Text: Anne-Marie Forker
Photography: Ian Anderson
What inspired the title of the album “Curious Ruminant”? Great title.
Well, a friend of mine, a retired priest at Wakefield Cathedral in the north of England, when he heard the title track on the day that it was released, he sent me an email saying “What does this title mean? Does it mean that you are a nosey cow?” And I said “No, though possibly I am”, but really, what it’s about is, first of all, ‘curious’ in the sense of having curiosity, and fulfilling that curiosity by learning something. And ‘ruminant’ in the sense not of the three-toed mammal, that chews the cud, sicks it up again and has a second helping – not that. It’s the ruminant in the sense of a contemplative person. Someone who likes to think things through. We have in English the phrase “to chew the cud” meaning that we think things over. And so that’s the nature of, I think, what I tend to do. Particularly these days I like every day to try and learn something that I didn’t know yesterday, and then to think it through for a while to absorb it. And then give it some context within my own life and times. I am a curious ruminant. And the title refers to the general tenor. I think of all the lyrics, they were all written in a fairly short period of two or three weeks, right at the end of May, the beginning of June. And so the thing in common is they have a personal touch, which is not so typical of most Jethro Tull repertoire over the years. I’m more of an objective writer, I write about other people; I write about situations and places. But here, I’m really talking about my own feelings and impressions. Not “heart on sleeve” feelings, like “oh dear, poor me, my boyfriend just left me” like Alanis Morissette or somebody. I’m inclined, really, not to touch upon emotional sadness in that kind of a way, but I’m talking more of ‘feelings’ in terms of more philosophical or spiritual thoughts.
Yes, my next question was actually related to the lyrics being on a more personal level. I very much sense that. The opening line is “I count my life in seconds past”. Which tracks would you say hold the most deep personal significance for you?
Of the tracks on this album?
Yes, yes.
Well, in different ways, I suppose they all do to an extent, but the first two songs quite clearly are much more specifically about me and my life, but in different ways. But then there are other songs that could be viewed as having some political concerns, like “Over Jerusalem”. That’s a very difficult song to write because to touch upon Jerusalem, particularly in the last year and a half, you know, we are talking dangerous territory as a songwriter. And I don’t believe in the simplistic views of right and wrong and one side versus the other. I mean, it’s a much more complex situation. I’ve been to Jerusalem a few times and Israel generally a few times in my life that I’ve been there to donate the money from the concerts to local charities that exist to bring people together as opposed to further divide them and engage in retribution and vengeance. It’s a very tiny difference to make, but I think there are people in Israel who do want to bring together the different cultural and religious backgrounds, and do it in a positive constructive way, usually through the arts and entertainment, through children at school and older children studying music together. It’s a positive step, a small, small step but a positive one. As I say we’ve always got to keep it in context. It’s a bit like the fundraisers I do for churches and Cathedrals at Christmas every year. It’s a tiny thing, you know, it’s such a little tiny thing, it’s not some big grandiose thing, raising millions of pounds. It’s a tiny thing. It’s just doing what I can do to bring people together. Ultimately, it’s not me giving the money, it’s the people who buy the tickets, they’re the ones who are donating to a cause at Christmas at the concerts, to support the fabric of our great Cathedrals and churches, not only in the UK but sometimes in Italy or elsewhere. So, it’s a very small thing, in the greater sense. I mean, the money raised from when I played a Canterbury Cathedral twice, equated with one day of the running costs of Canterbury Cathedral. So, you got to put it in that context. In some other cathedrals, maybe it’s two days or three days running costs, So, it’s a small, but definitely helpful thing to do.
Absolutely helpful. It wouldn’t be there without your influence. It’s because of you.
