just sent my email to emi ca - looking forward to this and replacing my cd4 version.....
Jethro Tull 5.1 (“Bursting Out” box set with Steven Wilson 5.1 mixes out in June 2024!)
- Thread starter JohnN
- Start date
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Quick ?. Why are we sending emails to "EMI Canada"? Shouldn't we be sending them to EMI UK?
Did you find a link?
The Ian Anderson Interview (2011)
http://thejethrotullboard.proboards...=display&board=tours&thread=1732&page=4#14261
In September, there’s a collector’s edition of the Aqualung album being released by EMI, which I just finished working on in conjunction with Abbey Road studios. An engineer has remixed the album very nicely in 5.1 surround as well as stereo, so the collector’s edition will have the original mixes, the remixes, the 5.1 mixes and about 11 bonus tracks, including some outtakes from the album, which we were able to find amongst the old tapes stored at Abbey Road studios these days.
Will the 5.1 mix be on SACD or Blu-ray?
It’s not on Blu-ray. It will be released as a pack with a CD and DVD. We only just finished this in the last week or two. Believe it or not, I have a CD of the remixes sitting on my desk that arrived a couple days ago, but I only got back a couple of days ago from a Latin American tour. I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet, but I will to do that tomorrow morning. I listened to the final mixes, but I haven’t heard the actual mastered versions, which had been put into the final trim at Abbey Road studios.
http://thejethrotullboard.proboards...=display&board=tours&thread=1732&page=4#14261
In September, there’s a collector’s edition of the Aqualung album being released by EMI, which I just finished working on in conjunction with Abbey Road studios. An engineer has remixed the album very nicely in 5.1 surround as well as stereo, so the collector’s edition will have the original mixes, the remixes, the 5.1 mixes and about 11 bonus tracks, including some outtakes from the album, which we were able to find amongst the old tapes stored at Abbey Road studios these days.
Will the 5.1 mix be on SACD or Blu-ray?
It’s not on Blu-ray. It will be released as a pack with a CD and DVD. We only just finished this in the last week or two. Believe it or not, I have a CD of the remixes sitting on my desk that arrived a couple days ago, but I only got back a couple of days ago from a Latin American tour. I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet, but I will to do that tomorrow morning. I listened to the final mixes, but I haven’t heard the actual mastered versions, which had been put into the final trim at Abbey Road studios.
Hey, we're making some headway!
Got some more feedback from EMI Canada. The Director of New Media replied to say that they have started a file; are passing everything along (presumably to EMI); and to keep the comments coming.
You are not going to happy come Sept if you get a Dolby or DTS 5.1 Aqualung. Let 'em know that you want dvd-audio. Send your comments here:
http://www.emimusic.ca/#!/about/contact
Got some more feedback from EMI Canada. The Director of New Media replied to say that they have started a file; are passing everything along (presumably to EMI); and to keep the comments coming.
You are not going to happy come Sept if you get a Dolby or DTS 5.1 Aqualung. Let 'em know that you want dvd-audio. Send your comments here:
http://www.emimusic.ca/#!/about/contact
Last edited:
Done.
Yes, I sent a DVD-A request also....a format that is still 'universal' for most of us here. Did I read that posting correct about their U.S./Canada tour?? I didn't see any venue East of Chicago! Or did I miss flipping a page somewhere? Even my wife was a fan back in the day and would like to see them live.....John
I just sent EMI a note stating most buyers of 5.1 music demand DVD-Audio, Bluray Audio or SACD...I figure why not give them a choice as to acceptable formats.
If you haven't yet sent them a message, please do so to keep this thing moving.
http://www.emimusic.ca/#!/about/contact
If you haven't yet sent them a message, please do so to keep this thing moving.
http://www.emimusic.ca/#!/about/contact
hwkn
1K Club - QQ Shooting Star
If they do end up doing it in the DVD-A format I hope they include a DTS 24/96 track for those of us without DVD-A playback capability[so we at least get something close to hi res quality].
You sent that comment to EMI Canada as well, right?
hwkn
1K Club - QQ Shooting Star
No I only sent the one about the possibility of Blu ray.
The guy at EMI Canada said "keep the comments coming". I'm sure they'd be happy to hear from you again!
hwkn
1K Club - QQ Shooting Star
Done.
Bob Squires Jr
1K Club - QQ Shooting Star
Sent mine off too... asked for DVD-A MLP and a DTS 96/24 track.
Told them please don't leave us hanging with just Dolby!
Hope it works!
Told them please don't leave us hanging with just Dolby!
