ceases to have that spontaneous and childlike naiveté that is the thing we all love about music. That very immature way of playing, where the musicians feel like they're on an adventure and you're participating on that with them by listening…that's very hard to do once you get past the age of twenty.

As an orchestral player you don't want to make a fool of yourself in front of a bunch of people. You lose that naiveté that you might have had ten years before. It's really hard for people to learn to improvise later in life.

We'll see what James can do because I think he's going to get up on stage with me in Ravinia, near Chicago, in the summer and he's going to join in on a couple songs, at least one of which involves a little improvisation, so we'll see if he's managed to figure that one out.

Jeb: You brought up special guests. I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't ask you this hard question: Wouldn't this be a perfect time, being it's fifty years, that maybe on one day, you could have some of the old guys, like Martin, on stage with you. I get the idea, from afar, that you have divorced yourself from that train of thought.

IA: No, not at all. We had a look some months ago, first of all to see who still plays. You've got to remember there have been thirty-seven musicians in Jethro Tull, including me. I was actually a bit surprised when I counted them up and there were more than the twenty-six I had usually touted as the number…but if you considered the ones that performed with the band on more than one major tour, or participated on at least one album recording, then it's at least thirty-seven people.

I pay homage to all of them during the current show. You will see their images on the stage behind me, on the screen and at least a couple of them pop up on the screen with a recorded message to the audience. Of course, it would be nice to have those people around but the problem is, especially with those from the ‘70s, there's really only Martin Barre who still plays music.

John Evans, Jeffrey Hammond and Barrie Barlowe just kind of gave up on that. Jeffrey gave up on that in 1976. John quit about 1980 and took up engineering and building, a totally different way of life. Jeffrey went back to painting and that's all he's ever done since. He hasn't touched an instrument since 1976.

Barrie Barlow became a manager and a wannabe record producer and more or less gave up playing drums. He actually joined us on stage about ten years ago at the Royal Festival Hall in London and played two songs that he had played on from Heavy Horses. He was really rusty. He hadn't played for a long time. He got it together, but he was absolutely physically and mentally exhausted by it. He said to me at the end, "I really was praying for it to stop because I thought I was going to have a heart attack and die". He had completely forgotten what physical effort it took in performing and it was just two songs!

It was exhausting for him and I think it reinforced the idea that once you've stopped playing for a while, it's really hard to get back to that level of physical fitness and expertise. You just can't pick it up and go back to it.

There was a time, actually, when John Glascock (Tull bassist 1975-1979) died that we got in touch with Jeffrey to see if he would perhaps be able to even temporarily rejoin the band to play while we found somebody longer term. I think we got as far as sitting down in a room with Martin and I and a borrowed bass guitar and he only lasted a few minutes. He said, "Listen, I'm not going to be able to do this, I've already lost it." It was just maybe two years later. It's something you become aware of where people just can't do that anymore.

Of course, Glenn Cornick, from the early days…he's no longer with us. Mick Abrahams who, like Glenn and other people over the years, there have been times where they've dropped by and got on stage with us and joined in for a bit. These are not possible anymore. Mick had two heart attacks and a stroke and has difficulty to talk let alone play guitar or sing, which he can't do. There are physical realities for a lot of folks who don't do that anymore.

Martin is the only one from that era that still plays, but when I came to look at his diary I realized straight away that he was on tour pretty much all the way through doing shows. For instance, when we were playing at the Albert Hall it would have been nice to have Martin get up and play something, but he's somewhere else. He's on a German tour that time of the year. These were not really options to have someone join in.

From my perspective, would it really be fair to say to the guys in my band, with whom I've been playing for twelve years, “Listen, I want you to move over because I'm dating my first wife again.” Imagine what a terrible rejection that would be. To say, “Why don't you go off the stage for these two songs so these other guys can play?” I think it's a very touchy thing to do. It's not something I would feel comfortable doing.

Even if you were to pick and choose the people who do still have performance skills and the current musical activity to be able to do it, they might not be the people who are the best known members of Jethro Tull. The audience might find it a little strange that there's some person they didn't even know played with Jethro Tull and was introduced as a bass player, or keyboard player and they don't know who the hell he is. Or we do know who he is but we never liked him anyway!

It's a very tricky thing to try to make that work and I looked at it. I discussed it with my son, who made a few overtures to people, but it became very obvious that this was not going to be a workable scenario. It was far nicer to feature people in a way that reminded the audience of all these folks that'd been part of the band by featuring little snippets of video of, not just band members, but other musicians I've known over the years.

