New Jethro Tull album spring 2023

QuadraphonicQuad

Help Support QuadraphonicQuad:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
I wonder when someone will use A.I. to create young Ian vocal tracks for these newer songs. It is definitely possible with current technology.
No thanks. I'd prefer instrumental Tull at this point. Vocal is not powerful enough to carry the decent music.
I thought Agent Z might be a Sony rep. :LOL:;)
 
This fella has quite a little thing going for Guns n' Roses, huh? Used as the only example of another band (and one pretty far removed from Tull with no apparent connection, musically or otherwise) in not one, but two separate Jethro Tull reviews? :unsure:

Anyways, hopefully that axe he's grinding is gettin' a little sharper after these repeated, eerily similar visits to the whetstone.
 
This is NOT Tull love. Another album (based on the singles) where I have a problem enjoying the music because of the vocal. The music is all sounding the same to me. Vocal trying to be dramatic and tough. YIKES!

This is not my Tull, too bad - back to the past.
 
link won't work
https://www.ft.com/content/35481b6e-db35-472d-9d9b-91dc681eeaed

Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson: ‘If we appear bombastic and pompous, well — that’s OK’​

Ian Anderson won’t shake hands with me. Professional caution is the reason, not haughtiness. Jethro Tull’s leader, and rock’s most famous flautist, injured his hand some years ago falling from a stage during a soundcheck. Submit to the FT’s firm clasp and, ouch, flute fingering will be agony. “A couple of burly Russians have done it in for a couple of days,” he explains, holding up the delicate digits. “And curiously enough, a lady oboist. You might’ve thought she’d have known better.” We touch elbows instead. Our location is the handsome 18th-century manor house in Wiltshire with 400 acres of land where Anderson lives with his wife, Shona. We install ourselves at a dining table in a wood-panelled room lined with framed antique prints of fish. Opposite me in this old-school tableau of rock squirearchy sits the mastermind of one of the most successful British bands from the 1970s — and also one of the most unfairly treated. Founded in 1967, Jethro Tull were among the first wave of acts to be dubbed “progressive rock”. Their setup was eccentric even by prog’s standards. Anderson capered around the stage like a jester, pausing to play vigorous flute solos standing on one leg. “A stork with St Vitus’s dance,” the music press called him. His costumes involved faux-medieval garb including a codpiece and an old overcoat his father had given him. Man playing a flute on the stage Flautist and vocalist Anderson performing at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 with Clive Bunker on drums © Redferns Untrained in music, the former art student was an inventive instrumentalist, blowing riffs and solos on his flute as though it were an electric guitar. He was also a fine vocalist, investing his erudite lyrics with baritone vibrancy. Songs tackled ambitious concepts such as the themes of spiritual faith and hypocrisy that Anderson addressed in 1971’s Aqualung, a big hit on both sides of the Atlantic. Those were the days when a codpiece-wearing rocker with a line in ribald stage chat could turn a fascination for comparative religion into platinum records. “It’s dirty work but someone’s got to do it,” Anderson says jovially. With an estimated 60mn album sales, Tull — named after an Enlightenment-era agriculturist: a misprint made them “Jethro Toe” for their first single — are still active. The bespectacled, goatee-bearded Anderson, 75, is the only remaining original member. Last year’s The Zealot Gene was the first Jethro Tull album to enter the UK top 10 since 1972. And now comes a follow-up, RökFlöte. “To go in with a blank canvas, or a blank mind, with no real idea of what’s going to ooze out, is a good test to see if you have that stuff still flowing, or oozing, as it comes rather slowly,” he says. His richly oratorical voice, a thing that both oozes and flows, bears scant trace of the accents of his upbringing, first in Scotland, then from the age of 12 in Blackpool, the Lancashire seaside resort. “Let’s make a real rock-flute album,” he told himself when he began his new songs. A day later, the idea had shifted to “Rök” — “meaning, in Old Icelandic, destiny” — and “Flöte”, the German pronunciation of flute. “So you could be clever about it and describe it as ‘The