Hope it works!
Q/A: Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson sets the recording straight — ‘Aqualung’ put them on the international map
June 16, 2011
http://oregonmusicnews.com/blog/201...‘aqualung’-put-them-on-the-international-map/
by Jeff Melton and Scott Steele
This week, venerable English rock legends Jethro Tull return to Eugene and Portland playing outdoors at both Cuthbert Amphitheatre on Thursday, June 16th and Edgefield on Friday, June 17th. They will play their classic 1971 album Aqualung in its entirety, in honor of its 40th anniversary. Bandleader Ian Anderson has been busy both with Tull and with his own solo performances, and the local appearances of the band are the first since the late nineties.
OMN was lucky enough to chat with Anderson earlier this month.
Do you remember the last time you were here in Portland?
Ian Anderson: I think I was there doing an orchestral concert, wasn’t I?
Right, that was last year. And the last time Jethro Tull was here?
I’d have to look it up to tell you. You know better than I do.
Jethro Tull was last in town in 1998 and now you’re going to be playing all of Aqualung live, is that right? Is it true that Tull has never played the entire album live?
No, they played it back in 2005 and 2006 in a few concerts both in the USA, mostly on the East Coast, and some dates in the UK. But it’s only been done in a few shows, and this is the first time in your part of the country that we have played all of the tracks together.
For this particular tour, were there songs that were harder to relearn than others?
Not really. We often play “Aqualung,” “Locomotive Breath,” and “My God” – those have been featured in Jethro Tull and Ian Anderson shows for forty years. They’ve been constant visitors to the set list. Some songs, like “Mother Goose” are quite frequently played, and some songs like “Hymn 43″ and “Slipstream” have hardly been played at all. “Wind Up” hasn’t been played for a long time either. They are okay songs, but the ones I enjoy the most are the classic three. They’ve been good songs to feature live and in my solo concerts with orchestras, string quartets and so on.
The word has already leaked out that the surround-sound mix for Aqualung is going to be coming out very shortly, in the next couple of months, right?
It’s scheduled for September release by EMI as a collector’s edition with all the remixes, the original masters, some bonus tracks, and some alternative recordings of a few songs that were uncovered from the original master tapes. So, it’s a big project. It’s three months in the making – we’re just finishing the artwork now, and we should be ready to release it in September.
Were you there to help supervise some of the remixing? Is this the first time you’ve met and worked with Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree?
That’s correct.
So what do you think of his prowess of as an engineer? Have you heard the King Crimson remixes that he did?
No, I haven’t. Steven Wilson did a very good job – he’s a little younger than me, but he has an avid interest in some of the classic albums of that era. His approach is very sympathetic and very respectful to the original presentation. He’s given it a lot more sonic clarity and more authority. Now it sounds a lot punchier and a lot cleaner for the digital age.
The sound is an improvement from the rather muddy mixes which resulted from working in a studio that was very much an untried and untested room with terrible acoustics and equipment problems. It made it a bit of a nightmare to record the original album. So it’s good that Steven Wilson had a chance to revisit all that in a way that would fill me personally with some horror, to have to go into the studio and start work on something like that again, even with fresh ears or after all that time. Apart from which I’ve been on the road doing concerts a lot. So I wouldn’t find it very easy to fit it in time-wise anyway. But then he’s done a very good job.
Once the remix process started, were there any specific corrections that needed to be made before you settled on a final mix that you were happy with?
You have to remember that these tapes are very old tapes. When you are working with old tapes, chances are you’ll have a bit of a tradeoff. You can tidy things up, you can clean some things up with contemporary digital technology; however, it’s true to say that some of the oxide will have been lost from the tapes, from playing and just age. Some tapes are really too old and too fragile to work with safely. You have to bake them in an oven to try and get everything to glue to the backing of the tape again, and you have to try to keep the oxide intact long enough to give it a couple of passes to get some high-fidelity, professional-standard, digital copies made. In the case of Aqualung and indeed Thick as a Brick, I made one-to-one tape copies of those about fifteen years ago. So we actually have backup multi-track tape copies, as well as the original tapes.
Watch “Thick as a Brick” at Madison Square Garden in New York City in October 1978:
That is very good foresight on your part!