A few of them pop up on the screen and introduce a song, reminding our audience that it's not just about Jethro Tull. It's about a context in which the development of rock music, as we know it, developed from slightly different areas of music and those that grew up as young teenagers hearing the music of Jethro Tull, might have been one of the things that inspired them to take up music…so there are a few little surprises, along the way, of those sorts and that's about as far as we can go to bring people back literally, unfortunately, from the dead in few cases.

Jeb: Do you have a personal favorite era of Tull? My personal favorite albums are Heavy Horses and Songs from the Wood. Do you have a favorite time period?

IA: Well, it's very hard when you're a songwriter and you perform those songs over many decades, to think of them in a historic context because they're something I did last night. I didn't, in fact, do it last night…but I did it three nights ago.

For me, when I'm performing that music and becoming so intimately involved with the lyrics, the performance and the music, it's not something that's in my mind that this was 1969. I'm just thinking that this is a song I did 24 hours ago and I'm putting myself into that character. 

A classical actor doing Shakespeare doesn't think about the time and the period that it was written. It was long before they were born. The person is trying to put himself into character and become that person. You're not thinking about the time.

Maybe Shakespeare's a bad example, but I went recently to see a couple of people who are friends that were actors performing in the West End (London theater district) in a play written by Harold Pinter, which was first performed in the end of the ‘50s or 1960. The actors performing the lead roles were not born then.

They're performing a period piece, but it's within my lifetime and it's very contemporary for me to see other than something way in the past, like Shakespeare. It's still relatively in the past for those actors to take on a role and understand a particularly difficult and very abstract piece of theater.

I don't think they go onstage every night thinking they're re-creating a piece of history. They go onstage every night to inhabit those roles, to inhabit those characters and make them come alive. It doesn't really matter if it's something written yesterday, or it was written fifty years ago, or something written three hundred years ago.

It's like that with music. I don't think, as a classical musician, you would be particularly focusing on the era in which the music was written. You think about performing it and bringing it alive every day because that's living, breathing music whether it was written two hundred years ago by Beethoven. That's not what's really in your head. I don't really see it the way a fan would see it. I don't have that temporal connection to the music.

For me, it's more about the words and the music and the songs…without really putting them into a niche, like that's 1969 or that's 1975. Of course, I do have that way of thinking about it when I come to analyze things or put a set list together or a Best Of collection, I have to think about it in those terms, but it is not my natural inclination to be thinking of it like that.

As to favorite albums, or favorite eras, well of course there are some things that have a certain importance to me because they are a bit landmark, in terms of career development. I will always feel, probably in very much the same way as Martin Barre, very attached to the album, Stand Up.

In 1969, when that was released, it was an album of much more original music. It was a step forward musically for me and a big step forward for Martin and for the other two guys who hadn't really encountered that kind of music before as musicians and performers…so that's a landmark album.

In equally and in different ways, albums like Aqualung, that's more of a singer-songwriter album. I focused a bit more on the songwriting and perhaps recording it quite often in a way that was a bit more like it was a solo album, in the sense of my knowing what I was doing and putting down my backing tracks first. The other guys played on it and added little frills and bits and bobs, but that was more of a singer-songwriter's approach perhaps than the albums that preceded it.

Then, of course, albums like Songs From The Wood and Heavy Horses, as you mentioned, these are albums that are developments where I'm bringing into play certain more eclectic influences of not only musical styles that are a bit more British folky. It’s culturally different to what went before. I'm drawing upon influences that are a part of rural tradition and culture in the UK. It gives it that sense of identity which I'm drawn to, but in terms of favorite to perform, that's a tricky one.

I don't listen to my music particularly with a view to entertain myself by sitting back and listening to it. I listen to almost all of from time to time, especially if I'm doing something like coming up with a fifty-track compilation album that will be released later this year. That means listening to maybe not every single track, but it's probably half of each album, picking this and that. 

I've listened to a huge amount of it in the last few weeks and therefore, I do listen to it and sometimes I’m quite pleasantly surprised by what I hear. It sounds, sometimes, better than I expected after all these years. Most of the time, I'm not thinking about it in that way. I'm thinking about it as a performer, in a way that an actor takes on a part. You take on that role again.

You've got to put yourself into that position that you were in when you wrote the song and first started to perform it. You have to try and get back to that mindset and put yourself into that twenty-five year old body and try to do it and think about it in the way that you did back then because that's the starting point of being in touch musically with it.

Once you've done a few shows, you're not consciously thinking of the musical style or the performance being 1968 or '69. You're thinking of it as being something you did last night and you're going to do it again in ten minutes time. It's a different way of thinking. It's difficult for me to talk about it in the way a fan would. I don't have that easy connection that has to do with favorite albums or favorite periods of time. I just don't think about it that way unless I have to.

Click Here for Part 2 of our Ian Anderson Interview...