Sunday, April 20, 2025

Jethro Tull: The Tipu House

I saw Jethro Tull at the National Exhibition Centre in 1987 and we were cracking jokes about them being old then, yet here is a track from from the album, Curious Ruminant, that they released last month.

Ian Anderson's voice has aged, but they still sound like Tull. In fact they sound more like Tull than they did for some of the 1987 concert - that was the era when Anderson had been listening to too much Mark Knopfler and rather fancied himself as a guitar hero.

Most importantly, judging by the comments left on YouTube, the band's fans are delighted with the album.

Others may detect a decline from Tull's glory years, but then all bands tend to sound tamer if they last for years.

And it's not just that they are getting older and running low on inspiration, it's that what music you can make is in part determined by the music that has gone before you and the music other people are making at the time.

1 comment:

  1. I went to see Tull last year in Sheffield and they were amazing. I had prepared myself for an 'aged' version but at 68 I certainly couldn't leap around on stage like Ian Anderson was doing (although I did walk 22 miles delivering Blue Postal Voter letters last week) and I could never sing like that. A fantastic performance.

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