Flute of Destiny’, but I think that’s more of a Rick Wakeman kind of thing,” he chuckles, tweaking the nose of his fellow prog grandee. Four men in the street Jethro Tull, 1972 © LFI/Photoshot RökFlöte reverts to the classic sound of early 1970s Tull, before they took a folkier turn, and then an electronic synthesiser-led one in the 1980s. It’s inspired by Norse mythology, a topic he felt inhibited from writing about because of their “heavy metal and ultra-right-wing associations, complete with umlauts flying left, right and centre”. But he came to realise that was a challenge, not an obstacle. His own politics are hard to pin down. He’s a member of the Labour party, he tells me, and also the Scottish National party. Hang on, I protest: you can’t be a member of more than one. “Well, they don’t stop you,” he ripostes. He’s also a member of the Liberal Democrats, and was a member of the Conservative party until Boris Johnson’s 2019 election triumph, when his wife “in a fury took the scissors to both of our Conservative party cards”. Anderson is droll yet also takes himself seriously, a combination apt to wrongfoot people. “As a songwriter I like words and I like having fun with words,” he says. He distinguishes his tone from what he calls “Prince Harry songs” — “rather introverted, pouring out of the soul, heart-on-sleeve stuff that I’m not very good at doing because I’m not that kind of a person”. Back when they were riding high with Aqualung, Jethro Tull attracted high praise from critics. Anderson was compared to Mick Jagger for his onstage antics, while the group’s combination of intelligence and zaniness was judged the equal of Frank Zappa’s band The Mothers of Invention. But the qualities that elevated Tull to the top tier were turned against them. Man holding a flute Anderson photographed for the FT by Tom Sussex Song titles and a green box A setlist and Anderson’s effects pedal © Tom Sussex The abuse meted out to 1973’s A Passion Play marked the turning point. The story of a dead man in the afterlife, it reached number one in the US but was assailed by reviewers, capriciously attacking the same dauntlessness that they had before applauded. A few years later, punk’s Jacobins administered a further kicking. Anderson and his merry band were caricatured as all that was most absurd and contemptible about prog rock. “I got used to being hammered by the press,” he says. The vitriol was particularly pointed in his case, however. “The man’s ego and pretensions are staggering,” one of A Passion Play’s reviewers sniped. “He doesn’t write mere songs anymore, he writes Homeric legends. Except he’s not Homer.” Anderson professes equanimity about these rhetorical assaults. “Some of the worst reviews I’ve ever had I thought, well, yup, fair point,” he says. “That’s not a difficult thing for me. I’m not one of those people who finds it difficult to apologise or admit to making mistakes.” In 2011, he parted ways with Jethro Tull’s other longest-serving member, the guitarist Martin Barre. It seemed as though the band was at an end, until Anderson reactivated it without Barre later in the 2010s. Purists rue the absence of his former foil, but Anderson shrugs off their concerns. “It’s a very important relationship that we had for a very long time,” he says. “But Martin has been doing what I was telling him to do for I don’t know how long, trying to develop his own career and songwriting. It’s a thankless job spending your entire life being the equivalent of first violinist in a symphony orchestra. You may be a really important guy but you’re just playing what somebody else has written.” Two bearded men on stage Jethro Tull’s Anderson and Martin Barre on stage in 1985 © Brian Rasic/Getty Images He recognises that his voice isn’t what it was. A rationed high E is the uppermost note he can reach in gigs these days. “I get it most of the time!” But the questing spirit of Jethro Tull endures. “It would be a very dull world if people like me didn’t just push things a bit too far for our own good,” Anderson says. “If we appear bombastic and pompous and arrogant and self-indulgent, well — that’s OK, I don’t have a problem with that, just let me get on with it. I haven’t got long to go. We’re near the end!” ‘RökFlöte’ is released on April 21 by Inside Out Music. Jethro Tull play Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London on May 23, jethrotull.com Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ftweekend on Twitter
 
Last edited:
Back
Top