They were the only two I actually took the trouble to do, but it was definitely worth doing in terms of having some contemporary tape stock with those with the material copied one-to-one in the analog tradition. It was worth it. I’m pretty confident. Some of the very old tapes are actually in better condition than the tapes from the late seventies and early eighties, at which point tapes were becoming thinner and theoretically of better quality; they in fact were very fragile, and some of the worst tape stock is actually from the early eighties. That was a bad time for certain batches of tape. But going back into the late sixties and early seventies the tape was much thicker. Because of the thickness of the tape, there isn’t as much tape on a reel, so you didn’t have as much playing time per reel. That was kind of good because of the quality of the tape. It was more solid, more resilient, thicker tape, and the oxide stuck to it better. Then tapes got thinner in order to put more tape on a reel and get more playing time.
Stand Up was a wonderful record. The surround-sound mixes you got of the Carnegie Hall gig were excellent, and the fact that you were able to restore the entire gig and its running order is very wonderful. So thank you very much for doing that.
We were pleased with that one too.
I’ve got one question about the Stand Up reissue. The packaging is great and the miniaturization is really cool, but there’s no lyric sheet included! There wasn’t one there originally, but it would have been nice to have that.
It would have been nice to have had it, but luckily in this day and age all you have to do is to Google search, and they will then appear in alphabetical order. Sometimes the lyrics will have the odd mistake in, but I use those websites a lot. It goes a lot quicker and faster. If I have to relearn a song I haven’t sung in some time, and I need a quick lyrical cue, then I just pop online and print out something off the Internet, and then reword it if I have to, if they have made some mistakes. But it’s a quick and easy way of getting the lyrics in an editable form, so I use those sites all the time. I wouldn’t worry about that which is not on the album, they’re not on the original as you say, and when we’re trying to do these re-masters and re-presentations, it’s very much about trying to stay close to the original; true to the original design work and original concept of the album, both in terms of the artwork and packaging and in terms of the music.
By chance are you going to sing the original lyrics for “My God”?
Well, that song was actually performed live many months before it was recorded. The original lyrics, whilst it might be amusing to sing them, are not the lyrics that most people know. So I’m going to attempt to stick with the one that was the recorded version.
Watch “My God” live in 1970 from the DVD Nothing Is Easy: Live at the Isle Of Wight 1970:
How much did your first wife help you with the lyrics of the Aqualung album?
That’s a touchy subject that I really don’t want to get into. It was based on some material which she provided. It was one of the very rare attempts to have a joint effort in writing any music, let alone lyrics. I’m a loner. I like to work alone, but once in a while you try to do something with other people musically or, on this very rare occasion, sometimes lyrically. I think she remembers it a little differently to how I do.
How important was American FM radio in 1971 to get the album tracks played in America to set the tone for the popularity of the album?
It was incredibly important. It’s interesting to note, however, that Aqualung, was a fairly universal success story for Jethro Tull, putting the band on the map internationally, was successful in a lot of countries where there was no radio play at all. I think it was by word of mouth, by reputation and by approach of the fact that it was talked about. It had a place in the subculture of music, at least as far afield as the ex-USSR countries, the Latin American countries, and in some of the more Latin countries of Europe like Italy and Spain. In these places, Aqualung is a big album without getting any radio play. In fact in the UK it hardly got any radio play and we still don’t today.
So yeah, it was important in America, because that was the medium and that was the culture. But it certainly managed very well without radio exposure in other countries. I think Aqualung probably contains two or three songs that have had a lasting impact and are still played on radio today. I think that’s why the album over the years has become a benchmark of Jethro Tull’s singer/songwriter kind of music as well as its full rock features.
Was the band already headlining in the US when that album came out?
Jethro Tull was headlining in 1969 in some smaller venues. But in 1970 and 1971 we were able to venture into the larger theaters and by 1972 into larger venues, into sports arenas and so on.
When I was in Denver last night at Red Rocks Arena, I noted that Jethro Tull first played at Red Rocks in 1970 and again a year later in 1971. So we were the headline act at a venue associated with, I suppose, the good and the great of American and British rock music over the years. I guess we were doing okay back then just as we were last night, to have a lot of people sitting in a place that has played host to U2 and Bob Dylan and pretty much everyone who has ruled the planet and sold a few million records.
I think the importance of Aqualung as an album was that it wasn’t just about having a short-term or even big out-of-the-box success. It had the effect of consolidating our music up to that date, and it took us on just to that slightly higher level, not only in the USA, but in most of the major markets in the world. It really put Jethro Tull on the international map.
