It's 1978 and my favourite LPs, along with Kate Bush's The Kick Inside, are Songs from the Wood and Heavy Horses. So when I see Repeat: The Best of Jethro Tull Vol. II in a record shop, I naturally buy it.
I was expecting more songs about ley lines, poaching and outdated modes of agriculture, but what I got was the late British blues. I wanted to like it, and soon I did.
Paul Bernal argues that banning children from social media is a very bad idea: "For the most part, most kids, most of the time, are able to navigate the internet – and in particular social media – in ways that work. Rather than being a cesspit of trolling and misinformation, the internet mostly works. Just like for the grown-ups, the internet is simply part of their lives – how they organise themselves, how they get information, how the socialise, how they do their (home)work, how they find entertainment, how they listen to music and watch television and movies, how they date, how they shop and much more."
"You only have to take a look recent exam papers to see the problem. For example, when my colleague Catherine Gower and I surveyed 219 GCSE, AS and A-level history papers issued in the summer of 2023, we found only 6 per cent of 991 exam questions directed students to discuss women (37 per cent directed students to discuss men)." Natasha R, Hodgson shows that women are largely absent from the questions, sources, and mark schemes that shape how history is taught and assessed in schools in England.
Municipal Dreams reviews Ned Hewitt's Housing the People of Leicester: A History of Social Housing: "Spending cuts and a cross-party emphasis on rehousing slum dwellers (previously excluded from council housing dues to its relatively high rents) from 1930 had their own impact. The North Braunstone Estate, built as a slum clearance estate, is one of many across the country that reflected both these aspects and suffered a resultant social stigma."
National Museums Scotland tells the fascinating story of the Isle of Lewis chessmen and their discovery.
"Living in the Past was a song in five/four time, with jazz flute solos, and grumpy lyrics about how the hippie lifestyle, with protests about war and talk about revolution, wasn’t for Anderson, who was also very staunchly opposed to drug use, and in general found little common cause with the hippies, despite his bearded, long-haired, eccentric appearance." Andrew Hickey on the eccentric single that became Jethro Tull's biggest hit.
As the publisher's website says:
High Flying Around Volume II continues the remarkable story of Leicester’s 1960s arts and music scene via the people who were there. Their memories and reminiscences bring back to life the buildings long since demolished, the groups who packed out the venues and the people who filled the halls and clubs.
Find out how some of the biggest names in music performed in some of Leicester’s smallest and long-lost venues, revisit the 1969 free festival, and discover the incredible stories of Leicester band Gypsy and the 1960s creatives. Discover the importance of the college and university circuit, the arts lab, the city’s underground music, folk and poetry scenes and the music that influenced Leicester playwright Joe Orton.
Leicester women tell their stories about life in the city during the 1960s, while singer/songwriter Ryan Dunn explains how the decade influences his songwriting and fashion.
Dipping into it, I find plenty of new bands to research and the odd anecdote I might share here.
And, yes, my home town gets at least one mention:
The first time we played in Market Harborough was at a place called the Embi Club, on St Mary's Road. The building had a great doorway, which was the entrance, then you went to the back building through a small yard. That was where the club was. The club itself was long and it looked like a few rooms had been knocked into one. It was a very busy venue. Jethro Tull had played there as did Edwin Starr. I later learned the site had been an old cinema. the Oriental, which opened in 1921. The interior decor consisted of Egyptian mummies Chinese dragons, palm trees and pyramids.
The main building had, I think, gone by the time I moved here – the length of it ran behind what is now the House of Art tattoo studio and probably a couple of other vanished buildings – but the exotic domed entrance on St Mary's Road lasted through the Seventies.
During her last weeks, I played my mother music on my phone. and she surprised me a couple of times by asking for Wuthering Heights bu Kate Bush.
The other LP I played to death while I was in the sixth form, besides Bush's The Kick Inside, was Songs from the Wood, but sadly my mother never asked for anything by Jethro Tull.
"Federal Council turned out to be the worst committee that I've ever served on. And remember, I've been doing this for the best part of forty years." Mark Valladares has found the first three years of the Liberal Democrats' Federal Council to be an exercise in futility.
