Life’s A Long Song
“I warned the publishers right from the word go that it’s not going to be full of sex and drugs and rock’n’roll, and people vilifying each other or describing the length of their todger,” says Ian Anderson of the new band biog, The Ballad Of Jethro Tull. “We are incredibly boring people.”
But The Ballad Of Jethro Tull is anything but boring. At 224 pages and with many never-before-seen photographs – “we climbed into our attics and delved in our cellars,” Anderson informs us – it’s relatively light on text, but then it’s full of surprising and fascinating nuggets of information that help colour in the history of this most singular of bands.
Anderson’s view is that after 50 years of making music, the time was right to assemble an official Jethro Tull book, and he is happy to expand upon some of the issues that are brought to light. Sometime journalist and author Mark Blake interviewed bandmembers and associates past and presented the results as an oral history – although former guitarist Martin Barre declined to participate and