I think it’s important. Not that it’s important to people in America, because in the US, you don’t have the culture of thinking globally in the way that in Europe we tend to do. It’s rather like Formula One doesn’t really exist for Americans – though it’s the international popular form of motor racing, in the US it doesn’t exist at all. We have to accept that America is really quite a unique and totally different place with a totally different sort of culture and values regarding music and entertainment. We obviously want to cross over, but it’s its own world with its own identity. I think long ago, the British and a few European acts realized that America is a very special place to be successful and to perform in, but you can’t compare it to any other markets, partly because it has a huge tradition of rock radio which is really just not paralleled in any other country that I can think of.
Classic rock is a comfort blanket to a generation.
You’ve got that right!
As people say, it’s the soundtrack of our lives, and of course, that’s what it’s about. But sadly, it tends to be driven by advertising. Increasingly, as far as being representative of the different artists and their catalogs, it’s going to be just those few songs that get all the plays on their small playlists, and very rarely do radio stations and their jocks have their freedom to go a little deeper into the catalog.
Watch “Locomotive Breath” live in Chile from 2007:
Terry Ellis, your old manager at Chrysalis, was quoted in Prog Magazine as saying that Aqualung was his favorite Tull record because it struck a really good balance between acoustic and electric pieces. Would you like to comment?
It was at the point when I was feeling a little more confident to sit in the studio on my own and get some music onto tape without the other guys being around. So there are quite a few tracks that were recorded really around the vocal and guitar parts. I mean songs like “Wondering Aloud,” “Slipstream,” and “Mother Goose,” and “Cheap Day Return.” They are rather more like singer/songwriter kind of acoustic songs.
The other guys would be involved in overdubbing their contributions to the master track that I put down. That was the way of getting that kind of intimacy. I thought that everything revolved around the master vocal and master guitar part. I didn’t like to add my vocals on afterward. They were always one of the main ingredients.
One of the things that was interesting about “Wondering Aloud” was that I sang and played it twice, and I think it was the first of the two takes was the one that was declared to be the master, and we overdubbed string quartet, too, whereas take two has some piano playing as well, but no strings. It is interesting that there is just the two takes, both with the relative master vocal recorded live. We decided to include the version without string quartet, just as it was recorded live.
So are there any completely unreleased pieces that you are putting on the Aqualung reissue?
There was really nothing that has never been released. I’ve been all through the catalog in years gone by. If it had not been released, there were a few incomplete songs that were just doodles. Maybe there was just a demo put down, but they are not complete songs, just incomplete backing tracks. The men at EMI were kind of hankering after putting one of those incomplete ideas out just for the fans, and I said “No.” That’s a bit like getting out of bed in the morning and being photographed for a fashion magazine, bleary-eyed, in your underwear. It’s not for public consumption. It’s a private moment involving us all to the point where you go, “This doesn’t work.” Especially when these bits are not very well played, it doesn’t serve the reputations of the musicians when you are just fooling around in the studio with an idea that doesn’t go anywhere. I have to draw the line somewhere, and I’ve drawn it pretty firmly a long time ago with a few pieces of music that were incomplete and could be subsequently given some degree of completion. Like on the – I forget what it was called . . . it was an album I did back . . . it was Nightcap.
Oh, right, the bits and pieces record! Fans of A Passion Play were very happy to be able to hear the precursor of that.
Yeah, well, that’s it. There was some of that stuff that was sufficiently well played and sufficiently well formed, and even if there were songs that had not yet had lyrics written to them, there was a melody. Some melodic flute additions were made to the original backing tracks, just to give them something to make them worth listening to. But there are relatively few of those around, and they’ve all been released by now in one form or another.
Are you planning anything of a similar nature for the Thick as a Brick anniversary?
It’s a bit early to talk about that now. It will be a little while before I turn my attention to that one. You can ask me again in December or early January and I might be able to answer your question. At the moment I’ve got a little work to do between now and the end of October when we finish our tours this year.
You were recently quoted as saying that you listened to Roy Harper and that he was a bit of an influence on you. Which albums of Roy’s do you like?
Roy’s music was becoming very involved – he was also a little bit under the influence of people like me, and Jimmy Page and some of the Pink Floyd people, we had a kind of a mutual admiration society going on. We respected and enjoyed each others’ work and saw it as being a source of – if not a direct source, a sort of an inspirational source. Roy was very much infatuated with the idea of being in a rock and roll band, whereas some of the folks who were in rock and roll bands were interested in becoming lonesome troubadours who could get out and entertain with just an acoustic guitar and a pair of long trousers. You always like the idea of what other people do.
But Roy was getting a little bit more involved as a musician at that point, and though I think he did some great tunes at that point, it was his earlier work that appealed to me. A really good set of tunes appeared on Come Out Fighting Genghis Smith that came out in the summer of 1968. That was the first record that impacted upon me, although I knew something of Roy’s reputation, because he came from the same patch of northern England that I had come down to London from.
