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In preparing for a conversation with someone like Ian Anderson the temptation is to try to read and view as much pertinent material on the man and his group, JETHRO TULL, as you can so that the gap in subject matter recognition and understanding would appear to be less than it actually is. To be sure, I am no kind of musician and I know desperately little about this club of progressive rock idolatry that JETHRO TULL seems to be an important part of so, I succumbed to the temptation and studiously boned up on all the material that I could get my hands on. So what tidbits of information did all this research yield? Well, I now know that nearly every critic, journalist and writer that has taken time to write something of the man/band thinks Ian to be a "dictator" and a "tyrant" in terms of his musical vision. I know that most view his writing as "innovative" and most are, if only mildly, impressed with his ability to make the flute a lead instrument in a hard rock setting. One unaccredited journalist wrote of Ian and his flute this way, "Uncharacteristically agile acrobatics for a mere flute player, Tull's Ian Anderson never let(s) you forget he was a rock star too." The preceding was a caption to an incredible photo that captured Anderson mid-leap, hands flailing and band sweatingly rocking, the very definition of classic rock and roll and all this guy could come up with was the greenest of insults? Thus ended my research of the print matter and I returned to the real and true source of all TULL knowledge, the music. With the final strains of "Cheerio," from the incredible "BROADSWORD AND THE BEAST" album, lilting gently across my living room the phone rings, as expected, it is Ian ready to talk about the new album, "j-tull Dot Com." As happens far too often, I have not yet received the slab of siliconized digitation yet so I have to begin our conversation exactly as I was trying to avoid, unknowledgeable of the pertinent material. Still, and contrary to all of my research, Ian was more than personable and, I dare say, downright friendly. He told me of the new album and assured me that it would be perfectly palatable to the long time fans while still managing to explore a bit of new sonic territory. It would be hard for me to think of any JETHRO TULL product as a tanker given their thirty year history of creating soundscapes of musical majesty with just the right amount of hard rock grind. As you will read, Ian describes the JETHRO TULL sound as a "low art" which leaves me only able to slightly modify an aging saying to read, "I don't know if it is art, high or low, but I do know that I like it." Though he mercilessly exploded my long held (and incorrect!) Interpretation of the meaning behind "Bungle in the Jungle" I did enjoy chatting with Ian very much and hope that what you are about to read will be a tad more interesting than the bulk of what has previously been written about the man and the band. Enjoy.
DAVID LEE You have an album out with a thoroughly modern sounding title . . . IAN ANDERSON It might sound like it is a modern album from the title but it merely is a title that is there to draw attention to our Website and our Website is there to draw attention to our album. I jokingly suggested to the record company, when we were coming to the conclusion of recording the new album, that we name it after the Website and they said "Ooh yeah, we think that is a good idea" and so we did. I honestly think that it is a great JETHRO TULL album title but it does serve a purpose of, as I say, focusing on the Website and the Website is a gateway to lots of information about JETHRO TULL past, present and future in the sense that it gives news and tour dates and all the rest of it so, we try and make our Website a very personal extension of our music and our music, hopefully, speaks for itself on the new album as well as the old ones. It (the new album) has one foot firmly planted in the "classic" JETHRO TULL sound and the other foot is taking little tentative steps, here and there, in different directions and putting a spin on the more traditional TULL ideas. Trying something a little different here and a little different there, I think that is the kind of album that we ought to make. I don't think that our fans would appreciate something that was clearly trying to jump on the bandwagon of contemporary sonic qualities or arrangements or music styling, I don't think that is what we should be doing. I think that we should be making it clear that we have our roots in a certain set of influences which come out in our music and we continue to explore those but I don't think any giant change in direction is what is called for. DL It would be safe to say that we can count on this record staying away from any flute inflected rap music then? (laughs) IA Well, there is a spoken vocal track called "Hot Mango Flush" which was a fairly abstracted piece of whimsical lyric which I sent to Martin Barre (TULL's guitarist) and asked him to write some music to go with it which he did and I put my spoken vocal with his guitar part then the other guys added some additional music around that arrangement. That was a way of working that we hadn't done before because it was done via the postal service, you see. I sent him my master vocal track and a tempo reference and a description of the pictorial context that he might try and place the music in, you know, sort of, as to what the lyrics were about and they were and what and what people in what landscape and he wrote the music and sent it back to me by post which is quite convenient. These days little digital audio tape travels very lightly and very cheaply. I wouldn't want to make an album that way, it is just nice to do a song using a different approach to coming up with the music but, yeah, that is probably as close as you would get to rap. The only difference is that, I think, there is a degree of artistry about my lyrics which I honestly don't find in rap music which is, for me, really extremely unsatisfying as a music form. I just really, I have never heard anything, rap-wise, that appeals to me and much of it sounds extremely vulgar, and some of it, quite threatening. I don't really