Ian Anderson speaks to Jason Barnard about what inspired him to create the new Jethro Tull album, The Zealot Gene, navigating the music world during the pandemic and his approach to songwriting that has sustained his career.
The title track for The Zealot Gene seems to capture the polarised nature of politics and society today. Is that what you were aiming for?
I guess yes, it was. Bearing in mind it was written in 2017, it obviously is not a reflection exactly of today’s up to date news world. It is really a reflection in broad terms and particularly the influence which has continued to grow, the influence of social media in helping to fuel the degree to which democratic free speech turns into insult, humiliation, bullying, and just being deeply unpleasant. It’s not good for the human soul to have that addiction to being as vile as people seem to want.
Obviously not that many people, but some people want to pursue that course. I think we saw it some years ago in the advent of the internet and chat rooms and fan based websites where people would ritually gather to insult past band members or each other. Which is why I removed social intercourse from the Jethro Tull website long ago. I was just tired of the way in which it was being abused by a few people who just seemed to think it was an opportunity to be insulting. I mean, not to me. It doesn’t bother me. It’s just I get upset when it’s other people in the band, or people just being insulting to each other.
But I think it’s just indicative of the way that, as I say, it’s a narrow line between democratic free speech and actually being incredibly bloody rude. And in that context, all you can ever do is really turn away from it and ignore it. And it’s easy enough for me to do that but particularly for a lot of young schoolchildren, they’re introduced to Facebook and other social media, which is very hard to ignore because they’re so desperate for peer group approval that they do tend to unfortunately be badly affected by the abusive nature of a lot of online posts. And then when you throw Donald Trump into the mix, of course you see the full weight of the awfulness of the divisive nature of social media on a much broader societal level. And I think that is basically in simplistic and moderately amusing terms and that’s what I’m applying in the lyrics of the title track, The Zealot Gene. But it’s not a University PhD thesis on the ails of modern times. It’s just a pop rock song.
One of the other advance tracks is Sad City Sisters.
It’s about young people but specifically, I’m speaking as a father of a daughter who was once young and a grandfather of a granddaughter who’s not quite of that age yet, but within a year or two doubtless will be. And of course we have a concern about the safety and welfare of people who set out to have a good time, but obey that rather odd ritual of Friday and Saturday nights of wandering around in the freezing cold. They may not remember very much about what they did the night before, but they get home safely. But as we all know, there are many who don’t who are tragically affected by it, and even to the extent of loss of life, they don’t make it home from the disco. I think that’s something that I’ve always found a bit emotionally disheartening to see when I’ve been on UK tours particularly, and walking back from some concert back to my hotel, and then walking past those places where people are gathering and waiting to go in.
But I’m a professional party pooper. I was born that way. I think when I was about five or six years old. I remember being sent to the party of a little boy who lived next door and I lasted for about ten minutes. I didn’t know anybody, I just felt I hated the crowds of people and the children screaming and shouting and playing with things and I knew I would get into trouble if I went back home. And so I climbed over the wall into my garden and hid among some rose bushes for a couple of hours until it was safe to go back in. Pretending that I’d been to the party. I did a similar stunt, actually, when I was sent to Sunday school. I climbed a tree outside the Church and hid in the tree for 2 hours because I was so terrified of the Sunday School lessons and the words and the notions and the things that were being imparted to me about this very scary God and how he would punish us all if we did anything wrong, like hiding in rose bushes or up trees.
So I got off to an uneasy start with organised religion as well as party going. So I’m an old fuddy-duddy who has perhaps an irritating avuncular approach to these things, so you should just ignore everything I say!
The album seems to reflect a range of human emotions. You’ve mentioned the Old Testament and that you sometimes use the Bible as a starting point as an anthology of stories.
Well, it wasn’t a starting point, my starting point was writing down a list of words that described extreme human emotions. The starting point for the album was just that notion, what shall I write about? And I thought, how about writing a bunch of songs and each one is focusing on a separate, strong human emotion? So I made a list of words, and then on a whim, I thought, wow, I remember reading all those words in the Bible. So I did an internet search for examples of those words in the Bible, and copied and pasted a few lines of text just as a reference point. But most of the songs started off by having relevance in the present age. It’s just that I was able in many cases to find examples of biblical text that had a parallel so I could use metaphor, analogy, simile – the tools of the writers trade. And apply them in a way that for me was satisfying because it means the album kind of joins together. It has a relevance that might not be the case if I just focused on a bunch of different songs and there was no clear cut relationship between them.
