Ian Anderson (centre), flute in hand, with his band Jethro Tull, enjoying commercial success again. Photo: ASSUNTA OPAHLE
The flute is back.
But not just any flute, not your flute for orchestra or jazz quintet, this one is lifted in the hands and brought to life on the inexhaustible breath of singer-songwriter Ian Anderson.
This flute has never been away, but for one place – the Top 10 album charts. For half-a-century, not a trill, a tootle or a blast.
This month, however, Anderson’s Jethro Tull celebrated its first UK Top 10 album in 50 years. The album is called “The Zealot Gene”. It also made Billboard’s Top 10, and the Top 5 in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Finland, Portugal and, briefly, Australia. Indeed, briefly is the word. By month’s end, “The Zealot Gene” was nowhere to be seen on the charts. Still, one wouldn’t think Anderson would be complaining.
He was mixing it on the UK charts with popsters half his age or more, such as Weeknd (31), Jamie Webster (28), Ed Sheeran (30) and Adele (33).
Anderson is 74. Perhaps a new genre has emerged, pensioner prog. Say that to him at your peril. The singer-songwriter-flautist-guitarist is no ordinary septuagenarian, settling down to slippers and cocoa. Although, in a concession to time’s flow, his trademark codpiece and one-legged stance at the microphone have been all but retired.
The last time Tull made the Top 10 the world was a different place, of course. It was 1972, and their compilation album “Living in the Past” made No. 3; the year before the classic album “Thick as a Brick” was released, reaching the same position. It consisted of two songs, “Thick as a Brick, Part I” and “Thick as a Brick, Part 2”. “Really don’t mind if you sit this one out/my words but a whisper, your deafness a shout.”
In 1972, Anderson was 24, five albums behind him, more than 20 to come. His voice sounds ageless and his flautist skills undiminished. The gap between Tull studio albums is a mere 19 years, the previous one being “The Jethro Tull Christmas Album” (the last on which guitarist Martin Barre played with the band).
Prescient perhaps is this: in 1975, Tull released “Too Old to Rock ’n’ Roll: Too Young to Die!” Ironic, too, for it tells the story of an ageing rocker who finds fame with the changing fashions of music.
Anderson said at the time of the concept that it was “to point out that this business is cyclic, and that if you stick around long enough, you do come into fashion again.”
Indeed, welcome to February 2022. Which is not bad for a band and leader who were quite open at the start of their prog-rock stylings. Said Anderson to this writer several years ago: ‘‘Jethro Tull only progressed into prog rock as a spoof, tongue-in-cheek way with ‘Thick as a Brick’ and ‘A Passion Play’ (1973), which were two prog-rock concept albums that were designed to exploit and make fun of that particular musical genre at that time.”
Through the decades, and the fads and movements, the fly-by-night trends, the wonders of inconsequence, Anderson has fashioned a signature sound that is so deeply ingrained, it’s identifiable at first listen, and as fresh as morning dew.
PLEASE HELP US CONTINUE TO THRIVE BY BECOMING AN OFFICIAL FOOTYOLOGY PATRON. JUST CLICK THIS LINK.
Anderson’s great strength is that he ploughs the past, harvests the events of the present and meshes the strains into song. It’s no surprise the name of the band draws from history. Jethro Tull (1674-1741) was a farmer and innovator. His horse-drawn seed drill was a major advance in agriculture.
Tull’s album titles reflect this, from “Aqualung” (with one of the meanest and most menacing riffs in rock), “A Passion Play”, “Minstrel in the Gallery”, “Songs from the Wood” and “Heavy Horses”.
And like an old oak, centuries grown, Tull has shown it can still produce fresh growth and leaf. From roots to branches, so to speak.
Reaching his 70s has meant some health conditions have arisen for Anderson. In 2018, he was diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a state for which playing the flute and singing would seem not suited.
But, as he recently told “Prog” magazine: “playing the flute and singing is a bit of a double whammy if you have my condition. The reality is that I do much prefer to keep performing, and if I’m not performing, I regularly play the flute and sing and practise, just because I think that’s the best way to stay in shape.”
“The Zealot Gene” is not the work of a retiring mind. As Anderson says: “Music and the arts, in general, surely must have the right to question and examine all topics as long as done sensitively and with respect. Whether in Shakespeare’s day or in the knives-drawn world of social media, there has to be a place for commentary and interpretation.”
The DNA running through this album is deep meditation and observation, it reaches back into the Scriptures, and especially its language, and plants humankind’s mindsets and actions as part of one long song.
Anderson is not a man of organised religion, “but I hold dear the Christian faith of my geographical and cultural heritage. I do not believe in an interventionist god and I am not a man of faith. Faith implies certainty and I don’t do certainties. I do possibilities and even probabilities.”
And like the stance he struck at the beginning of “Thick as a Brick”, the title song “The Zealot Gene” sets the stage: “the populist with dark appeal, the pandering to hate/Which xenophobic scaremongers deliver on a plate to tame the pangs of hunger and satisfy the lust/Slave to ideology, moderation bites the dust.”
The release and embrace of this album by the public shows the songwriter is not ready to bite the dust himself, though time’s lengthening shadows do cross his mind.
As Anderson told Prog magazine: ‘‘There is that sense of urgency that you’ve got to do this while you still can. And it’s the same as a performer of my age: the harsh reality of growing old and knowing you don’t have that much time ahead of you.”
Enough time, one hopes, for another album or three. After all, he’s only 74.