enjoy that. DL As a music fan, I would have to agree that rap music is certainly a lower level of an art form, as a critic I have never truly appreciated the lack of originality in the music itself. Most of the time they don't even bother to write their own music they just talk or rap over someone else's. IA Well, and also because the meter and the phrasing is just boringly repetitive and doesn't really, I don't think that it enjoys the use of the language, it just employs language in the vernacular but, for me, it doesn't ring of anything very creative. I am sure there are some rap records out there that really do have something special about them, I just haven't come across them and I am afraid that I do already hear more than I would like to listen to so I am not about to go and investigate it any further than I have. (laughs) So far, it doesn't pay off for me but that is just my opinion. DL I would suspect that you don't listen to a whole lot of radio? IA I don't list to a whole lot of radio because over in this country and in Europe there isn't really any rock radio. It is really very much middle of the road, either chart based or it is pop music that is a bit mumsy, you know, it is there for the mums who stay at home and listen to the radio while they are hoovering or whatever they do, I think that is the popular conception of what radio programming should be about and it does seem bewilderingly based on the hits of the last ten years of pop music and all the commercial stations play the same kind of format. It is really very dreary. I mean, you hear some great and sometimes classic pop songs but it is all very polite, very safe, very middle of the road and it doesn't really embrace what you would call rock music and certainly doesn't embrace any of the more specialist, cult kind of music. You are not going to hear Frank Zappa or Captain Beefheart on British radio unfortunately. You probably are not going to hear them too much on American radio too much either, mind you.(laughs) DL No, not much at all. IA There you go. So, I don't listen to the radio much in this country but I do listen to the radio quite a lot while I am traveling around the USA which I will be doing for the next couple of weeks driving on most of the first couple of weeks of our tour we are doing it by car so I shall listen to a lot of American radio. Sometimes it might be a Jazz station or it might be alternative rock or classic rock. It is kind of OK but it is a bit, it is what I do so I guess my listening choice is going to be something a little different from what I do. I prefer to listen to music that isn't quite of the same genre that I am going to get up on stage and play that night. You can only take so much of that in a day. (laughs) DL This is probably a question that you have been asked a lot but I will ask it again anyway, those songs that are most memorable to fans and that you almost have to play each night, "Aqualung," "Locomotive Breath" and things like that, do you ever get tired of performing them or even hearing them? IA There are some songs that we have recorded that I would not only get tired of playing but I would probably really hate to play in the first place. Happily, like, if you take "Locomotive Breath" that is a vital ingredient in my evening. I mean, a JETHRO TULL concert wouldn't be a JETHRO TULL concert if I didn't do "Locomotive Breath" it is a yardstick, it is a marker, it is a reference point by which everything else is placed both in the temporal sense and in the musical sense and, perhaps, in the value sense as well. I like a lot of those songs and the ones that we do play regularly which are probably only "Locomotive Breath" and "Aqualung," other than that things go in and out of the set. This particular set that we are playing, I was just running through some songs about an hour ago, and it is probably 80% different to the music that we played the last time that we were in the USA, maybe 90% different but still it embraces the big picture of JETHRO TULL. It covers our history and a variety of the musical styles that we have worked in and most of the songs will be pretty familiar to many of the audience and some of them will be songs that they will go, "Wow! We never heard JETHRO TULL play that before!" It might be something from the "STAND UP" album or "BENEFIT" or whatever. We are always finding songs that have never been played in either twenty years or more or in some cases never been played at all so, some of those sneak into the set too so it is a broad brush look at JETHRO TULL. Not only do I not worry or get bored with some of those songs, for me, they are a vital part of it. If I got up on stage every night and played "A Whiter Shade of Pale" or "Stairway to Heaven" I might feel the same way about those songs because they are great, classic rock songs or pop songs unfortunately, I didn't write them otherwise I would be living in an even bigger house in the country and my wife would have four or five Mercedes! (laughs) DL More fish and more cats? IA Probably more cats, I have plenty of fish actually. (laughs) I am not actually mad about fish, I like eating it but it is something that is just more for commercial reasons, that I have fish. I don't have any fish where I am living here. I live away from the sea and away from the water. DL In my American way of thinking, when I hear that someone is a fish farmer It is easy for the mind to formulate a picture of someone in a farm house with a giant lake in their back yard. IA Oh right! No, I just own and founded some companies twenty years ago that were involved in fish farming and fish processing and I, well my wife and I, are the owners. No one else owns the company, we own the entire company and we employ about 250 people in our fish farms and factory in Scotland and it is a business. It is not one that takes up a lot of my time, I mean, maybe one day a month on average I would probably be having meetings or doing phone calls or whatever but it is very little a part of my life in that sense. DL Do you call ahead and warn them when you are coming up to inspect the place so that they can tidy up? (laughs) IA No, I don't have to warn them because I don't very often go to the fish farm, what I