The artists who never interested Ian Anderson at all: “In any way”
Even when you’ve been in the music industry for many years, there will probably come a time when you finally accept that you’re out of touch with new music.
I personally dread the day when my finger suddenly slips and is no longer on the pulse, but I have to accept that when I’m old and senile, I won’t be scouring the depths to find bands primed to break through in 2070.
For Ian Anderson, he had a good run keeping up to speed with what modern music had to offer, despite being on the road and in the studio with progressive rock titans Jethro Tull for the majority of the 1970s.
What was special about Jethro Tull and Anderson in the earliest years of the band was the fact that they were a group known for having pushed their art to the absolute limit, and they weren’t afraid to challenge the norms within the industry. While this might mean that they were actively trying to create something that felt like an antidote to popular music, this is something that poses a difficult challenge when you’re out of touch with the status quo.
In order to rally against the dull, overpolished and mass-marketed music that often finds its way to the top of the charts, you have to at least know what’s going on so you don’t fall into the trap of inadvertently creating something that is a copy of it rather than the inverse.
However, in Anderson’s case, he admits that he wasn’t necessarily that fussed by pop and rock music from quite early on in his career, despite having still been making music that sounded fresh.
In an exclusive 2026 interview with Far Out, Anderson was asked about what modern music he’d been enjoying of late, and before discussing his thoughts on the current climate of the musical landscape, he confessed that he’d lost interest in following trends almost 50 years ago.
“If you’d asked me that in 1976, I would have had difficulty in answering what my favourite album of 1976 was because by then I’d pretty much stopped listening to pop and rock music,” the frontman and flautist exclaimed. “I’m not really a music fan in the way that so many are.”
However, he does still have a passing knowledge of some of the biggest names in the world of modern pop, and he knows that he doesn’t particularly care for their work either. “I do know that it wouldn’t be Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran,” he added, “Because both of those, I don’t dislike them on a personal or musical level, but I don’t find their music or lyrics particularly of remote interest to me, they don’t in any way satisfy my taste in music or songwriting. So, they would not be on the list.”
It’s remarkable to think that someone whose music has always attempted to be cutting edge would have lost interest in musical discovery so early in life, but even if he couldn’t give a damn about the most high-profile names, you’d think that some of the modern acts who are keeping progressive rock alive would tickle his fancy.
