OUT OF THE ORDINARY
The first thing Ian Anderson did when he woke up this morning was stand in the window completely naked – “there’s no one around at that time to see me” – and look out across the fields. “I saw the sheep gently moving a few hundred metres away, and got that wonderful feeling of, y’know, thanks for all the good fortune.”
He’s thinking like this because he’s remembering Grace, the simple snippet which closes the far-from-simple album Minstrel In The Gallery, Jethro Tull’s 1975 near-classic.
“That song was just paying homage to the world around,” he says. “It was a musical afterthought, a postscript, just thanking whatever power or spirit for the blessings that have been bestowed upon you that day. Then it asks: ‘May I buy you again tomorrow?’ Because in a way you pay through the nose for that good luck. So it’s just saying grace, although… I tend not to have these thoughts about me when I sit down to gorge myself on King Prawn vindaloo, a saag aloo, pilau rice and a plate full of poppadoms. I’m not that spiritually minded all the time. But there are moments.”
There are moments of spoken-word theatre, acoustic folk, heavy electric rock, string quartets and (of course) flute on the busy, bustling, bursting-at-the-banks , one of the peak Tull statements. Some go as far as to call it the quintessential Tull album, but Anderson himself reckons it’s has to sit right at the top of the tree,” he says, “not only regarding the quality of songs but as being ‘iconic’ to an audience the world over. Well, particularly back in the seventies. Then if you were to divide all the work including my solo stuff into three blocks of a) great, b) okay and c) perhaps not, then would be in the second group and probably near the top of it. But, you know, it might be somebody else’s favourite. For some that’s even [the much-criticised] . Luckily everyone has different opinions, and that’s what makes us all more interesting than otherwise we might be.”
