Intervista Jethro Tull (Ian Anderson)
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Hi Ian, how are you doing?
About the same as I was yesterday and the day before, so I can’t complain, I wake up every morning with a sense of gratitude that I’m still here and, you know, that’s all I can expect at my age.
I’m still here.
In a couple of weeks you’ll play some gigs in Italy. You’ve already played here earlier this year, so what can the fans expect this time around? Are you going to play a different setlist, maybe some deep cuts, or will you have a different production?
Yeah, there will be a few different songs.
We played some shows in Italy earlier this year, but those were just performances, these ones are production shows with all the videos and production, so a bit more visually entertaining and hopefully put the music in context, and of course the setlist is a bit different, some different songs, and then we’ll be coming back in Italy again in December, but that hasn’t been announced yet: I know where we’re going, but it’s a secret.
That will be a very different show, different songs, different shows from either the summer show and the production shows we’re doing in just over a week’s time.
We’re trying to keep it different, keep it interesting for the fans, and we’re working on a new show for 2020 which we’re just beginning to put together in terms of setlist and learning lot of material, some new material, quite a few songs that we haven’t played in many, many, many years so, you know, we always try to change to keep it interesting for the fans, and to keep it interesting for us in the band.
I was looking at the recent tours you’ve played, and I saw that some are billed as “Jethro Tull performed by Ian Anderson”, some as “Jethro Tull The Prog Years” and some as “Jethro Tull 50th Anniversary Tour”, what’s the difference?
Very straight forward, really: we’re talking about Jethro Tull repertoire, so “Jethro Tull performed by Ian Anderson” we are talking about Jethro Tull repertoire, I don’t do any of my solo material, or other pieces of music, it’s all music that has been part of the Jethro Tull repertoire, released as Jethro Tull.
With “Jethro Tull 50th Anniversary Tour“, those are the tour dates that we are still doing, although technically it’s now the 51st anniversary of Jethro Tull, you know, it’s very much focused on the early years of Jethro Tull, how we came to start play at the Marquee Club, and how things progressed from there.
These are the production shows that are called “Jethro Tull 50th Anniversary Tour”, whereas if it just says “Jethro Tull by Ian Anderson” it’s more likely to be the billing for a generic Jethro Tull repertoire show that doesn’t have all the videos in there, the more complex side of the productions.
In the case of 2020, it… I don’t know where you got… where did you get the information about “The Prog Years” from?
It was on the Jethro Tull website.
Oh okay, I’ll take a look at that.
You know, we always try to focus on, also in terms of our shows for 2021, and 2022, I’m thinking that far ahead as to a kind of theme shows so the repertoire is a bit more pushing towards certain kinds of songs, certain aspects of Jethro Tull music over the years… I’m thinking ahead usually two or three years, not more than that because I don’t know if I’ll be alive in five years’ time, so I’m reasonably confident about the next two or three years.
Songs like ‘Aqualung’ and ‘Locomotive Breath’ are classics that people expect to hear every time they see you live, and so you are almost forced to play them. Do you still enjoy doing it, or do you just do for the fans, and maybe you’d rather play something else?
Well, if I was “just doing it for the fans and I’d rather play something else” I would just play something else.
I’m not someone who would want to be a paid musical hooker, you kind of hire me for the night and you choose the sexual position that gratifies you the most, I’m not into that, sorry.
I do what I enjoy doing, and of course when you have a long career with certain pieces of music, to me very special pieces, you mentioned ‘Locomotive Breath’ and ‘Aqualung’, I mean those are not songs that Ed Sheeran would do, these are not songs that Madonna would do, these are not songs that Status Quo would do, these are songs about real issues, songs about homelessness and our reaction to it, or ‘Locomotive Breath’ is a song about globalization, population growth and a runaway economy which by all forecast might well be coming back to bite us in the bottom in the next two or three years. The world is moving towards what could well turned out to be a major recession, again; just ten years after the last one, twelve years after the last one by the time it might happen.
So, you know, ‘Locomotive Breath’ and ‘Aqualung’, these are about real issues that are as real today as they were when I wrote the songs, and I feel good about that.
