Ian Anderson, more than Mr. Tull

Wild-haired, cod-piece flaunting flautist frontman Ian Anderson was the band’s driving force and his fierce creative bent continues to this day. He may have shed the band’s name (and his mane), but he’s still continuing the musical legacy he began all those years ago. “The solo stuff and the ‘Best Of Tull’ is one and the same to me,” the erudite craftsman explains. “It’s me and a bunch of guys going back to 1968, and in an historical sense always called Jethro Tull but in terms of the last ten or fifteen years – when I do more project-related stuff – it’s more of a new project, so I tend to use my own name with increasing frequency. It would be nice to end my days being referred to as Ian or Ian Anderson rather than Jethro or Mr Tull.”

Anderson’s new album Homo Erraticus is the third in a conceptual trilogy which began back with Tull’s 1972 classic Thick As A Brick and continued with Anderson’s Thick As A Brick 2 (2012), all three albums following the travails of fictional character and narrator Gerald Bostock. Anderson’s writing has always been profound and ambitious, and this far-reaching quest for meaning clearly hasn’t abated.

“I think a little bit of continuity is something that makes the bitter pill go down a little easier"

“I think a little bit of continuity is something that makes the bitter pill go down a little easier for fans who, like many, reject the idea of old bands doing new records,” he reasons. “Gerald Bostock is a writer’s device – he’s a tool, a nom de plume, an alter-ego. He can express beliefs and views that I don’t have, so I can invest him and the characters he talks about as a fictitious writer with personalities, views, thoughts and expressions which are not my own.

“I don’t go around referring to you guys as ‘Johnny Foreigner’, but Gerald does because he’s a bit of a crusty old type who’s inherited certain hostilities – or perhaps insecurities – towards people from other countries... For many people in Britain the fear of immigration is a real one – I’m not talking here so much about immigration as I’m talking about the more objective view of migration, and that’s the one word that describes what this album is about. Not just the migration of the human species... but the migration of arts, entertainment and culture, the migration of commerce and industry and science and technology, the migration of spirituality and the way in which Christianity and Islam have spread across the world as a whole. I’m talking about big ideas, and if I’m going to do that I need to do it with a smile on my face.”