The 1973 album too complicated for Ian Anderson: “It’s wacko”
How much is too much on an album?
Some genres exist to thrive on excess, to stuff the intestines, guts and all into hour-or-so requirements of the album, to present everything on a plate so the listener, overwhelmed by choice, can dive head-first again and again and come up each time with something entirely new. However, in 1973, Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson seemed to have found the limit for this argument.
Five albums in, and the Blackpool rock band were beginning to sweat. They’d all but exhausted their early ideas, encapsulated in a blues-heavy, jazz-infused rock sound, punctuated by Anderson’s familiar flute. So off the band went, some 500 miles from their humble origins to Paris, to a studio where Cat Stevens and Elton John had previously recorded. Desperately, they hoped the big names would inspire them.
But Paris syndrome doesn’t just hit tourists who wander the cobbled streets, hoping for the glitz and the glamour of the Ratatouille depiction of the French capital – speaking with Tidal, Anderson recalled, “Generally, everybody was really unhappy”.
The food, all mucusy snails and crusty bread, wasn’t quite what they’d imagined. You try making an album through “dysentery, scabies, and bed bugs”… I can’t imagine it would’ve been an easy feat, and eventually, after two weeks, the band admitted defeat and drove back to London downtrodden, tight-lipped, and even more desperate than before.
Still, perhaps from the overwhelming, and ultimately mind-altering disappointment of their condition, they had scattered the seeds for several sonic ideas. Picking up again after a good rinse and some proper British food, the band scattered the seeds of a few more. And more, and more. Eventually, fusing pre-Paris, Paris, and post-Paris ideas, the band had too much to work with and not much of a clue which parts, if any, were good. Oh, and they were working on an accompanying movie, too.
All this considered, Anderson explained about the ensuing album, A Passion Play, “I don’t think it was our best record by any means – a little bit too complicated and too frenetic in terms of some of the musical content. Too much detail, too much stuff piled into the arrangements. It’s musically a bit too dense in places, but to some people it’s the album to like, because it’s wacko.”
We might’ve even guessed the criticism to come from the title, which, Anderson explained, attempted to play “with the idea of the agony of death as a ‘passion play’ – alluding to the Passion of Christ – but in a way that was really a dark comedy”. Part acknowledgement of spiritual sensivity, part dark joke, part homage to their love for the work, the title doesn’t quite know what it wants to be.
Still, this was the 1970s. Perhaps, as often happened, Anderson was ahead of his time. Today, bands are using maximalism as a reaction to their reductive assimilation into algorithmic culture, as a way to say put me in a box, I dare you.
Nowadays, avant-pop band Fievel Is Glauque are celebrated for highly complicated electric miniatures, while experimental art-rock project and Black Midi shoot off, My New Band Believe, are serving up a shapeshifting sound infinitely on the rise, and need I mention a band called Geese? Try again next time, Anderson?