You know, I’m not writing love songs, or things about some contemporary fashion issue, I’m writing songs about perennial subjects that for me are important matters of some issue.
I mean, I wrote my first climate change song in 1973, and I’m always thinking about the reality and how things will move into the future, it’s something that I’ve grown up with, it’s a philosophy: it’s to try to take from the past, understand the present and project into the future.
Talking about music in general, one of the main characteristics of Progressive Rock is this progression, the striving for new solutions and sounds. Nowadays few bands that are labelled as Prog actually manage to do that, and many just sound like some bands from the ‘70s. Do you think it’s still possible to be innovative in this genre?
Well, I think so, broadly speaking, but of course you’re going to find some Progressive Rock bands of the current age who you may listen to and think, “Oh, they’ve obviously taken a lot from Genesis, or Yes”, you know, their influences are very, very obvious in many cases, but I still think that Progressive Rock generally, and it embraces elements of Folk music too and Classical music, it’s by definition a very eclectic set of musically influenced ideas that musicians have come up with over the years.
I would still… if I was starting out today, I think I would want to be labelled a Progressive Rock band, I don’t think I would be interested in doing Hip Hop, or trying to be a Pop star doing catchy tunes, that wouldn’t interest me at all.
I think those of us who enjoy the challenge of music that requires either more skill, or more intellectual awareness, I think that’s ultimately satisfying to us folks who want to do it, but I don’t pretend that it’s for everybody, and I wouldn’t dream to suggest that audiences should always embrace that, because audiences, they know what they want, and they come to shows expecting to hear Ed Sheeran singing cute little love songs, or to go and see Iron Maiden doing their full-on Heavy Metal slaughter.
The audiences are right to choose what they want and to enjoy what they want, but some of us just take a different course musically, we don’t want to be too predictable, we like to explore different avenues.
You know, when I’ll arrive in an Italian town, in a couple of weeks’ time, where am I going… Padua, I will go out of my hotel, I will either turn left or turn right, and I will be faced with a decision: do I go straight on, do I make another right, I will choose a different path when I get there.
And then the next morning, on the morning of the show, I will probably walk in a different direction because I’m interested in where that’s going to take me.
It’s the same thing with music, you have the choices along the way, you can turn left, right, go straight ahead, or even make a U-turn and go backwards.
Having been playing for 50 years you’ve had the chance to see the music industry change a lot: a hot topic in the industry, today, is Spotify and streaming services in general. While the services allow artists to make some money where they were making none because of the music piracy, many artists have complained about them, mainly because of the little money they make out of Spotify and the such. What are your thoughts on these services?
Well, the copyright in both recorded music and in the composers’ copyright, the mechanical copyright, these are things that traditionally have make it worthwhile starting out to be a musician, and even if you’re not very successful you’re going to… we go back thirty years, forty years ago, then you had a chance to make a little bit of money from the royalties from your recordings.
About ten to fifteen years ago, when that really begun to change with the advent of MP3s, with file sharing, with frankly quite illegal downloads, then it became pretty obvious to me, and I’m sure it gradually became obvious to record companies, those days are over and there isn’t anything in the world you can really do. I mean, you’d have to employ an army of helpers to do nothing but to try to remove your illegal videos and music from, let’s say, YouTube or whatever from which you’re unlikely to get paid anything at all, it’s an enormous task.
You have to pay people to do that, and chance are that it’s going to cost you more paying people to do these things than you would actually be getting from the end results.
I’m sad for all the contemporary musicians, young musicians today the only chance they have to make any money frankly is by doing live concert and by selling t-shirts at the door, the days of making big bucks from records, you know, you do have to be selling millions and millions and millions of records to make decent levels of income from, let’s say, Spotify, or iTunes, or whatever it might be.
Ed Sheeran, I’ll mention him again, he has such huge record sale he probably does make a reasonable income stream from the digital media, but for the average artist that’s just not going to happen, it lose you more money to try to collect it than you’d be getting.