"It's easy to condemn anti-migrant protests on moral grounds. What such condemnation misses, however, is that there's also an intellectual error here – an excessive focus on individuals and insufficient attention to structural societal problems." Chris Dillow says we should spend less time looking for scapegoats and more time thinking about socio-economic failure.
Danny Chambers discusses how his varied veterinary career now shapes his work in politics: "I’ve learned the hard way that you can’t look after animals – or other people – unless you look after yourself first. Whether you’re a vet or an MP, it’s incredibly easy to let your own wellbeing slide, to say yes to everything, and to push yourself to the point of burnout."
"'If you love cider, this is cider to the power of 10,' says Barny Butterfield, speaking about the flavours packed by some of this year’s 'special' apples. Indeed Butterfield, the owner of Sandford Orchards, near Exeter, is buying extra tanks to increase cider production after the UK’s hottest summer on record resulted in an abundance of fruit." Zoe Wood reports on the prospects of a vintage year for English cider.
Andrew Hickey celebrates Jethro Tull and Living in the Past.
When I was 17 I thought this was the best LP there had ever been or ever could be (with the possible exception of The Kick Inside by Kate Bush).
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.
It's the summer of 1977. England are regaining the Ashes under Mike Brearley, and Songs from the Wood by Jethro Tull is the best album I know or can imagine.
When I play it loudly at night with my bedroom windows open, I can hear a pair of class 20s on the Market Harborough to Northampton line. They're slogging up the bank to Great Oxendon with a coal train bound for London.
Yes, it was all a long time ago. Over the years I must have featured most of the tracks on Songs from the Wood here, but not this one. At eight and a half minutes, it represents Tull's blend of folk rock straining to become something more pretentious.
And 'Pibroch'?
Pibroch, piobaireachd or ceòl mòr is an art music genre associated primarily with the Scottish Highlands that is characterised by extended compositions with a melodic theme and elaborate formal variations. Strictly meaning 'piping' in Scottish Gaelic, piobaireachd has for some four centuries been music of the great Highland bagpipe.
"Men don't get her," announced the headline on Barbara Ellen's article on Kate Bush in the Observer a couple of weeks ago.
The article is more questioning about Bush's appeal than that, but this man or boy certainly gets her. When I turned 18, The Kick Inside was rivalled only by Jethro Tull's Songs from the Wood for the title of my favourite LP.
So here's another track from it.
But the Walker Brothers weren't the only big names to play Harborough in those days. I've blogged before about Jethro Tull, and now I can add some more names to the list.
Because a reader kindly pointed me towards an old post about the town on the Soul Source site:
The club was called the Frollockin' Kneecap and had been there since 1968, I saw Brenton Wood, Blossom Toes, Ferris Wheel, Keef Hartley, Dantallian's Chariot (Zoot Money), Brenton Wood and the best of all the Family 3 times, once with Fairport Convention jamming; about 700 in for that one!
It goes on to say that the club called itself The Lantern for "allnighters", which suggests there was such a thing as East Midland Soul.
I can't give you Family and Fairport jamming, but here's Dantalian's Chariot (Andy Summers, later of the Police, is on guitar) with their most famous track.
"Laura Kuenssberg’s tenure as the BBC’s political editor, beginning in July 2015 and ending in the coming weeks, was a catastrophe. On her watch, lies were not just permitted, they were amplified and given credibility by Britain’s state broadcaster. At least partly as a result of this, the UK Government now routinely lies with impunity." Patrick Howse on the consequences of the BBC's political editor.
Josh Self sees signs of a revival of one-nation Conservatism.
Brian Domitrovic reviews a new book on the 19th-century political economist Henry George: "George sold millions of copies of his books and pamphlets, spawned scores of activist reading groups among marginally literate groups of working people, inspired the building of model communities on the basis of the single tax, motivated innumerable “Georgists” successfully to seek elected office, influenced world-historical leaders such as the Mexican Revolution’s Venustiano Carranza and modern China’s founder Sun Yat-Sen, and all but reoriented the agenda of taxation and public works globally as the twentieth century dawned."