It’s not that I’m a person who can only think in terms of grand concept albums, but even with a bunch of four minute songs, it’s nice if you can give them a sense of belonging to each other. They’re part of that same musical family and same period of time. Because all these songs are written in the course of just over a month in January of 2017. And by the end of February, I sent demos to all the band and all the lyrics and the whole instruction manual of what it was they had to prepare in readiness for five days of rehearsal and four days of recording in March. And I’m right back to that place right now. I’m exactly in the same place. I’m now whatever it is, 42 weeks into the next album project for release at the end of March 2023. I’m engaged in that writing process again, and I have to start off with an idea that everything I write has some kind of a relationship to the pieces of music and lyrics around it. And I’ve completed the first draft of all the lyrics. I’ve written ten out of twelve of the main musical themes. And from here on, a couple of hours a day, I try and flesh that out and turn it into enough content that I can make some little simple demos for the band and we’ll take it from there. Since we have no idea currently whether we are going to be. I should have only just come back at the beginning of this week from a tour of Finland, which got postponed now for the fourth time. I’m supposed to be going the week after next to Sweden, which has already been postponed until May. Right before I hooked up on the Zoom call I was responding to our Italian promoter with some suggestions that he had made about modifications to the tour dates in Italy. Assuming that the rules don’t change from what they are right now, but given that most of Western Europe is about three or four weeks behind the UK, I think the Omicron cases are going to be continuing to rise for a while before falling – if we are to believe the figures here. It’s tough going as we go into the third year.
In recent years you’ve released the The Ballad Of Jethro Tull book and the Jethro Tull String Quartets album. Does that mean now you can focus forward?
Well, there are a few things that in the last few years that I thought I should do. One was an official biography of Jethro Tull and with a book publishing company, and who engaged the services of a professional writer, a music business writer of some repute to actually author it. The book of complete Ian Anderson and Jethro Tull, lyrics spanning, all the way up to date with the Zealot Gene, which I included at the last minute. That was another project I had in mind to do at some point. The String Quartet album was another of those. Plus, of course, the work that goes in, which is considerable, on all of the box set reissues and remixes and remasterings that go on with the catalogue product, which in this day and age, with the demand for vinyl and more comprehensive editions of these commemorative anniversary albums, has been another of those ongoing side projects. I’m certainly not the prime mover. The prime mover is a guy called Tim Chacksfield at Warner Music. He used to be with EMI and is a veteran of the music industry and is someone who places keen value on assembling a really good quality product, not just for Jethro Tull, but other artists, too.
Record companies wouldn’t waste their time on that 20 years ago. Now they realise there is a small but finite profit in doing a really quality job when it comes to doing collections and box sets. And record companies really need that tangible profit because the world has changed so much in the last 20 years. And with the move to digital, used to be downloading, now it’s just streaming, which is even less productive in terms of income to both the record companies and to the artists. So if you can manage to pay the electricity and the cleaning lady’s bill by releasing high quality box sets, you’re going to do it, whereas perhaps they didn’t need to worry about that 20 or 30 years ago. Everybody is a winner in that sense. The public and the record buying fans, they get some really good product. And perhaps what we try to do is to make sure they have a variety of formats in which they can buy it so they can get the cheap and cheerful, or they can buy the big deluxe box set. And in the case of The Zealot Gene, another couple of intermediary points in between.
So I think it’s a better and healthier world if you’re a music fan now than it was a while back. But it means a lot more work and for a lot more work for arguably much less overall income from records. Everybody had it so good back in the 60s and 70s, even into the 80s. So record companies had a big chance to make a whole lot of money. And now there’s only three majors left, and they tend to control, not control in a bad way, but they just pragmatically. They have so much clout in the marketplace when it comes to distribution and marketing and getting vinyl records pressed, for example, because they have such an authority and a weight of artists. They can block book time in the very few pressing plants left in the world, which is what they have to do in order to try and get product out into the marketplace. As it was, we delivered the finished album, all the artwork and everything, to the record company in June of last year. The earliest date we could get for release was the end of January, due to the time it takes to get records pressed.
Do you think that one of the things that’s helped sustain Jethro Tull and yourself creatively, in the early was a melting pot of influences? Like Jeffrey Goes to Leicester Square. Nothing was necessarily off the table.
