The album that launched the British prog explosion, according to Ian Anderson
Among the leading faces of British prog in the early 1970s, Blackpool’s Jethro Tull avoided the po-faced pitfalls that ensnared contemporaries such as Yes or Emerson, Lake & Palmer by spiking their bluesy, hard-rock folk with just the right amount of animated theatre to flautist frontman and sole constant member Ian Anderson’s philosophical musings on folklore and society’s nebulous nature.
Naming themselves after the 18th-century agriculturist and striding headfirst into the ’80s with their electronic-shaped medieval rock, Jethro Tull in their own idiosyncratic way straddled prog’s intersection of fanciful lore and sonic vanguard with greater success than most of his peers.
Anderson had a love/hate relationship with the prog tag. After their seminal Aqualung was lauded as a milestone in conceptual rock, despite only four of its songs sharing any vague, thematic arc, Jethro Tull dropped ’72’s Thick as a Brick, a continuous suite of music with tongue firmly in cheek claiming to be an adaptation of an epic poem by the eight-year-old boy genius Gerald Bostock. The prog parody was so committed to its ‘bit’ that it perversely ended up being hailed as a classic of the era, its lampoon conceit resurrected again on 2012’s sequel album.
Discussing the albums that changed his life to Goldmine in 2021, Anderson collated records that largely orbited his 1960s and ’70s foundations, Captain Beefheart, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and John Mayall all enjoying a look in. One album in his essential ten Anderson credited with launching the British prog explosion the early Jethro Tull was caught up in during their foundation is The Graham Bond Organisation’s debut album, The Sound of ’65.
“This was the seminal album for anyone in the UK nurturing early jazz-rock pretensions,” Anderson stated. “Two pre-Cream members (Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker) plus the renegade jazzman Bond give sturdy renditions of classic jazz, blues and home-grown compositions which fired a generation of Brit bands of the late ’60s/early ’70s.”
Formed during the early British R&B boom and centred around the charismatic Graham Bond, his adoption of the Hammond organ as his instrument of choice, coupled with his raspy bellow, cut a striking presence in the underground music scene by the time of their ’65 debut.
Any further success for the Organisation following the smattering of singles in ’67 was thwarted by Bond’s erratic drug habit and the feuding between Bruce and Baker, but despite his tragic death at the age of 36, Bond worked sporadically across the 1970s, notably appearing in old bandmate’s Ginger Baker Air Force project.
Speaking to Classic Rock, Anderson bestowed further praise on Bond’s formative legacy over the 1960s’ musical trajectory on a generation of future prog and free-jazz rockers: “Hearing saxophone and Hammond organ along with bass and drums really clicked with me. It made me realise that you could do something with this kind of line-up.”
Concluding, “It didn’t have to be Black American music; you could take things from classical music and use them. In some ways, it was the beginning of what became classic rock.”
