Jethro Tull Thick As A Brick

Monty Python. It might seem a little odd to mention the influential British comedy troupe as we begin a journey through the story behind the groundbreaking album Thick As A Brick. But Jethro Tull mainman Ian Anderson believes there’s a common thread.

“Monty Python lampooned the British way of life. Yet they did it in such a way that it 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.”

It’s often been said that the seeds for 1972’s Thick As A Brick (the band’s fifth release) were sown when its predecessor, ’71’s Aqualung, was wrongly perceived as a fully-blown conceptual piece. Myth has it that Anderson was angry about this, erm, misconception.

“Not angry, no,” explains the man five decades on. “I was actually mildly wasn’t a concept album, the media still persisted in treating it as such. They seemed to believe the whole record was a major religious story. The truth was that three or four songs were linked by questioning the nature of religion. But the rest were standalone tracks. So, after this whole scenario, I thought, ‘Okay, we’ll not only now do a real concept album, but we’re going to make it the mother of all concept albums!’”