"Equally as important as the music in this case was that distinctive and much-discussed You Can All Join In sleeve. Snapped from above on a stepladder by the Hipgnosis photographer, the front cover shows a rag tag collection of 29 musicians. Fashionably unsmiling with collars turned up against the wind and hands thrust deep into the pockets of army greatcoats, leather jackets and (real) fur coats on a cold winter’s morning, no one looked too happy to be there at that hour of the day." Stuart Penney looks back at Island Records' first UK sampler disc.
Who were the coolest band in Leicester in the late Sixties?
The consensus, I think, would be Family, but they had a rival in the shape of Legay, who later renamed themselves Gypsy.
I came across Legay in old newspapers because, like Jethro Tull, they played the Frolickin Kneecap in Market Harborough.
But Bryan Hemmings goes back a long way with the band:
Legay, later to become Gypsy, had that almost undefinable quality that most times makes the crucial difference. In a parallel universe, somewhere, things probably turned out a lot better for them. And I’m probably a successful novelist. In this universe none of us were quite so lucky. Sometimes, there are moments I feel it’s all my fault.
To my mind, they could have been one of the biggest bands in Britain. Looks, style and music, like David Bowie, they had virtually everything. All they lacked was that final, tiny bit of musical polish, and a really good producer.
Guitarist, vocalist, songwriter and founder of the band, Robin Pizer, was in my class at Syston Parochial Juniors. Apart from a small interlude, when I was committed to a school in Leicester, we attended the same schools for most of the rest of our school lives.
Though we were never what you could call best of friends we communicated at times. We were probably also at the Infants’ school in Syston's High Street by Walker’s woodyard together.
Robin once got shamed in front of morning assembly with Billy Walker, who used to sit at the desk in front of mine. They were caught after throwing stones at a lamp outside St Peter and St Paul Church and breaking it. He was Jack the Lad personified.
He told me his uncle was teaching him to play guitar when he was about ten. Was I jealous. Robin once dissected a stickleback in front of my eyes with a pen knife under the bridge at Syston brook, when we were nippers. He definitely made an impression, I was horrified.
We were in the same year Longslade Comprehensive School. Most of the rest of Gypsy went there too. The band was called Legay after their first drummer, Legay Rogers. Unfortunately, Legay died young.
For a virtually unknown band outside Leicestershire, Legay had huge female following. Girls loved them. Even their roadies were sexy.
No-one, the track above, apparently reveals Legay in a more psychedelic mood than was usual for them. But it's easy to imagine it being a hit in 1969.
Robin Pizer is still around in Leicester and recorded a song about Richard III when the old boy was found in the city.
He wrote another about the Princes in the Tower, but that's a topic that merits a post of its own.
As the address given for the Frolickin Kneecap is The Square, Market Harborough, the club must have been meeting at the old County Cinema, where the Walker Brothers lost their shirts.
Sunday afternoon concerts appear to have been controversial. Another Leicester Mercury report from earlier in the year (18 April 1968) said that the police had asked all 'Sunday clubs' in the county to
look carefully at the regulations covering music, singing and dancing on Sundays. This is a warning that they might be infringing the law.
The report also says that Harborough's Frolickin Kneecap had decided to shut up shop because of this, but clearly it was back again later in the year.
In 1968 Jethro Tull sounded like this.
BBC News reports:
The leader of Blackpool Council's Conservative group has resigned from the role after falling out with one of the town's Tory MPs.
Councillor Tony Williams has led the Tory group for the past eight years.
He said he signed a letter of no confidence in Blackpool South MP Scott Benton and was then suspended from the Conservative party, so he subsequently stood down.
The letter, which was signed by a number of other Tory councillors, asked the controversy-hungry Benton to stand down at the next election.
But I don't want to tell you that.
Tony Williams grew up in Blackpool, played in a number of groups there and unsuccessfully auditioned to join the town's most famous group, Jethro Tull, in 1968.