Are you planning to do any more recordings like Rupi’s Dance, recording and touring with that kind of material and approach?
The answer is probably yes, because I do lots of different kinds of concerts outside of the Jethro Tull framework. So when I’m not doing perhaps the more mainstream rock material, I might work with an acoustic lineup, a string quartet, an orchestra, special guests, whatever it might be. I tend to do a lot more specifically different things when I go out on tour most of the year, and relatively few concerts these days that are specific to Jethro Tull.
For example, this September I have a bunch of dates in the UK just as a trio, just me and two guys. That’s a way of stripping things down to a pretty basic and sometimes different way of doing the music, because without bass and drums, you have to think more about the way you convey the tune with a rather simpler arrangement.
As of October, it’s going to be a string quartet in the late year, which will be more acoustic oriented, but we’ll have some of the rock arrangements, albeit done in a slightly different – not hugely quiet, but I get to do a lot of different kinds of things, whether it is acoustic stuff or rock stuff. It’s part of what I do for fun. I get to dabble in a number of areas of music outside of the more rigid and rather, I suppose, anticipated format that comes with doing gigs with Jethro Tull, especially in America, where Jethro Tull tends to be more synonymous with a classic rock band. Those songs that perhaps have had the most impact on the widest cross-section of the American public, whereas elsewhere I guess Jethro Tull is probably thought of more as a folk-rock band rather than very simply a rock band.
Anyway, very nice to talk to you but I must move on.
Watch Ian Anderson’s solo work live with the Frankfurt Orchestra:
Celebrate the 40th anniversary of Aqualung with Jethro Tull in Eugene at the Cuthbert Amphitheatre on Thursday, June 16th or in Portland at Edgefield on Friday, June 17th.
__________________
June 16, 2011
http://oregonmusicnews.com/blog/201...‘aqualung’-put-them-on-the-international-map/
by Jeff Melton and Scott Steele
This week, venerable English rock legends Jethro Tull return to Eugene and Portland playing outdoors at both Cuthbert Amphitheatre on Thursday, June 16th and Edgefield on Friday, June 17th. They will play their classic 1971 album Aqualung in its entirety, in honor of its 40th anniversary. Bandleader Ian Anderson has been busy both with Tull and with his own solo performances, and the local appearances of the band are the first since the late nineties.
OMN was lucky enough to chat with Anderson earlier this month.
Do you remember the last time you were here in Portland?
Ian Anderson: I think I was there doing an orchestral concert, wasn’t I?
Right, that was last year. And the last time Jethro Tull was here?
I’d have to look it up to tell you. You know better than I do.
Jethro Tull was last in town in 1998 and now you’re going to be playing all of Aqualung live, is that right? Is it true that Tull has never played the entire album live?
No, they played it back in 2005 and 2006 in a few concerts both in the USA, mostly on the East Coast, and some dates in the UK. But it’s only been done in a few shows, and this is the first time in your part of the country that we have played all of the tracks together.
For this particular tour, were there songs that were harder to relearn than others?
Not really. We often play “Aqualung,” “Locomotive Breath,” and “My God” – those have been featured in Jethro Tull and Ian Anderson shows for forty years. They’ve been constant visitors to the set list. Some songs, like “Mother Goose” are quite frequently played, and some songs like “Hymn 43″ and “Slipstream” have hardly been played at all. “Wind Up” hasn’t been played for a long time either. They are okay songs, but the ones I enjoy the most are the classic three. They’ve been good songs to feature live and in my solo concerts with orchestras, string quartets and so on.
The word has already leaked out that the surround-sound mix for Aqualung is going to be coming out very shortly, in the next couple of months, right?
It’s scheduled for September release by EMI as a collector’s edition with all the remixes, the original masters, some bonus tracks, and some alternative recordings of a few songs that were uncovered from the original master tapes. So, it’s a big project. It’s three months in the making – we’re just finishing the artwork now, and we should be ready to release it in September.
Were you there to help supervise some of the remixing? Is this the first time you’ve met and worked with Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree?
That’s correct.
So what do you think of his prowess of as an engineer? Have you heard the King Crimson remixes that he did?
No, I haven’t. Steven Wilson did a very good job – he’s a little younger than me, but he has an avid interest in some of the classic albums of that era. His approach is very sympathetic and very respectful to the original presentation. He’s given it a lot more sonic clarity and more authority. Now it sounds a lot punchier and a lot cleaner for the digital age.