do is sit down and have business meeting because that is what I am involved in, really, the occasional serious business stuff. I have to say that I don't really enjoy it very much but it is something that I started doing a long time ago and I am fairly proud of having built up those companies and the fact that they have survived in a very competitive marketplace where it is very difficult for small independent companies to survive. It is very difficult for a small independent company to survive in the food industry just as it is for small record companies to survive in the music industry. To be a survivor and to have a place in the firmament of fish processors and suppliers is something that I am pretty happy about. It is not a big part of my life day to day, it is a big part of my life emotionally but it is not what I do with my time. DL It seems as though you have done far more than survive in all of the ventures you have undertake especially in the music field, to what do you credit that longevity? IA I think that we established early on something unique in rock music because of the conspicuous positioning of the flute as a lead instrument in the band and I suppose if you combine that with the more reliable and accepted instrument of the rock guitar as Martin Barre plays it then you have a combination that is both safe and steady and a little unusual and off the wall so those two things seem to work quite well for us. They have established a certain sonic value for JETHRO TULL which people say is "the JETHRO TULL sound." Whatever it is it is something that sets us apart from everybody else. I don't think that there is another band, certainly no other main flute player in rock music, a few have come and gone but I don't think that they were ever on the level that we have managed to achieve so, it is a party of one out there in the world of rock-flute and I am the guy who does it. It is nice to hear other people play the flute in pop and rock bands but I don't think that they have quite managed to, or possibly want to, use the instrument in the way that I tend to use it as a focal point for the sound and the image that the band has. I think that is the thing that sets us apart and combined with the loyalty of our audience who enjoy being part of that big club and that cult following which pertains to groups who are not really mainstream pop and rock but enjoy cult followings and that makes it rather special to be a JETHRO TULL fan knowing as they do that some people will go "Yeah, boo! JETHRO TULL is really boring" or "Why are you wearing that awful T-shirt?" It gives them a perverse pleasure to be insiders and to have this sense of following a band that are not within the broad range of popular taste. You know, we are off to the side of BON JOVI. (laughs) The pants aren't so tight and the hair isn't so long and I think that what we do has something about it that is maybe a little bit more unusual. DL Occasional I will use the descriptor "intelligent" and I think that JETHRO TULL fits in that category with a bit more justification than a BON JOVI would. IA Well yes, I mean, as soon as you start using words like "intellectual" or "art" you are in a dangerous position because it may be OK for you to say but if I say it then people with think that is very pretentious and overly highbrow. What I think that we do is a kind of a low art, it is not a high art. It is something that employs some degree of creative approach, some technical skills and you put that all together and hope that you come up with something which is closer to art than craft which is what you have if you have the skill without, perhaps, that creative, mysterious, indefinable quality that separates artists from craftsmen. (There is) nothing wrong with craft, it makes the world go 'round, it doesn't make my computer work that well. I hate lumps of shitty old plastic with scary old VDU screens but that is, perhaps, the craft these days in high tech, the software programming. You certainly couldn't describe the boxes of plastic that it comes in as being particularly esthetic valuable. I hate computers but I like what they do when they can be persuaded to do it which is not the case in an English thunder storm when everything goes horribly wrong and crashes and lights go out and computers die a horrible death, hopefully, to be resurrected with a few running of "scan disc" or whatever treatment you have to apply. (laughs) I actually hate computers and it is interesting that I have to work with them all the time, not only because of the Website but because I use them for all sorts of bits of information exchange and research and they are part and parcel of planning tours and even writing lyrics and all the rest of it. I use them all the time but I can't say that I like them as objects, I think that they are fairly awful. DL They seem to be the pencils and paper of the future whether we like it or not. IA Sooner or later somebody will hit upon the idea of having really nice cases for computers, you know, actually made in stainless steel or some exotic alloy and they will be really nice-made things with little screws and neatly put together and it will have a nice retro look to it with retro keyboards that sort of look like they could have been Art Deco design or whatever and inside will still be the same old high-tech innards but it would be so much nicer if somebody actually put these things in a nice, pleasant, interesting box that actually made you like them as opposed to horrible bits of plastic. There you go, there is an ad on business, you see? Even the keyboard, if somebody came up with a sort of Art Deco, retro, high tech sort of keyboard thing that was just a keyboard but nicely done, I think that it would sell like hotcakes. Even I would love to have a silly, awful, twenty dollar thing that I would bang away at! Anyway, there we go, we mustn't get on about that, we run out of time if we start talking about those things. DL Yes, time is moving on. I do have two more questions for you, in the early and mid-eighties, when MTV was worth watching, I recall seeing your face pop up on the screen and saying that you thought "the flag of progressive rock is still waving out there," is it still waving? IA