The album only George Martin could’ve made, according to Ian Anderson
Despite such a diffident and reluctant relationship with the movement, Jethro Tull would ultimately stand as one of prog rock’s most successful acts, with a monster count of over 60 million albums sold worldwide.
Flying high in the charts with 1971’s Aqualung, the following year’s Thick as a Brick would lampoon his peers’ conceptual loftiness yet still shoot to the top of the Billboard 200. Soldiering on through punk’s threat, an embrace of synthesisers would push Jethro Tull along with Canadian power-trio Rush as one of the 1980s’ unlikely faces of the MTV era.
Burnished in the middle of London’s full swing and slogging it around the city’s hectic live circuit, Jethro Tull swiftly found themselves in the company of John Lennon, The Who and Eric Clapton, recording The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus barely two months after their 1968 debut, This Was, had been dropped. Before long, ‘The Tull’ was on tour with Jimi Hendrix in Scandinavia and opening for Led Zeppelin on their North American leg.
Amid the countercultural whirlwind seizing the UK pop charts of the late 1960s, Jethro Tull frontman and creative force Ian Anderson had an apathetic take on the day’s biggest band and key force of the British Invasion’s American conquer. “I was never really a Beatles fan,” he confessed to Indeflagration in 2017. “I suppose it would be Sgt Pepper’s…, because of the landmark it represented in pop music and rather like in the same year, Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn“.
Many who stand non-plussed about The Beatles’ songbook will often acknowledge grudging admiration for 1967’s Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band‘s sonic innovations and pioneering realisation of the album as a medium of cohesive, artistic uniformity. Following The Beach Boys and The Mothers of Invention’s LP precedence, the Fab Four’s psychedelic opus strived to push pop into new creative terrain unmoored from on-stage reproduction and prioritising the listening experience.
Such ambitions needed a solid production team, and luckily, The Beatles had one of the best in the business at the famed EMI Studios.
“George Martin was a friend of mine (I didn’t know the Beatles at all), and his role in all of that is very important, Anderson elaborated. “I like to think of Sgt Pepper’s… as the album that could not have been made with another producer; it had to be George. He was Beatles number five, he was actually probably Beatles number three! He was a very special guy and helped to bring together those very opposite personalities and musical backgrounds.”
With a chequered background in classical music, beat, and electro-acoustic avant-garde, Martin was able to translate and interpret The Beatles’ myriad of pop eclecticism, be it ‘She’s Leaving Home’s stirring string section to ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite!’s lysergic musique concrète, Martin’s fingerprints all over their work with unmistakable authority.
Anderson concluded: “They were the life-changing musical moments for a generation and although I wasn’t a Beatles fan, I guess I learnt something from Sgt Pepper’s… in terms of variety, of the rather surreal nature of it, that was quite laudable”.
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