“Donald Trump was relatively shiny and new when I wrote the songs,” he says, speaking from his Wiltshire home two weeks before Jethro Tull head to Europe for their first post-Omicron shows. The title track talks about Twitter-happy authoritarian leaders damaging use of social media is an Anderson bugbear. Mrs Tibbetts is named after the mother of the US air force captain whose B-29 dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima Jesus is wistfully evoked in the acoustic songs interspersed among the album’s spiky rockers. The Zealot Gene explores how these emotions govern life today as they did when the vengeful Old Testament God rained sulphur and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah. Jester minute … Anderson in codpiece on stage, 1974. Mick Jagger’s trousers keep going up and down, so all’s well with the world.” There are others older than me who are still doing their stuff. His troll-like hair vanished long ago, but that passage of time is “both romantic and encouraging, because it means we can keep on paying our grandchildren’s school fees in our old age. But those of us in arts and entertainment get to die with our boots on, like John Wayne in a black-and-white western.”Īppraising Anderson’s face on my laptop screen, I could easily knock a decade off his 74 years, but it’s still hard to reconcile this loquacious, informed analyser of politics and history with the wild hippy dervish he was circa 1970, famous for playing his flute on one leg. “If you’re a professional tennis player and fully vaccinated, you might manage to play on until you’re in your late 30s. “I think I was confusing myself with British Airways pilots who, when they turn 65, are out,” he counters today. When I last interviewed Ian Anderson, leader of multimillion-selling prog rockers Jethro Tull, in 1993, he told me that 2000 would be a good time to hang up his flute.
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