So, today those days are gone, they are not going to come back, everybody expects access to the internet to provide them with whatever they want without having to pay anything for it and, if you try to download most international newspapers you’ll find that all but a tiny few will now insist on you subscribing and paying a monthly or an annual charge to read all of the features of the newspaper because they can’t survive! Printed media is dropping away all the time, so even with advertising revenue, which is really their sole source of revenue because they don’t sell enough physical copies, it’s still a real, real struggle for the famous newspapers to stay alive in the current age, and that applies in Italy, just as it does in the UK or in the USA.
People expect all for nothing, they don’t expect to pay, they just think, “Hey, it’s out there, it’s free”, and I’m not sure that I can agree with that culture at all.
I think we should pay for what we consume, and that includes the air we breathe and the water we drink, you know, it’s not free, it’s not your right, we pay for it and we will pay for it big time if we don’t address the issues of conservation and the environment and climate change, we will be paying the hard way.
We take these things for granted but nothing is for free: the food we eat, the air we breathe, it doesn’t come without cost.
Today there is a great fascination and nostalgia for “the old times” – with Prog Rock fans’ “the old times” being the ’70s – and surely the kind of creativity that was around back then is nowhere to be seen today. However, with so much having changed in the music industry, I presume that not everything turned worse. What is, in your opinion, something that is better today than in the first years you were around?
I have to tell you that I really stopped listening to Pop and Rock music back in around 1970.
As a teenager I listened to Jazz and Blues, and little later on I listened to Folk music and Classical music, but I really stopped listening to what we might broadly call Rock and Pop music.
When I became successful I didn’t really want to hear music that sounded in any way the same as my music, I didn’t want to have those influences and I didn’t really enjoy it.
Look at it this way, if you work at McDonald’s and you have six days a week working long hours not getting paid very much money and all you see is French fries and burgers, on your night off are you going to go to Burger King? [Laughs] Probably not! You can’t just have too much of it.
So, I make a living that you broadly call Rock music, I have no interest in my spare time to plug in to my phone and start listening to my legal, paid-for, downloads of Pop and Rock music, it just doesn’t interest me a great deal, I tend to pay for my legal, paid-for, downloads and listen to Handel, or Mozart, or Bach, it gives me kind of more solace and relaxation and a sense of something finer in life than the harsh reality of being inside an aeroplane, or walking through interminable corridors in airports and so on, an so on.
I’m a happier guy when I listen to music that doesn’t sound in any way like the music I do.
If you ask me what’s in the charts today I have no idea, if you’d asked me that, what was in the charts back in 1972 I would have said, “I have no idea”.
Once in a while I go out and I think, “I’ve got to listen to this Ed Sheeran guy and see what all the fuss is about”, and I listen to a bit of it and I think, “Yeah, I don’t really hear anything that I haven’t heard before”. It doesn’t interest me very much to listen to more of it, same thing when I hear a lot of contemporary Rock bands who send their records and ask me to play on a track or something. Most of the time I don’t really hear anything that excites me to want to join in, but sometimes I do, sometimes somebody sends me a song and says, “Would you play on our record?”, and I think, “Yeah, okay, there’s something in here that I can do, that I haven’t played before”, that would be my criteria for making that decision, it would be based on, “Is there something original about it? Is there something that for me as a musician is challenging to have to find the best addition I can make? Do I think I’m going to do a good job and improve in some ways the music that they’re working so hard on?”, you have to make a judgement, but it doesn’t happen very often, most of the time I’m not interest in hearing what the contemporary world of Rock music is, and it’s not because I’m an old guy who doesn’t want to face what’s happening in the world, because I felt the same way when I was a young guy [laughs] when I was about 22 years old that’s how I felt, and I feel the same now.
What I do keep up to date on is I read about between six and twelve newspapers every day, I watch a lot of documentaries and informational television, so I’m usually pretty well versed on what’s going on in the world in the last 24 hours, I’m someone very much engaged with the present and reality and contemporary issues, but I’m afraid you can’t expect me to be interested in music that sounds too much like what I do.