The sound is an improvement from the rather muddy mixes which resulted from working in a studio that was very much an untried and untested room with terrible acoustics and equipment problems. It made it a bit of a nightmare to record the original album. So it’s good that Steven Wilson had a chance to revisit all that in a way that would fill me personally with some horror, to have to go into the studio and start work on something like that again, even with fresh ears or after all that time. Apart from which I’ve been on the road doing concerts a lot. So I wouldn’t find it very easy to fit it in time-wise anyway. But then he’s done a very good job.
Once the remix process started, were there any specific corrections that needed to be made before you settled on a final mix that you were happy with?
You have to remember that these tapes are very old tapes. When you are working with old tapes, chances are you’ll have a bit of a tradeoff. You can tidy things up, you can clean some things up with contemporary digital technology; however, it’s true to say that some of the oxide will have been lost from the tapes, from playing and just age. Some tapes are really too old and too fragile to work with safely. You have to bake them in an oven to try and get everything to glue to the backing of the tape again, and you have to try to keep the oxide intact long enough to give it a couple of passes to get some high-fidelity, professional-standard, digital copies made. In the case of Aqualung and indeed Thick as a Brick, I made one-to-one tape copies of those about fifteen years ago. So we actually have backup multi-track tape copies, as well as the original tapes.
Watch “Thick as a Brick” at Madison Square Garden in New York City in October 1978:
That is very good foresight on your part!
They were the only two I actually took the trouble to do, but it was definitely worth doing in terms of having some contemporary tape stock with those with the material copied one-to-one in the analog tradition. It was worth it. I’m pretty confident. Some of the very old tapes are actually in better condition than the tapes from the late seventies and early eighties, at which point tapes were becoming thinner and theoretically of better quality; they in fact were very fragile, and some of the worst tape stock is actually from the early eighties. That was a bad time for certain batches of tape. But going back into the late sixties and early seventies the tape was much thicker. Because of the thickness of the tape, there isn’t as much tape on a reel, so you didn’t have as much playing time per reel. That was kind of good because of the quality of the tape. It was more solid, more resilient, thicker tape, and the oxide stuck to it better. Then tapes got thinner in order to put more tape on a reel and get more playing time.
Stand Up was a wonderful record. The surround-sound mixes you got of the Carnegie Hall gig were excellent, and the fact that you were able to restore the entire gig and its running order is very wonderful. So thank you very much for doing that.
We were pleased with that one too.
I’ve got one question about the Stand Up reissue. The packaging is great and the miniaturization is really cool, but there’s no lyric sheet included! There wasn’t one there originally, but it would have been nice to have that.
It would have been nice to have had it, but luckily in this day and age all you have to do is to Google search, and they will then appear in alphabetical order. Sometimes the lyrics will have the odd mistake in, but I use those websites a lot. It goes a lot quicker and faster. If I have to relearn a song I haven’t sung in some time, and I need a quick lyrical cue, then I just pop online and print out something off the Internet, and then reword it if I have to, if they have made some mistakes. But it’s a quick and easy way of getting the lyrics in an editable form, so I use those sites all the time. I wouldn’t worry about that which is not on the album, they’re not on the original as you say, and when we’re trying to do these re-masters and re-presentations, it’s very much about trying to stay close to the original; true to the original design work and original concept of the album, both in terms of the artwork and packaging and in terms of the music.
By chance are you going to sing the original lyrics for “My God”?
Well, that song was actually performed live many months before it was recorded. The original lyrics, whilst it might be amusing to sing them, are not the lyrics that most people know. So I’m going to attempt to stick with the one that was the recorded version.
Watch “My God” live in 1970 from the DVD Nothing Is Easy: Live at the Isle Of Wight 1970:
How much did your first wife help you with the lyrics of the Aqualung album?
That’s a touchy subject that I really don’t want to get into. It was based on some material which she provided. It was one of the very rare attempts to have a joint effort in writing any music, let alone lyrics. I’m a loner. I like to work alone, but once in a while you try to do something with other people musically or, on this very rare occasion, sometimes lyrically. I think she remembers it a little differently to how I do.
How important was American FM radio in 1971 to get the album tracks played in America to set the tone for the popularity of the album?
It was incredibly important. It’s interesting to note, however, that Aqualung, was a fairly universal success story for Jethro Tull, putting the band on the map internationally, was successful in a lot of countries where there was no radio play at all. I think it was by word of mouth, by reputation and by approach of the fact that it was talked about. It had a place in the subculture of music, at least as far afield as the ex-USSR countries, the Latin American countries, and in some of the more Latin countries of Europe like Italy and Spain. In these places, Aqualung is a big album without getting any radio play. In fact in the UK it hardly got any radio play and we still don’t today.