Yeah, I always had an interest in other kinds of music, apart from, I suppose, the blues and jazz that I was exposed to as a child and as a teenager. There were elements of folk music, and I was interested when I started hearing music from other cultures, other parts of the world, ethnic music of one sort or another. And by the time the Stand Up album came along, I was able to further that interest by writing some original music, which was quite varied in terms of its eclectic set of influences. And I think really during then and the next three or four years, I had enough musical influences to last me a lifetime, which is when I hardly ever listened to music after that. As a music fan, I’ve never really been someone who spends recreational time listening to music. I would rather read a book or watch a late night talk show or read the newspapers.
Humour has been an important element at times, represented in Thick As A Brick, for example. Unlike other artists, you’ve represented different ideas lyrically as well as musically.
I don’t actually have to try very hard, it just turns out that way. But I do prefer pursuing subject material and expressing in a way that perhaps other people don’t. I’m usually looking for a little more depth in musical and lyrical subject matter to start with in terms of beginning a writing event, a song, a piece of music, whatever it might be. But also in terms of broadening the vocabulary of pop and rock lyrics, because it is actually really usually very limited. There’s not many words employed, and they tend to be on very similar subjects. Because the vast majority of pop and rock songs. It’s me, me, and it’s relationships with people and romantic relationships. Either they go well, they go badly or not at all. That’s what people tend to sing about, and they have done since the beginning of time. And many of the great songwriters of my era have been far superior in output to anything I could do. I always felt, well, I’ve got to do what’s left. I’ve got to find things the other people aren’t writing about, or if they write about them, I’ve got to find a different way to write about them. So I employ perhaps a slightly bigger vocabulary, and I try to join the dots a little bit more in terms of English grammar and expression. So it makes it fun for me. It might not make it fun for the listener, because maybe it’s just a little bit too complicated or a bit too weighty, but it’s dirty work, somebody’s got to do it. I volunteered.
Maybe that’s the theme that links The Zealot Gene and some of the music from across your career. Tracks like Skating Away, covering the environment. You’re there, capturing the news, all the ideas of the day. And actually, much of it is still relevant now.
Well, yes, I think my first climate change song was in 1973 that I wrote. It was released in 74. But Skating Away was back at a time when popular science thought we were headed towards global cooling, another ice age. That opinion was reversed a few years later when ice core samples began to reveal the opposite to be the likely progression. And other interest in the environment generally. It goes back quite a long way in my life, for sure, but it’s not with prescience and incredible ability to gaze into a crystal ball. It all seems fairly painfully obvious at the time. The same thing with issues of globalisation and population growth, things that were behind the song Locomotive Breath in 1971. Those are things that are still around today, issues to do with organised religion and the brainwashing of children in stereotypical ways, from media and comic papers that was the focus of Thick As A Brick. These are things that are still around today. Aqualung, the homeless person. Our streets are still filled with homeless people, albeit the demographic is different, and the reasons for homelessness are somewhat more complex, but nonetheless is a phenomenon it’s still around. Yes, I think there is a relevance to the music, or at least to the lyrical part of it. And the musical style has turned out to be in some ways more timeless than we might have feared. It still seems to capture the imagination, and a huge host of young people are discovering Led Zeppelin for the first time, or Jimi Hendrix or Cream or whatever it might be. And they’re getting a chance to listen to something that isn’t just a historical little explanation of how we got to where we are now. It’s in its own right got to be really stimulating and invigorating for people to hear that music that was sometimes a little brash and amateurish. But it had energy and excitement in the same way as a few years later, the early so-called punk groups of the UK did. I think that in a turn the Sex Pistols will be rediscovered by another generation. They’ll go, wow, this was brilliant. Enough of those old fogeys, Yes and Genesis that I was listening to when I was 11. Now I’m 13 and I’m hearing Johnny Rotten, who of course was a big fan of Aqualung, so he told me.
Thanks very much for your time Ian. The Zealot Gene is another great Tull album.
Thank you very much for the compliment. I hope everybody in your life stays safe and well through whatever remains of the COVID interruption. If you’re my age that interruption is most unwelcome because time is of the essence. It is running out so I’m kind of anxious to get back and do things while I still happily can. Anyway, good to talk to you. Take care.
Further information
A podcast version of this interview, including the music discussed is available here.
The Zealot Gene is available in the following formats:
- Special Edition Digipak CD
- Gatefold 2LP+CD+LP-booklet
- Limited 2CD+Blu-ray Artbook
- Limited Deluxe 3LP+2CD+Blu-ray Artbook
Order here: https://jethrotullband.lnk.to/TheZealotGene