I think, judging from what I hear and come and come across in the way of bands who, sometimes I see, sometimes they open for JETHRO TULL, sometimes I read about them in magazines that focus on the broad world of rock or focus specifically on progressive rock, there seems to be a lot of it about. I don't think that much of it is very successful in numerical terms, they don't sell a whole lot of records and they don't sell a whole lot of concert tickets but there are a whole lot of bands out there playing that kind of music and some of them are frighteningly good. Bands like THE FLOWER KINGS from Sweden or SERAS (?), another band from Sweden. For some reason there are a lot of classic rock bands in Scandinavia and the same thing applies to Germany. In the US there is a huge number of bands that are that kind of progressive rock think that, you know, maybe owes a little bit to folk music or maybe it is a bit darker, a bit "spooky metal" but progressive rock is very much alive and well and that sort of music, should it be successful, would be the classic rock of tomorrow but it is hard stuff to get played on the radio and hard stuff to get out to an audience in a live context because it is difficult to find the gigs. There are a lot of those bands around and if we are talking about the older bands, in terms of classic rock as it is formatted in radio, it is a very small selection. If you actually think of the number of artists involved, and they are only playing, maybe three or four titles deep, even with major artists. It is actually not a very big repertoire In the old days you would be able to go into a radio station and it was just wall to wall to wall, room after room with huge amounts of records, these days you go in and the whole of classic rock fits on one wall! That is the genre, that is what they all play. I know that CDs are smaller than vinyl but when you look at it you say, "Is that it?" We are in there. There are maybe three or four JETHRO TULL titles, maybe, six LED ZEPPELIN titles and half a dozen Elton John's and Rod Stewart's and it is all that stuff but it is only a few tracks that end up getting all the play. Classic rock is somewhat, it can be a little limited in terms of its repertoire at radio. Classic rock, in terms of the way it is available at retail, will depend on the size of the store. They may have it at Tower records but they are not going to have it at some little corner store or the checkout of Woolworth's and these days I think that the Internet is the salvation of repertoire and catalogue because if you go to someone like CD NOW you are going to find that there are a lot of titles available and through specialist record companies that supply those kind of niche market pieces of product, I would say, you would find pretty much all of the repertoire of all the major artists available all the time and in the future as electronic downloads. That is not he case yet but in two years time it certainly will be the case and certainly JETHRO TULL's full catalogue will be available as opposed to just rotating fifteen, sixteen or seventeen album titles at retail which is really all you can do in this day and age because it is so competitive for space. If you are talking about a real record in a real rack in a real store, you just can't have thirty albums there, they just won't stock them. So, we have to be realistic about it along with everybody else but the Internet is going to bring about some opportunities for us to get those albums we always promised we would get and then, suddenly, we find that we can't get them anymore. I can get all the Mose Allison albums and Muddy Waters and howling Wolf and they are all going to be there and I shall be able to download them from the Internet. I shall set aside a weekend two years from now to do that! (laughs) DL And then you will have to add on another box for storage. IA Yeah, another bloody computer. DL OK, the last question is something a bit personal . . . IA Is it very personal? DL No, no. IA OK, I was going to say, it was Mick Jagger, it wasn't me, honest! It was his Brazilian love child and had nothing to do with me. I was not the dad, it was proven that it was him! (laughs) DL No, but here are some Scandinavian women who have made claims. (laughs) IA (Laughing) Well actually, there have been some women who have made claims, it is quite extraordinary. I have only had one or two and one even brought her child, well he wasn't a child he was actually about twenty-five years old and said that he was a product of some liaison that I had with this woman some time ago. In fact, a policeman had actually brought her back because they were prepared to prosecute me as the father who hightailed it out of there. I explained to the police officer that the date she was giving for this liaison would have, technically, been a little bit difficult because I was actually only thirteen at the time!(laughs) And I didn't have a passport at the time so it certainly couldn't have been me that did the deed, wherever it was. It wasn't me, it was some other guy and I can prove it even without the DNA test! (laughs) Anyway, right, what was the question? (laughs) DL "Bungle in the Jungle," I had always assumed that this was your comment on religion but I have since read an interpretation of the lyric that differs with that. What were you saying in that song? IA No, no, no, it was just, sort of, about the harsh realities of the business world, the urban jungle, the city of London and finance. The way that people in urban society, I have never really been a town guy, I have usually lived in the country and whenever I go to town I am rally quite excited by it but I don't really want to spend the night there if I can avoid it. (laughs) It is always a bit scary and a bit "dog eat dog" and a bit of a roughhouse down there. It is a song about that using the analogy of animals in the jungle, how people behave in the world of corporate competition. DL Well, there is yet another of my personal rock and roll misconceptions righted once and for all! (laughs) Thank you very much for taking the time to chat. I am looking forward to the new album and the tour of course. IA My pleasure. Thanks for talking to me. DAVID LEE WILSON |