So, I go back to my analogy, working in McDonald’s, seeing hamburgers and French fries every day it doesn’t make me want to go and think, “Well, I’ll try something different, on my night off I think I’ll go to Burger King”, that’s the best way of summing up my thoughts on the matter.
By the way, I don’t eat meat, so you won’t find me in neither of those places [laughs].
A while back you announced a new album that was supposed to be released this year, what happened with that?
What happened was that we recorded seven backing tracks in… more than a year ago, and at that point I had not really decided that I was going to do anything to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Jethro Tull, but when I started thinking about, you know, giving it a consideration as a possibility then I though, “Maybe I could do this and enjoy doing it, revisiting the story of how Jethro Tull came about, and trying to do a production show that would be challenging and interesting to come up with”.
That really has take up all of 2018, doing the Jethro Tull 50th anniversary tour, but because we didn’t get to play everywhere in 2018 we are still doing it in 2019, but at the end of this year I can positively confirm that there will no more 50th, or 51st, anniversary Jethro Tull tour because been there, done that.
Next year is time of a change and next year, by the end of February, I hope I’ll have completed the new album, projected to be released during September of 2020.
I’ve read of so many musicians being inspired by Jethro Tull: members of Iron Maiden, Rush, Dream Theater and so on, so many bands that inspired bands, that inspired bands. How does it feel to be such a huge inspiration? And is there any band that you are particularly proud to have inspired, that you became a fan of, maybe?
I would have to qualify your suggestion that I am a huge inspiration.
I mean, quite obviously there people who, some of whom you’ll see during the production tour, old friends who pop up on the screen introducing a song and people who’ve been influenced in some way, they’ve said, by Jethro Tull.
That’s great, but I must put it in prospective because if you ask me who are my inspirations I’m going to sit there for an hour coming up with names, because it’s not just one, or two, or three, it’s so many different things and I wouldn’t say for me there’s an obvious case of there being one huge inspiration, there are lots and lots of little inspirations, and I guess it must be the same for other people.
If Steve Harris of Iron Maiden calls himself a fan of Jethro Tull then, sure, there’s two or three songs I guess he heard when he was beginning to play music along with a whole bunch of other songs from other artists that will be one of the little things that may have pushed him in a certain musical direction.
I think the same thing applies when you have people as diverse as Johnny Rotten of The Sex Pistols, or Sting, or The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ guitar player quoting in a being fans of Jethro Tull: that’s very nice to hear but I have to be, it’s not just being cynical, but I have to be cautious.
Well, sure, but they probably say the same to all the girls [laughs]. You don’t want to be too flattered, it’s like being a pretty girl in a party and everyone is coming up and says, “Oh, wow, I love your hair” or “You have such beautiful eyes”. If you are a polite young lady and you are well brought up you’ll say, “Thank you very much for your complement”, then you turn to your friend and say, “How many times have I heard that tonight?”.
I have to be a little bit cautious in thinking that maybe my influence is anything other than just one of many, but that’s still very nice to hear, it’s still very nice to think that you may have helped someone form their musical direction by something you’ve done and that’s very nice, but let’s not get carried away.
This is the 30th anniversary of Jethro Tull winning a Grammy that caused quite the controversy, the Grammy for the Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance which everyone thought Metallica was going to win. When you look back on it today, exactly 30 years later, what do you think about it and what are your memories of all that happened with that?
Well, it was a bit embarrassing because we knew that we had been nominated for the Grammy Award along with five other artists including Metallica, and Iggy Pop, and Jane’s Addiction, whoever they were.
I remember that our record company told us not to bother coming to Los Angeles because we weren’t going to win it, they said, “Metallica are bound to win it because they’ve got this huge record out, everybody loves Metallica, so it’s not worth… we have to pay for many other artists on the label to go to the Grammy Awards, and they only live in San Diego, but to flight you guys all the way from London to Los Angeles, three nights in a hotel… you’re not going to win, so there’s no point spending all that money” so I say, “Fair enough” I would make the same decision if I was the record company guy.
We were working in the studio in the UK when I got a phone call late at night saying, “Congratulations, you won the Grammy” and I sort of scratched my head and thought, “Oh that’s a bit of a surprise, a bit embarrassing for Chrysalis Records that the Grammy winning act is the one they chose not to invite to the ceremony”.