Yeah, I mean, if it wasn’t me, maybe somebody else would be doing concerts that they would come to, but I know that in most cases people are not that generous. I know that Roger Waters for example when he last played in Israel, because I was there not long afterwards to meet some people from a co-educational school co-educating people of different faiths – The Oasis of Peace is what it’s called – and Roger Waters had done his concert on land that they own, and I said to the organiser “Oh, so did he donate some money from his big concert to your organisation?” and they said “No. The promoter paid some rent,” he said, but he didn’t leave anything. And as you probably are aware, he is one of those who shouted from the rooftops about boycotting Israel, as if it makes one shred of difference to Benjamin Netanyahu whether I play in Israel or not. I mean, of course it wouldn’t register on his radar at all. And so I choose to go if there is a positive side to doing that sort of a thing. And if you can, if there is a small upside as opposed to the obvious negative aspects, it’s my decision to do that. Some people called on me to boycott Israel. I’ll just tell them to mind their own business. Because if they feel so strongly about it, why don’t they donate some tens of thousands of shekels to charities? You know, if you feel such a big deal about it, you go ahead and do it, and donate to the Palestinians if that’s your viewpoint. So, it’s all about scale and intent. And I work within a small scale but with broadly speaking a good intent but it doesn’t make me a hero. It doesn’t make me an enormous benefactor and to a lot of people, it’s entirely unimportant, they’re just there for a good night out.
Yeah. You’re not going to create anything good by isolating one side, you can’t unite people that way. It’s not going to work. It’s just going to cause more discontent. But going back to the album (reviewed here!), is there any track your most proud of and why?
I suppose one of the tracks that is an unlikely track but one that appeals to me is “The Savannah Paddington Green” because it was a song written very quickly. I was walking through that part of London. It just struck me as a sort of an odd place this little green space in the middle of a huge dual carriage way, with a concrete flyover and busy streets and not very nice housing. But it’s a little oasis of calm and tranquillity and I thought – what’s this going to be like in fifty years or a hundred years, in terms of the inevitability of climate change and what it might produce in our urban landscapes? And I went away with this feeling in my head and wrote the song very quickly after that and recorded it pretty much immediately. And when I record things, I don’t like to dwell upon it, you know, I came up with a chord sequence and a bit of a melody and I sang it and I gave myself an hour and a half to do the master vocals and guitar parts and then I did a few more things. Some of the guys in the band came and added their contributions. But I like that way of working very quickly and intuitively and not wasting time, cracking on with it.
Was there any particular track that took the longest to make that was quite difficult to put together? Also, which one was the easiest?
Probably the one that took the longest to make, is the one that was originally done as a demo back in 2007. So you could say that it took twenty-two years to get around to find it – it was actually my son who found a multi-track on an old computer that he was about to destroy or give away and he came across this multi-track and said “I’ve just found this, does this mean anything to you?” Because it had a working title, which in fact became the final title, and I recalled making a demo of a very long piece of music to perform with the Indian classical flautist Hariprasad Chaurasia, with whom we were scheduled to do some concerts in India and in Dubai. And I’d written this piece as a duet very carefully in the key that he played in and as a duet essentially for Western concert flute and the Indian classical bamboo flute. And he didn’t end up wanting to do that for whatever reason. So we ended up playing a traditional Indian Raga when we did the stuff together in our concerts. So it just lay there doing nothing. And I heard it again and I was immediately struck by how much the flute playing, particularly in the Indian bamboo flute, was as good as I was ever going to be playing that instrument. And so I thought, I’m going to finish this and make it into a complete piece. I wrote some lyrics and I re-recorded it, you see that a lot of the flute that was on there was copy and paste sections, and I wanted to every line to be new and fresh. So I re-recorded the flutes and then we added some guitar acoustic guitar, electric guitar, drum, bass, and cajon, a percussion instrument, and I edited it down to a mere sixteen minutes. So it takes its place as the third longest Jethro Tull track ever!
Is that “Drink from the same well”?
Yes, that one.
That is beautiful. As a former flautist myself, although not anywhere near your level, I’ve always wondered, what do you find the most challenging flute solo to play live, if you can pick one?
