Jethro TullThick As A Brick
Python, pipes and The Simpsons. They all owe something to Jethro Tull’s Thick As A Brick, “the mother of all concept albums” according to Ian Anderson. In an article from Prog issue 1, we looked at how it even saw the creation of Derek Smalls long before Spinal Tap.
Words: Malcolm Dome
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.
Jethro Tull’s TAAB was a concept ‘spoof’, complete with fake newspaper design.
“Not angry, no,” explains the man five decades on. “I was actually mildly irritated and wryly amused. However much I insisted that Aqualung 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!’”