It was an embarrassing moment, but not as embarrassing as it was for poor Alice Cooper who had to get up on stage to receive the award on our behalf at short notice and walked to the stage being greeted by boos and catcalls and general displeasure, not just from Metallica’s fans, but from all the media who were very angry that Jethro Tull had won the award for “Best Hard Rock/Metal Act”: it was the first time that category appeared in the Grammys, and somehow we had been shoehorned into it and, against all the expectations, Jethro Tull won the Grammy.
Of course it wasn’t the right thing, Metallica should have won it and I said at the time, “Metallica will win next year, no problem, whoever else is nominated, Metallica will win next year” and indeed they did. And I also predicted that if the Grammy committee should decide on a new category in the Grammy Awards, a new musical category called “Best One-Legged Flute Player”, I confidently predicted that I would win that the next year.
So far, in their infinite wisdom, they have not yet invented that new category, so I guess I’m out of luck.
I just have one final question: with this website being mainly a Metal website, many readers would be interested in knowing about Tony Iommi’s stint in Jethro Tull. What are your memories of his time in the band, and are you still in touch with him?
Yeah, I was actually reading an email from him the other day.
Tony and his band, Earth, which they were called at the time, played on a show with Jethro Tull in some university gig in the Midlands or somewhere, they were the opening act, and I was struck with Tony’s playing: it was different to other people’s, it was simple, it was very powerful guitar-playing, sort of riffs and single notes and very simple chords, mostly just open 5ths.
It sounded refreshingly different to most Blues guitarists at the time, including our own Mick Abrahams at that point.
I thought Tony was an interesting guitar player, so when Mick left the band we hold some, you can call them auditions, but we tried out a few people including David O’List from The Nice, some little guy… oh, a couple of other guitar players who did actually go on to do quite well, but at the time they were a little unsure of themselves and not musically that great, but they did okay later in life, and Tony who, as I said, we had met at that show I asked him to come down to London and we got together in a rehearsal room and played through a few pieces of music, it wasn’t like, “Okay, let’s just do a 12-bar Blues jam”, because that was just so boring, so I said, “Right, let’s work on a new song that none of us has played before, that’s the best way of finding out whether this musical relationship that’s going to work”. So, we sat down to work on the arrangement of a piece that I had just written, ‘Nothing is Easy’, which was a song from the “Stand Up” album the following year. We sat down to work that one out, but it became then clear to me why Tony had such a distinctive style, because then I realised, and I was very embarrassed to learn that he was missing the ends of two fingers, so he really couldn’t play like a conventional guitar player. ‘Nothing is Easy’ is a guitar sequence that is filled with bar chords, you actually have to use all of your fingers to play that part of guitar [laughs]. Obviously, Tony just couldn’t do it the way that I played it to demonstrate the song to him, he just didn’t have the physical ability to play that in that way. So, we were not going to find really possible to play some of the more complex music that Tony would physically find very difficult. I mean, he might manage it today because he did successively have much more professional proper fingertips that he could put on the end of his fingers and that allow him, I guess, these days to play a bit more conventionally than perhaps he could in those early days in the year, or two, after he had his industrial accident working in the factory where he lost the end of his fingers. But, you know, we spent an epic couple of days together and then Tony came back to help us out on the Rolling Stones TV show recording three weeks later to mime to a backing track because, again, that was a song that would have been difficult to play live on stage being slide guitar and weird chords constructions, open tunings, different chords, so we decided that we would do a backing track and I would sing live and play flute live, and he would be, as the other guys, they were just miming. His guitar wasn’t even plugged in, there’s no guitar lead on it.
Tony did that and was a bit embarrassed, he had his hat pulled down over his face so no one, perhaps including Ozzy Osbourne, could recognise the guy who was supposed to play with Black Sabbath the next night… not that they were Black Sabbath at that point, I think they became Black Sabbath the following year.