He was to play with them on a US tour 10 years later after Tull's bass player John Glascock became to ill to continue. (He died the following year.)
In between these two encounters with Jethro Tull, Williams was a member of a number of groups. In 1972 he joined Stealers Wheel, which had been formed earlier that year in Paisley by Gerry Rafferty and Joe Egan.
And it was the line up with Williams that recorded the band's self-styled first album. Which means (as Discogs confirms) that he played bass on Stuck in the Middle with you.
Perhaps showing an early talent for resignation, he had left the band by the time it was released as a single.
Later. And here he is being introduced to the crowd at Madison Square Garden in 1978 by Ian Anderson.
Jethro Tull, God bless them, have a new album. RökFlöte. coming out in April.
To think that I saw them at the NEC in 1986 with some colleagues from Golden Wonder and we made jokes about them being old even then.
And it wasn't the best era to see them either. Ian Anderson had decided he wanted to be a guitar hero, so there were too many Mark Knopfler imitations and not enough flutes and cod pieces.
Here they are 10 years before that, playing a version of Thick as a Brick, their album from 1972.
Anderson once said of it:
"Monty Python lampooned the British way of life," says Anderson. "Yet did it in such a way that made us all laugh while celebrating it. To me, that’s what we as a band did on Thick As A Brick. We were spoofing the idea of the concept album, but in a fun way that didn’t totally mock it."
There's only one song it's possible to choose today. Ring Out, Solstice Bells is a track from Jethro Tull's 1977 album Songs from the Wood.
When I was 17 I thought this was the best LP there's ever been or could ever be (with the possible exception of Kate Bush's The Kick Inside.)
We've seen St Louis Union before. They were a Manchester rhythm and blues group and the best thing in the Spencer Davis Group's film The Ghost Goes Gear after the Spencers themselves.
We've also seen their keyboard player before. Dave Tomlinson later reinvented himself as Dave Formula and was a member of Magazine and Visage.
In 1965 St Louis Union won the Melody Maker National Beat Contest, beating The Pink Floyd, as they then were, among many other bands.
Their first single was the Lennon and McCartney song Girl and reached number 11 in the singles chart in 1966.
They had no more hits after that, but Behind the Door, their second single, is interesting too. It was written by Graham Gouldman, who was then writing for the Hollies and later a member of the successful Seventies band 10CC. And the flute on it makes them sound first like Traffic and then like Jethro Tull.
The band split in 1967. Wikipedia says that their lead singer Tony Cassidy went into teaching and became the youngest headteacher in the country.
James Kirkup offers a penetrating character sketch of Boris Johnson: "Yes, he went to Eton and the Bullingdon with them, but he was never truly People Like Us. His family had neither the money nor the breeding that Cameron was born to. Some people even say that the very name 'Boris' came about because the other boys started using it to bully the young Al Johnson: he adopted the name and the persona of Boris in to roll with the punches and fit in."
The government's Increasing Access to Psychological Therapies programme is an abject failure, argues Michael Scott.
Will Lloyd makes a Tory-Anarchist case for abolishing schools.
"Sadly, Jethro Tull brought the day to an end. But what a day it had been. For some, the combination of the Old Peculiar and the hot sunshine had taken its toll, but for most they were just intoxicated with the enjoyment of the day." Forget Glastonbury: John Heywood remembers Nostell Priory, 1982.
Simon Court looks at the art of Samuel Palmer.
We are profoundly attached to Catholic Rome. We hold firmly to all that has been believed and practised by the Church of all time, in her faith, morals, worship, catechetical instruction, priestly formation and her institutions, and codified in the books which appeared before the late Council. Meanwhile, we wait for the true Light of Tradition to dispel the darkness which obscures the sky of eternal Rome.
We pray that the Pope will consecrate Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, for its conversion, and for the return of Modern Rome to Catholic Tradition. ...
If you have just found this site, or have concerns or questions about the loss of Faith in the Church and society, you are welcome to visit St. Anne's and to attend the Tridentine Mass so as to appreciate the mystery and sacredness of the Holy Sacrifice, and the sense of participating at something "other worldly.