So yeah, it was important in America, because that was the medium and that was the culture. But it certainly managed very well without radio exposure in other countries. I think Aqualung probably contains two or three songs that have had a lasting impact and are still played on radio today. I think that’s why the album over the years has become a benchmark of Jethro Tull’s singer/songwriter kind of music as well as its full rock features.
Was the band already headlining in the US when that album came out?
Jethro Tull was headlining in 1969 in some smaller venues. But in 1970 and 1971 we were able to venture into the larger theaters and by 1972 into larger venues, into sports arenas and so on.
When I was in Denver last night at Red Rocks Arena, I noted that Jethro Tull first played at Red Rocks in 1970 and again a year later in 1971. So we were the headline act at a venue associated with, I suppose, the good and the great of American and British rock music over the years. I guess we were doing okay back then just as we were last night, to have a lot of people sitting in a place that has played host to U2 and Bob Dylan and pretty much everyone who has ruled the planet and sold a few million records.
I think the importance of Aqualung as an album was that it wasn’t just about having a short-term or even big out-of-the-box success. It had the effect of consolidating our music up to that date, and it took us on just to that slightly higher level, not only in the USA, but in most of the major markets in the world. It really put Jethro Tull on the international map.
I think it’s important. Not that it’s important to people in America, because in the US, you don’t have the culture of thinking globally in the way that in Europe we tend to do. It’s rather like Formula One doesn’t really exist for Americans – though it’s the international popular form of motor racing, in the US it doesn’t exist at all. We have to accept that America is really quite a unique and totally different place with a totally different sort of culture and values regarding music and entertainment. We obviously want to cross over, but it’s its own world with its own identity. I think long ago, the British and a few European acts realized that America is a very special place to be successful and to perform in, but you can’t compare it to any other markets, partly because it has a huge tradition of rock radio which is really just not paralleled in any other country that I can think of.
Classic rock is a comfort blanket to a generation.
You’ve got that right!
As people say, it’s the soundtrack of our lives, and of course, that’s what it’s about. But sadly, it tends to be driven by advertising. Increasingly, as far as being representative of the different artists and their catalogs, it’s going to be just those few songs that get all the plays on their small playlists, and very rarely do radio stations and their jocks have their freedom to go a little deeper into the catalog.
Watch “Locomotive Breath” live in Chile from 2007:
Terry Ellis, your old manager at Chrysalis, was quoted in Prog Magazine as saying that Aqualung was his favorite Tull record because it struck a really good balance between acoustic and electric pieces. Would you like to comment?
It was at the point when I was feeling a little more confident to sit in the studio on my own and get some music onto tape without the other guys being around. So there are quite a few tracks that were recorded really around the vocal and guitar parts. I mean songs like “Wondering Aloud,” “Slipstream,” and “Mother Goose,” and “Cheap Day Return.” They are rather more like singer/songwriter kind of acoustic songs.
The other guys would be involved in overdubbing their contributions to the master track that I put down. That was the way of getting that kind of intimacy. I thought that everything revolved around the master vocal and master guitar part. I didn’t like to add my vocals on afterward. They were always one of the main ingredients.
One of the things that was interesting about “Wondering Aloud” was that I sang and played it twice, and I think it was the first of the two takes was the one that was declared to be the master, and we overdubbed string quartet, too, whereas take two has some piano playing as well, but no strings. It is interesting that there is just the two takes, both with the relative master vocal recorded live. We decided to include the version without string quartet, just as it was recorded live.
So are there any completely unreleased pieces that you are putting on the Aqualung reissue?
There was really nothing that has never been released. I’ve been all through the catalog in years gone by. If it had not been released, there were a few incomplete songs that were just doodles. Maybe there was just a demo put down, but they are not complete songs, just incomplete backing tracks. The men at EMI were kind of hankering after putting one of those incomplete ideas out just for the fans, and I said “No.” That’s a bit like getting out of bed in the morning and being photographed for a fashion magazine, bleary-eyed, in your underwear. It’s not for public consumption. It’s a private moment involving us all to the point where you go, “This doesn’t work.” Especially when these bits are not very well played, it doesn’t serve the reputations of the musicians when you are just fooling around in the studio with an idea that doesn’t go anywhere. I have to draw the line somewhere, and I’ve drawn it pretty firmly a long time ago with a few pieces of music that were incomplete and could be subsequently given some degree of completion. Like on the – I forget what it was called . . . it was an album I did back . . . it was Nightcap.
