IAN ANDERSON

There’s an awkward moment when Ian Anderson arrives in Bath for the Classic Rock Interview. As he emerges from the train station on a rainy winter morning, dressed for the weather in an anorak and woolly hat, he recoils sharply when I offer a handshake. “I don’t mean to be rude,” he says. “But I’ve got a bad wrist.” With a thin smile, he adds: “I’m probably a close second to Pope Francis for getting upset with people grabbing my hand without asking first.”

He has a bad leg, too. And as bad luck would have it, it’s his right leg, the one on which he has always stood, with his left peg dangling, while playing flute as frontman for Jethro Tull, the band he has led since 1967. “Quite painful,” he says of the torn meniscus in the knee joint.

This injury, like that to his right wrist, is result of the occupational hazards common to many stage performers. Anderson sprained his wrist in a fall during a show in 2019. “The problem with my leg goes back a long way,” he explains. “I damaged both knees in the seventies because I was stomping around on stages and impacting the joints. But my knees were in worse shape twenty years ago,” he says with a shrug, “so I suppose I should look on the bright side.”

Early in our lengthy conversation in the bar of the Francis Hotel, it becomes apparent that small talk does not come naturally to Anderson. Instead, he launches into a detailed analysis of the policy mistakes that cost the Labour Party the recent general election, before stating his support for the Liberal Democrats. As he will say, he is not the archetypal rock musician.

Ian Scott Anderson was born in Dunfermline, Scotland on August 10, 1947. He was a teenager living in Blackpool when he joined his first group, The Blades, in 1963. As a singer, guitarist and harmonica player, he served his apprenticeship in various blues bands before Jethro Tull – named after the 18th-century agriculturist – formed in 1967, the same year in which Anderson took up the flute, on a whim.

In the 70s, Tull’s idiosyncratic blend of progressive rock, hard rock and folk music made them one of the biggest bands in the world via a series of landmark albums including Aqualung, Thick As A Brick, Minstrel In The Gallery and Songs From The Wood. And while many musicians have passed through the line-up during the band’s long history, at the age of 72 Anderson remains captain of the ship.

That history is celebrated in a new and beautiful silk-bound book, The Ballad of Jethro Tull. And while Anderson continues to tour and record as a solo artist, he and his current four-piece band are touring throughout 2020 with what he calls “a big production show”, Jethro Tull: The Prog Years. “I perform under the name Jethro Tull depending on the kind of concert it is,” he explains.

An expansive talker, witty raconteur and deep thinker, he relates the band’s story, and his own, over two hours, fuelled first by coffee and later, after midday, a large Scotch. He begins with an early memory, of a small boy living in Scotland, who found something in music that would shape the rest of his life…

As a young boy living in Dunfermline in the early fifties, what was the music that first had a powerful effect on you?

I was sent to Sunday school, so the first music I ever heard was church music,, – when Elvis was dangerous, before he got sequined [laughs].