“That’s my excuse”: The album Ian Anderson said was too pompous to be a triumph
“Obviously, at the time of making an album, I get very, very involved with it,” Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson said in 1975, “It’s my 100 per cent total reason for being”.
Once a new record is out there in the world, however, Anderson felt an almost unavoidable sense of detachment, saying, “It’s difficult for me to relate to it in the way that [a new listener] might relate to it, hearing it for the first time. It’s much easier for them to be objective after hearing it a few times than for me, having heard it about a hundred times.”
Anderson certainly isn’t unique for having complex, evolving relationships with his own work. Like a lot of songwriters, there are parts of his discography that he’d rather delete, and other parts that he wouldn’t change at all. Across a 60-year career, though, a lot of stuff is going to fall somewhere in the middle; projects that were ambitious and interesting, but also flawed or mistimed.
When Jethro Tull started work on their sixth studio album in 1972, they were in the middle of a phenomenal run of success, having reached the top ten in the UK charts with all their previous releases, and scoring their first number one album in America with their latest effort, the somewhat satirical concept album Thick as a Brick.
Anderson, who was still just 26 at the time, now had the cache to do just about anything he wanted, and in some respects, he chose the safe option, another concept record featuring a continuous musical piece, à la Thick as a Brick. This time around, however, the slightly tongue-in-cheek dissection of glam and prog-rock excess gave way to something a bit less self-aware and considerably more serious.
A Passion Play, which was released in 1973, still went straight to number one in the US, continuing Jethro’s run of success, but critics were less enthused about it, and even some of the band’s most devoted fans struggled to get through it.
Anderson described it at the time as a concept record that “concerns a girl’s afterlife,” although the main character, Ronnie Pilgrim, seems to be a grown man. In any case, there is a narrative thread of Pilgrim’s quest through limbo, with big issues about religion and morality tossed about, but a lot of the creative energy of A Passion Play seemed to go into the accompanying tour and stage show, which went way beyond your standard rock concert, with theatrical props, actors, sketches, and a full-length film running continuously behind the band. It was a bit of a Spinal Tap and ‘Stonehenge’ situation, bordering on humorously pretentious at points.
“I think, musically, A Passion Play is probably the best whole thing that we did,” Anderson said in 1975, still defending the piece, “But I don’t think it contains the high points, or indeed the low points, of other records like the last two, War Child and Minstrel in a Gallery. They have more sort of ups and downs on them; more peaks that are easier to pick on. I think A Passion Play was largely misunderstood. I don’t know why.”
When asked about the same album nearly 20 years later, however, he was able to access a bit more clarity, noting that Jethro Tull had abandoned a whole other record in between Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play, putting them a bit on the back foot from the outset.
“Imagine if you spent three months of your life working on an album and it had all gone horribly wrong and you had to then pick up the pieces and kind of get a record delivered,” Anderson told interviewer Marc Allan in 1993, “Then it was, I don’t know, some of the humour went out of it. And that, for me, is the only problem with A Passion Play is that it is rather humourless; it’s just a little bit too serious and deadpan. It therefore sounds pompous and totally grandiose where it wasn’t supposed to be that way… I’m afraid the levity got lost. So that’s my excuse.”
