‘Aqualung’: The prog-rock album that John Lydon actually liked
Looking back at the mainstream rock sounds of the 1970s, you begin to realise just how essential the advent of punk rock was in terms of shaking everything up a bit.
Gone were the days of psychedelic experimentation that had dominated rock during the late 1960s, replaced by a plethora of self-aggrandising and needlessly complex prog rock odysseys, which didn’t seem to reflect the rather bleak times kids in Britain were experiencing.
If punk existed as a stark opposer of the musical mainstream, then prog rock was its prevailing target. The two styles were completely at loggerheads on the musical spectrum: one happy with long, incredibly complex compositions stretching across albums covering fantasy worlds, the other preferred short, sharp and socially reflective rock songs. No self-respecting punk rocker was ever going to braid their hair or walk around with an Emerson, Lake, & Palmer LP under their arm.
Nevertheless, every different avenue of musical expression has its light and shade. Even if the most dismal music scenes your imagination can muster up, there are usually one or two groups that stand out as having a few redeeming qualities. Within prog rock, for instance, not even the most ardent punk revolutionary could truly deny the genius of Ian Anderson and his outfit, Jethro Tull.
Even the famously hard-to-please John Lydon, whose sneering performances with the Sex Pistols ushered in the UK’s punk age in 1976, has always been an outspoken advocate of Jethro Tull’s prog rock sound, with the 1971 album Aqualung being particularly influential on his younger days. Seemingly, the appeal of the record was not just in its undeniable musical quality or innovation, but also in the wild image of Ian Anderson himself.
“Aqualung I adore,” Lydon once declared during an interview with Classic Album Review, “[Ian Anderson’s] antics were just hilarious, he was beyond, he took pomp to another level, it became absurdly entertaining… It was both medieval and modern at the same time, and he played a flute like I’d never heard in my life.”
Not quite the punk blueprint that you might expect of Lydon’s listening habits, but the Sex Pistols frontman’s appreciation for that prog rock masterpiece is indicative of just how expansive the punk scene truly was, even if it didn’t always show it.
Despite the image of punk being completely modern, aiming to burn down everything that had come before it and start anew, the scene took a great deal of inspiration from the rock outfits of the 1960s, the glam rock of the early 1970s, and, as it turns out, the prog of Jethro Tull, too.
Anderson himself is aware of the relationship between his record and the birth of punk. “On more than one occasion, Johnny Rotten has cited that Aqualung was a huge influence on him as a young wannabe musician,” Anderson told Magnet in 2018. “People tend to want to divide things up, put them in neat little boxes on the shelf, and say, ‘This is for that, and this is for that’. In the real world, people are much more capable of thinking across the broad spectrum of different genres.”
Without that broad spectrum of genres to influence him, Lydon might never have fallen down the path of punk later on in the 1970s. Given how essential Sex Pistols were for the development of the scene in the UK, British punk would have looked and sounded very different were it not for the impact of Aqualung, even if prog and punk were routinely pitched against each other.
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