How Roxy Music nearly destroyed Jethro Tull’s show at Madison Square Garden
It’s always a risk when a band decides to bring another act they really like on tour with them, because you can’t always account for whether your fans are going to feel the same way about their music. For Jethro Tull, they found out that their fans were a lot more discerning about the acts they chose to perform alongside.
As one of the foremost progressive rock acts of the 1970s, it may have been a safer option for them to be paired up with another band of a similar ilk on the same billing, but there’s always a chance that their audience would be able to open their minds enough to be able to appreciate the stylistic differences of something that was removed from the prog world.
Considering how bold and adventurous progressive rock has a reputation for being, you’d think that a lot of fans of the genre wouldn’t have too many qualms about something that’s less cerebral being placed as the opening act for Jethro Tull, and as long as it wasn’t too drastic of a leap, then there ought to be no issues with the band selecting something from a different sphere.
However, the issue with a lot of progressive rock fans is their tendency to be somewhat precious and sneering about music that lacked the same levels of complexity as the bands they were actively supporting, and unfortunately for Jethro Tull, the band that they chose to have open for them in New York as part of their Thick As A Brick tour in 1972 weren’t quite to the lofty standards that fans had been hoping for.
Granted, it wasn’t entirely the band’s fault that they were performing with this much-maligned opener, and it was more a case of promoters catching wind that Ian Anderson and his bandmates were fans of the output of the group that they chose to make this unfortunate pairing that would rile up their audience.
In a 2025 interview with the Classic Album Review podcast, Anderson revealed that he’d obviously spoken too loudly about his love for one of the UK’s then-up-and-coming art rock outfits, and despite his adoration for their work, fans of Jethro Tull sadly didn’t see things the same way.
“I must have let it be known that I liked Roxy Music and that first album they had,” the frontman and flautist explained, “As a result of which, they ended up playing with us at Madison Square Garden. They got put on as the opening act, which was a near-disaster.”
“Our audience hated them with a deep, abiding passion,” he continued, “Especially the preening [Brian] Eno with all his feathers and things. You could just sense the animosity from the audience, but bless them, they were one of my favourite pop groups at the time.”
While you wouldn’t have thought that fans of Jethro Tull would have to have made too many sacrifices to their personal preferences to accept Roxy Music into their hearts, it’s clear that their glammy sensibilities were a stretch too far, and their fusion of pop and rock with extensive synthesiser use was not their cup of tea in the slightest.