Anyways, that’s all that happened but over the years I’ve met Tony a few times and Tony, I think, remember his little brief relationship musically with me as being something where he learned that if rehearsal is supposed to be at 9.30 A.M., everybody is there tuned up, ready to go at 9.30 A.M., it doesn’t mean that you get out of bad at 9.30 A.M. and by the time you got to the rehearsal room it’s two hours later. He said he learned a lot about discipline, both in musical and practical, professional sense. At that time, he thought maybe I was being a bit fussy, but then he came to realise that the way Ian Anderson does it is probably better for everybody. If it’s like that, people arriving late, it makes other people angry so… nobody arrives late more than once.
Okay, well, I’m not that tough, everybody sleeps in once in a while, but nobody gets to sleep late and keep everybody waiting sitting in the van three times, you know, three times you’re definitely out.
I guess that when you have to keep the band function that’s the only way.
Well, you know, people sometimes go, “If we left half an hour later I would have had breakfast at the hotel”, I guess people are really angry, if we say we’re leaving at 7.00 in the morning, as we did yesterday morning somewhere in, wherever it was… oh yes, in Holland, in the Netherlands. So, departure was at 7.00, and everybody was downstairs loading up the van ten minutes before 7, because it takes 10 minutes to fill up the vehicle, and get people in, and get the seat belts on. Departure means wheels are rolling, that’s kind of how life is: trains got to run on time, even in Italy, flights have to take off on schedule, even in Italy. It’s taken a long, long time for Italian promoters to get that showtime, if it’s 19.00 or 20.00, that’s showtime! There’s got to be a very good reason if we’re going to run late, it won’t be because the band isn’t ready, we’re standing there behind the stage ready to go on at the time we agreed on a contract and put in the itinerary. It’s the way we expect things to be, life’s too short to waste time sitting in another dressing room while the show gets delayed because people haven’t managed to get their part of the bargain concluded. So, yeah, we’re a little bit twitchy about things running on time.
It’s like a Swiss watch, you wouldn’t go and spend $5000 on a Swiss watch and then think, “Oh well, it keeps playing kind of okay, it sits within about 10 minutes a week” [laughs] It’s not good enough!
In fact, you average Swiss watch has a minus 2 or plus 4 seconds per day accuracy, and that is ridiculous! I do have a set of very small screwdrivers and some magnifying loupe and, with a good Swiss watch movement, I can open the back of the watch, I can go in there, I can tweak it, and 90% of the time I can get that watch to run within a 1 second per day accuracy. So, I expect that kind of a standard, and if I have a quartz watch I would expect it to be probably about 1 second a week accuracy.
It doesn’t seem too ridiculous that I should not expect my drummer and bass player to show up a few minutes before departure time, we are like a living organism that is a Swiss watch.
We can be finely tuned to get a very accurate performance, that’s what we try to do, it makes life so much eaaasier for everybody when things run smoooothly [laughs] Less stress, less angst, less anger, it’s just smooooth and niiice, that’s the way I think I like my musical life to be.
Then I can go on stage and get angry [laughs] Because I’m getting angry for reasons to do with the lyrics of a song, and what the song is about, and the subject material.
I save my emotions for the music I make, I think that’s the way it should be.
If I was an actor and I had to do Shakespeare I would be like a little pussycat 22 hours of the day, but for the 2 hours that I was on stage I would become an angry person on a Shakespearean stage, living the character of some murderer, or some evil person, or romantic person perhaps, but as a performer you should save your emotions for the audience.
Anyway, that was you last answer and I gave you a very long answer.
That’s alright, it was very interesting, thank you very much for your time!
Your Italian fans will see you on stage very soon…
I’ll leave you with one final story: I came back last night, and I thought, “I think I’ll have some pasta”.
I made myself a vegetarian pasta dish, and my wife found a piece of spaghetti on the floor this morning, so I got into trouble.
Occupational hazard, I guess.
I’m an enthusiastic cook, that’s why sometimes what I cook doesn’t always end up on my plate, sometimes it gets on the kitchen floor because I’m getting too excited.
Anyway, nice to talk to you, I’ll see you in a few days’ time.
Davide Sciaky