The song that “embodies” Jethro Tull, according to Ian Anderson
Stick on any kind of ‘Prog at the BBC’ type clip show late at night on BBC Four and amid the introductory roll call of exotic fantasy dress donned by Peter Gabriel and Rick Wakeman’s Moog wizardry will no doubt flash Jethro Tull’s beardy frontman Ian Anderson’s one-legged flute attack.
He’s always been diffident about the prog tag. Relating little to the bloated excesses the likes of Yes or Emerson, Lake & Palmer would lapse into by the mid-1970s, Anderson would agree that ‘Tull’s creative spirit was essentially burnished in the progressive rock spirit toward the end of the previous decade.
Eagerly embracing the expanded conceptual vistas pioneered by early Genesis and King Crimson, Anderson matched his prog peers’ ambitious songcraft yet always remained half-in, half-out of the progressive world for the rest of the decade.
1971’s Aqualung is routinely touted as a gem of the era, yet Anderson would simultaneously drop a landmark of the prog era with its satirical follow-up, Thick as a Brick, both hailed as a marvel of musical scope with its continuous suite of music and praised by fans for its lampooning of the day’s lofty rock theatre.
Jethro Tull would avoid the era’s sillier pitfalls, leaning into folk rock while Wakeman was orchestrating Arthurian silliness on ice. Too Old to Rock ‘n’ Roll: Too Young to Die!’s misguided riposte to punk wouldn’t derail Jethro Tull for long, adding dollops of synthesizers and soldiering through the 1980s, somewhat orbiting new wave.
It’s a key frisson in Anderson’s work, always flirting with new trends while throwing in his confounding compositions and esoteric lyricism, ensuring he’s never too close to the mainstream sun. Despite such critical heights and fan favourites well over ten years earlier, it was 1987’s Crest of a Knave that presented Anderson with a cut he felt best represented Jethro Tull’s idiosyncratic and multi-dimensional songbook.
“A particular song that I was just rehearsing again with the band, last week, was a song called ‘Budapest’,” Anderson revealed to Rocknews Switzerland in 2025. “It’s quite a long song in its original arrangement. But it embodies again lots of elements of music that for me make it interesting as a composition. Lyrically, it’s telling a little bit of a non-circuitous story; there is no conclusion, no follow-up to it.”
While flexing a little of the day’s Mark Knopfler styles Anderson would meet some criticism for, ‘Budapest’ conjures a ten-minute storm of hard rock heft, folk ripples, and soaring keyboard washes masking a meticulous composition behind its wistful reverie.
Inspired by the chance encounter with a female stagehand backstage who was also moonlighting as a junior Olympic athlete for Hungary, Anderson’s seemingly leery lyrics supposedly serve as a tribute to honourable appreciation over lustful ogling.
“It says all kinds of erotic things about a young female body – but the whole point is to respect it and not do anything about it,” Anderson maintained. “It’s about respect for naïve youth in the female form, for the sanctity of growing up, which is not to be trifled with.”
Whatever its merits, ‘Budapest’ indeed presents Jethro Tull in all their complexity, a dramatic valley of their myriad musical influences lyrically dwelling in subject matter prompting debate and scrutiny, a songwriting quirk Anderson’s fans wouldn’t want any other way.
