IAN ANDERSON

8314 Boxed MADFISH

Thick as a 10-LP box set.

Given that the dominant characteristic of Jethro Tull for the last 56 years has been shaped and sustained by Ian Anderson’s musical vision, the need for a solo career always seemed moot. While that’s especially true of his later works, where Anderson the solo artist and Jethro Tull are indistinguishable, that’s not quite the case when looking at his earlier solo albums. Handily, they’re all collected in 8314 Boxed, a comprehensive and lavishly-appointed vinyl box set.

Walk Into Light, from 1983, bristles with the latest music technology. Serviceable songs are rendered in a glassy production of sequencer bass, programmed drums and period-dating keyboards from future Tull side-man PeterJohn Vettese. In trying too hard to create a sonic environment that’s so different from his usual habitue, Anderson himself feels a somewhat marginal presence.

"A complementary body of work to Anderson’s day job."

Not so with 1995’s Divinities: Twelve Dances With God, 2000’s The Secret Language Of Birds and 2003’s Rupi’s Dance, where his admirable skill sets stand as the very foundation of each album. With all three making their vinyl debut here, collectively they add up to a vibrant, kaleidoscopic mix. The former explores comparative religions through longformat orchestral suites thanks to more than a little help from Tull stalwart Andrew Giddings, The Secret Language Of Birds feels like it could easily stand as a sunny Tull unplugged album, and the latter takes a polyglot approach to songwriting that occasionally feels as though Anderson is addressing a personal challenge to find the most wilfully obscure subject matter with which to turn into a song.

That sense of pushing himself as a creative force certainly applies to such as 2012’s rather bold Thick As A Brick 2 and 2014’s criminally underrated Homo Erraticus. By penning a sequel to Tull’s original 1972 opus –and releasing it under his own name –Anderson risks being judged in comparison. Yet TAAB2’s nimble and sharp-witted writing, backed by what was then the full Tull lineup, stands up rather well in its own right. Not quite done with his poetic alter-ego, Gerald Bostock turns up again in Homo Erraticus. Densely layered in terms of conceptual and musical content, it’s an album that repays close listening.

Designed to draw in the undecided Tull completist, the final LP, Roaming In The Gloaming, offers a selection of previously unreleased live recordings captured between 19952007. It’s a charming review of material that deserves to have the spotlight directed upon it, completing a package whose overall weight makes 8314 Boxed feel like a substantial and complementary body of work to Anderson’s day job.

SID SMITH

CURVED AIR

The Rarities Series SPIRIT OF UNICORN MUSIC

Six-disc spotlight on the prog veterans’ recent years.

Always shapeshifting, London’s Curved Air were thrilling exponents of the thenburgeoning rock/ classical crossover on early LPs such as Air Conditioning and Second Album. As respective former students of The Royal Academy Of Music and Royal College Of Music, keyboardist Francis Monkman and violinist Darryl Way were well placed to do so, but Curved Air also had a not-so-secret weapon in Sonja Kristina, a former actress, folk singer and Playboy Club croupier who brought a wonderful musical theatre sensibility to songs such as Jumbo – and asensuous charisma to the band’s gigs.

Way and Kristina are the original lineup’s only surviving members, and Kristina still fronts an incarnation of Curved Air today, but this sprawling, sixCD set taps different eras of the band’s history, some of them vital, some of them not so much. As Prog editor Jerry Ewing writes in his detailed sleeve notes, there are basically two Curved Air experiences on offer here: jam band or practitioners of exquisitely-arranged songs. The first disc, Tapestry Of Propositions, packs 16 different live improvs on the same rapid-fire riff, and is probably only for completists, but disc four’s document of the line-up that made the underrated Phantasmagoria playing live in Germersheim,