THICK AS A BRICK
Jethro Tull’s fifth studio album was something of a parody of the 1970s fervour for concept albums and its cover is a spoof, too. Sending up the parochialisms of a classic English newspaper, the album sleeve became The St. Cleve Chronicle & Linwell Advertiser, a 12-page local rag. The newspaper’s reporting team was made up of Tull’s Ian Anderson, bassist Jeffrey Hammond and keyboardist John Evan. It was laid out by Chrysalis’ Roy Eldridge, himself a former journalist. The paper’s front-page splash credits a fictional eight year- old boy, Gerald Bostock, with co-writing the lyrics to the album, and also breaking are local sport reports, a story about a dog soiling actor Robert E Levi’s shoe and several in jokes about the band and their friends. Recording engineer Robin Black, for instance, is depicted as a local roller skating champion. The record company were initially unimpressed by Anderson’s idea, deeming it too expensive. The singer later revealed it had taken longer to make the cover than the album itself, which consists of a single track split into Part 1 and Part 2. “It was very carefully studied,” Anderson told Classic Rock. “I amassed a pile of papers and drew inspiration from the really silly stories that people would write about because there wasn’t anything else to write about. That was part of the fun, and definitely made it a concept album.”