Credit: Far Out / Will Ireland

How Led Zeppelin influenced Jethro Tull album ‘Aqualung’

Thu 17 August 2023 16:30, UK

To many, Jethro Tull hit a progressive peak with Aqualung. Pairing the band’s mix of folk and rock with more complex arrangements and dark themes, the album wasn’t necessarily a guarantee when it came to commercial success. However, as a top ten hit in both the US and UK, Aqualung solidified Jethro Tull as masters of the concept album… even though Aqualung itself didn’t fit that mould.

“Aqualung wasn’t a concept album, although a lot of people thought so,” band leader Ian Anderson told Guitar World in 1999. “The idea came about from a photograph my wife at the time took of a tramp in London. I had feelings of guilt about the homeless, as well as fear and insecurity with people like that who seem a little scary. And I suppose all of that was combined with a slightly romanticized picture of the person who is homeless but yet a free spirit, who either won’t or can’t join in society’s prescribed formats. So from that photograph and those sentiments, I began writing the words to ‘Aqualung’.”

“I can remember sitting in a hotel room in L.A., working out the chord structure for the verses,” he added. “It’s quite a tortured tangle of chords, but it was meant to really drag you here and there and then set you down into the more gentle acoustic section of the song.”

Island Studios, where Jethro Tull recorded the entirety of Aqualung, was a busy place at the start of the 1970s. Across just a few months, the studio saw the completion of Stephen Stills’ self-titled debut album, Traffic’s John Barleycorn Must Die, Cat Stevens’ Tea for the Tillerman and Black Sabbath’s Paranoid. While the Tull were working on Aqualung, Led Zeppelin was recording overdubs for their untitled fourth studio album, known better as Led Zeppelin IV.

“We’d locked ourselves away in the studio—us doing Aqualung, and them working on Led Zeppelin IV—and I hadn’t seen Jimmy Page at all,” guitarist Martin Barre told Guitar Player in 2015. “Finally, he walked into the control room to say hello, just as I was recording the solo to ‘Aqualung’. Now, in those days, if you didn’t get a guitar solo in one or two takes, it might become a flute solo. It was, ‘Go in there and do it or else.’ And here was Jimmy waving like mad—’Hey, Martin!’—and I’m thinking, ‘I can’t wave back, or I’m going to blow the solo!’”

Despite being one of the band’s most popular songs, ‘Aqualung’ was never released as a proper single. Instead, ‘Locomotive Breath’ and ‘Hymn 43’ were chosen as A-sides instead. According to Anderson, the decision regarding whether to release ‘Aqualung’ as a single never even came up.

“Because it was too long, it was too episodic, it starts off with a loud guitar riff and then goes into rather more laid back acoustic stuff,” Anderson explained to SongFacts. “Led Zeppelin at the time, you know, they didn’t release any singles. It was album tracks. And radio sharply divided between AM radio, which played the 3-minute pop hits, and FM radio, where they played what they called deep cuts. You would go into an album and play the obscure, the longer, the more convoluted songs in that period of more developmental rock music.”

“But that day is not really with us anymore, whether it be classic rock stations that do play some of that music, but they are thin on the ground, and they too know that they’ve got to keep it short and sharp and cheerful, and provide the blue blanket of familiar sounding music and get onto the next set of commercial breaks because that’s what pays the radio station costs of being on the air,” Anderson concluded. “So pragmatic rules apply.”

Check out ‘Aqualung’ down below.