Ian Anderson: Thick as Brick was done in a fast and furious period of time, and it was as joke.

By editorial board on June 4, 2023

On March 3rd 1972 Jethro Tull released  "Thick as a Brick".   A concept album that perhaps  marks the qualitative peak of Ian Anderson's band.

“When I wrote Thick As A Brick I tried to approach it in a humorous and satirical way,” Anderson says. “The whole idea happened very quickly. It was done in a fast and furious period of time. I’d just turn up at rehearsal every lunchtime with what I’d written that morning. Then the guys would dutifully grapple with it and we’d try to recap on what we did yesterday and the day before."

"By the end of 10 days we’d rehearsed to a performance level all the elements of Thick As A Brick. And we went in and recorded it, literally in a few days. The album cover actually took us longer than the music itself.”

"I drew upon my own childhood and my own early experiences for ideas for sections within the overall work. But I was also drawing very much on the world of the eight-year-old Gerald Bostock. It was part of the absurdity.”

“It was written very much as I went along, and was a very natural, organically evolving piece of music. There was an almost Monty Pythonesque idea in my head of this pastiche approach to creating this idea – ‘the mother of all concept albums’, as I’ve come to call it. It was presenting such a preposterous notion that an eight-year-old boy had written this saga in some poetry competition.

"Of course, you can then suspend disbelief and just go with it. But there were a lot of countries where they just didn’t get the joke. They thought it was a real story, that this precocious schoolboy had written this stuff and somehow I turned it into an album." (Excerpt from Louder)

The packaging  is among the most ingenious and complex in the entire history of rock: it is essentially the complete reproduction of a parish weekly of the English province (the "St. Cleve Chronicle") .

(excerpt from Rockol)

"Integral" means that the disc it was stuck in a pocket  between page 11 and page 12 of the newspaper, which is in tabloid format . Twelve pages, mind you, entirely written  just like a real newspaper: with articles, information, classified ads, television programs, sports results,

A brilliant  art work, and among other things full of humor ("a spoof, in Monty Python's style"). Ian Anderson said it took more time to write and make the cover than it took to write and record the album.

 

 

 

"When" Aqualung "came out, (tells Ian anderson)  everyone had called it a concept album, and we knew it wasn't true, that it was just a collection of songs that were not related to each other in inspiration and theme. Almost as a joke we decided to release, with the following album, 'the mother of all concept albums': and perhaps we let ourselves be carried away a little. ".

 

"The jury disqualifies "little Milton" after a bitter discussion - The Society for Literary Advancement and Gestation (SLAG) announced last night the decision to disqualify Gerald "little Milton" Bostock, eight, winner of the Award, following the hundreds of protests and threats received after the boy, last Monday, declaimed his epic poem "Thick as a brick" to B.

B.C. Television. The jury, hastily reconvened, took note of the opinion of four eminent child psychiatrists, according to whom the child's mind is seriously unbalanced and his poem is the fruit of "an extremely unhealthy attitude towards life, of God and of the Fatherland ". Doctors have recommended that Bostock undergo psychiatric treatment "without delay". The first prize will now be awarded to the runner-up, Mary Whiteyard (12 years old)"

The long song, "Thick as a brick", is credited, on the label, to Ian Anderson and Gerald Bostock. Gerald "little Milton" Bostock, a character of pure fantasy, was, in the concept of the disc, an eight-year-old child prodigy who had won a competition organized by the Committee for Art and Literature of the Parish of St. Cleve.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson shared a charming unboxing video of sorts in which he previews a new illustrated history of the band, The Ballad of Jethro Tull.

 

 

 

 

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