Oh, right, the bits and pieces record! Fans of A Passion Play were very happy to be able to hear the precursor of that.
Yeah, well, that’s it. There was some of that stuff that was sufficiently well played and sufficiently well formed, and even if there were songs that had not yet had lyrics written to them, there was a melody. Some melodic flute additions were made to the original backing tracks, just to give them something to make them worth listening to. But there are relatively few of those around, and they’ve all been released by now in one form or another.
Are you planning anything of a similar nature for the Thick as a Brick anniversary?
It’s a bit early to talk about that now. It will be a little while before I turn my attention to that one. You can ask me again in December or early January and I might be able to answer your question. At the moment I’ve got a little work to do between now and the end of October when we finish our tours this year.
You were recently quoted as saying that you listened to Roy Harper and that he was a bit of an influence on you. Which albums of Roy’s do you like?
Roy’s music was becoming very involved – he was also a little bit under the influence of people like me, and Jimmy Page and some of the Pink Floyd people, we had a kind of a mutual admiration society going on. We respected and enjoyed each others’ work and saw it as being a source of – if not a direct source, a sort of an inspirational source. Roy was very much infatuated with the idea of being in a rock and roll band, whereas some of the folks who were in rock and roll bands were interested in becoming lonesome troubadours who could get out and entertain with just an acoustic guitar and a pair of long trousers. You always like the idea of what other people do.
But Roy was getting a little bit more involved as a musician at that point, and though I think he did some great tunes at that point, it was his earlier work that appealed to me. A really good set of tunes appeared on Come Out Fighting Genghis Smith that came out in the summer of 1968. That was the first record that impacted upon me, although I knew something of Roy’s reputation, because he came from the same patch of northern England that I had come down to London from.
Are you planning to do any more recordings like Rupi’s Dance, recording and touring with that kind of material and approach?
The answer is probably yes, because I do lots of different kinds of concerts outside of the Jethro Tull framework. So when I’m not doing perhaps the more mainstream rock material, I might work with an acoustic lineup, a string quartet, an orchestra, special guests, whatever it might be. I tend to do a lot more specifically different things when I go out on tour most of the year, and relatively few concerts these days that are specific to Jethro Tull.
For example, this September I have a bunch of dates in the UK just as a trio, just me and two guys. That’s a way of stripping things down to a pretty basic and sometimes different way of doing the music, because without bass and drums, you have to think more about the way you convey the tune with a rather simpler arrangement.
As of October, it’s going to be a string quartet in the late year, which will be more acoustic oriented, but we’ll have some of the rock arrangements, albeit done in a slightly different – not hugely quiet, but I get to do a lot of different kinds of things, whether it is acoustic stuff or rock stuff. It’s part of what I do for fun. I get to dabble in a number of areas of music outside of the more rigid and rather, I suppose, anticipated format that comes with doing gigs with Jethro Tull, especially in America, where Jethro Tull tends to be more synonymous with a classic rock band. Those songs that perhaps have had the most impact on the widest cross-section of the American public, whereas elsewhere I guess Jethro Tull is probably thought of more as a folk-rock band rather than very simply a rock band.
Anyway, very nice to talk to you but I must move on.
Watch Ian Anderson’s solo work live with the Frankfurt Orchestra:
Celebrate the 40th anniversary of Aqualung with Jethro Tull in Eugene at the Cuthbert Amphitheatre on Thursday, June 16th or in Portland at Edgefield on Friday, June 17th.
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Thank heavens for that!
Got an update from EMI Canada regarding all the comments that were sent in. The main excerpt is:
"...you've probably reached a saturation point. We've passed on that there is tremendous interest in a modified version of the product, and it's now in their hands."
"...you've probably reached a saturation point. We've passed on that there is tremendous interest in a modified version of the product, and it's now in their hands."
Almen
500 Club - QQ All-Star
Sweet! Nice to know that it is possible to make an impact; let's hope it also leads to something.
yeah, nice work but i think we shouldn't stop on this. more feedbacks and requests from
potential consumers most likely will do impact on the label's approach with future possible
releases. please keep going.
EMI has tonns of quad masters which only need to be converted to digital format and
put on the DVDA with no expensive remix work to be involved.
potential consumers most likely will do impact on the label's approach with future possible
releases. please keep going.
EMI has tonns of quad masters which only need to be converted to digital format and
put on the DVDA with no expensive remix work to be involved.
