“Something that’s eclectic”: how did Jethro Tull become the band we know today?
I don’t want to blow your mind too much, but Jethro Tull weren’t much interested in doing what came before them. Shocking, I know. The band that combined traditional English folk with thunderous hard rock, with a flute-slaying frontman, standing on one foot and clad in a codpiece, wanted to stand out. Well, stand out they absolutely did.
The Tull had a pretty thrilling place in rock in their early 1970s heyday. They were as technically skilled as any band around. They are liable to rock like absolute bastards, too. However, they were also one of the few bands of that time playing heavy music that didn’t take themselves desperately seriously. How could they? They had a jester upfront warbling about aqualungs.
Yet, that embrace of the silliness allowed them to take the music more seriously than most. While most other bands of their ilk were content to thunder on aimlessly about nothing much in particular, Tull and, in particular, singer Ian Anderson’s lyricism was always a little more incisive than most.
After all, one of their breakout hits, 1969s ‘Living in the Past’ was a pointed criticism of hippie culture more pointed and vicious than most would dare at the time. For Jethro Tull to stand up among a sea of hippie copyists and say “Now there’s revolution but they don’t know what they’re fighting” took some serious guts. Something you only have to take a cursory look at the band’s image to realize they have in spades.
How did Jethro Tull become this kind of band?
To be clear, this wasn’t the idea from the start. Tull began life as hundreds of other bands of their generation did. Inspired by The Beatles, The Roling Stones and more classic artists like Bo Diddley and Howlin’ Wolf, they were another Yardbirds-lite blues band, at least for a period of time. However, it soon became clear that Anderson, then a guitarist, was never going to be Eric Clapton.
He elaborated on this in a 2002 interview with Jim Newsom, saying that he picked up the flute because “I didn’t want to be just another third-rate guitar player who sounded like a plethora of other third-rate guitar players. I wanted to do something that was a bit more idiosyncratic, hence the switch to another instrument.”
Eventually, this attitude expanded from his choice of instrument to the sound of Jethro Tull as a whole. In a 2022 interview with The Guardian, Anderson elaborated on his vision for the band’s sound and why they started out playing that kind of music. “I loved the blues, but for me it was just a pragmatic way of opening the door, because it wasn’t really what I wanted to do musically.
He went on to say, “The signposts were the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and then Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. I thought: ‘I want to try to do something like that, something that’s eclectic.’” Try they did. Considering Jethro Tull made themselves one of the most beloved cult bands of that era, I think it’s fair to say they succeeded with flying colours.
