Fire engulfed Ian Anderson house caused a lot damages and nobody survived
When I last interviewed Ian Anderson, leader of multimillion-selling prog rockers Jethro Tull, in 1993, he told me that 2000 would be a good time to hang up his flute. “I think I was confusing myself with British Airways pilots who, when they turn 65, are out,” he counters today. “If you’re a professional tennis player and fully vaccinated, you might manage to play on until you’re in your late 30s. But those of us in arts and entertainment get to die with our boots on, like John Wayne in a black-and-white western.”
Appraising Anderson’s face on my laptop screen, I could easily knock a decade off his 74 years, but it’s still hard to reconcile this loquacious, informed analyser of politics and history with the wild hippy dervish he was circa 1970, famous for playing his flute on one leg. His troll-like hair vanished long ago, but that passage of time is “both romantic and encouraging, because it means we can keep on paying our grandchildren’s school fees in our old age. There are others older than me who are still doing their stuff. Mick Jagger’s trousers keep going up and down, so all’s well with the world.”
And indeed it is for fans of Jethro Tull, who will have wondered if they’d ever get another studio album – the previous one was in 2003, and that was a Christmas album (although done in puckish Anderson style). New LP The Zealot Gene originated in early 2017 with a list Anderson made of primal emotions: “Bad stuff like anger, jealousy, retribution, then good stuff like love, compassion, loyalty,” he says. All the tracks draw on biblical texts Anderson then Googled to support the record’s anti-extremism theme; one song skewers Judas Iscariot, the disciple who kissed Jesus in Gethsemane to expose him to his enemies: “How does it feel to point the stabbing finger / with perfidious kiss from those deceiving lips?”
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