What is always challenging as you get older is having the lung capacity to deal with long passages of music with a lot of notes in them. I test myself very regularly. Every couple of days I go and play flute and I sing, when I’m not on tour or recording. And I test myself with a particular piece of music, which was always at the limit of what I could do. And I test myself with that from time to time just because I want to be sure that I can still just about do that. And, so far, I can, but it requires conscious thought to really fill my lungs before I begin a very lengthy phrase with a lot of notes in. It also depends to some extent on the flute itself and the embouchure of the particular head joint because with some so-called “free-blowing” head joints you seem to expend rather more air, it tends to go through where with something that has more resistance – it makes a fraction of one percent or one and a half percent difference – you have the sense that your breath will go a little bit further and you can manage an extra quaver on the end of a long phrase as a result. But with the flutes that I play, I would say, the head joints, the embouchure is a kind of a medium one, there’s not a huge resistance but it’s not as free-blowing as some of the ones I used to play, like the Sankyos.
Do you have a Yamaha flute?
Yes, I have a Yamaha flute, which has never been cleaned in about 30 years since actually, it’s black because it’s oxidized so much! And I just keep that lying around in my little house in London, should I feel the need to play something. But it’s the basic student model Yamaha flute that I bought as a backup flute, many, many years ago. I’ve never played it on record. It’s just there but it’s not an important instrument to me. Mostly I play Powell flutes and then I used to play Sankyo for quite a while, but I switched to playing Powell flutes in the 1990s, later 1990s. And I have a platinum flute and a white gold flute. I prefer actually a relatively thin-walled silver flute, partly because it’s light but partly because it has a degree of clear resonance that, because I have to close-mic it with a wireless system live on stage, it’s more practical. It’s just that little bit louder, it has a little bit more reach as an instrument without sounding too shrill. I have a very thin-walled, quite old, like early 80s, Powell flute, an in-line flute, which is not something that’s comfortable for me to play and it has no E-mechanism. So, it’s one that forces to really think quite very carefully whenever you play, mostly, just the note of E in the third octave. But that means, again, it’s a good thing to practise with sometimes because it makes me think more about where my fingers are, makes me think more about my own embouchure and making sure I don’t fluff notes. So it’s quite a good thing occasionally to turn to, but I don’t think I would use it on stage because being very thin-walled, it’s very light in the hands which is good, but it doesn’t have a lot of body to the note. It doesn’t have a lot of warmth to it. So just I’m kind of in between. I have a heavier-walled Conservatory Powell flute which I used to play. That was my main flute. But I just play with a thinner-walled silver flute, mostly on stage these days. I only have one of those. So, I hope usually that it’s going to be in good shape and I choose my moment to send it off for a general cleaning and overhaul when I can do without it for a month or two.
That’s fascinating. I’ve been considering picking up the flute again and trying it out, and I didn’t want to pick up my old student Yamaha flute.
I would just say that, Powell flutes, generally speaking, even if you find a good second hand one, it’s going to be many thousands of pounds and if you buy new one, it’s going to be in today’s money, sixteen grand or whatever. But they have a range of flutes that, they say, are assembled in the USA in the Powell Factory, but with parts made in China, possibly Japan but most likely China. They didn’t want to tell us the truth! But their Sonare range of flutes are actually very good indeed. I’ve heard people being critical of them, but I’ve owned two of them, it is a flute I now carry as a backup flute. And I would say from the intonation, it’s an exact replica. It’s just using parts that are made and shipped over to the USA, to be made and put into the final flute and tested and sent out from the Powell factory in Massachusetts. So, then you’re talking, two and a half thousand pounds for a very good quality student flute, and they make it in a number of configurations. So, If anybody wants to get into the world of Powell flutes than a Sonare flute is a cheap and, in my experience, very good way of getting the Powell scale, which is a very good scale deriving from the Cooper scale from back in the in the ‘70s when Albert Cooper worked with James Galway and others to refine the scale and it’s a scale that is used by most of the American flute makers these days. Anyway, that’s specialised knowledge not of any use to the normal, run of the mill reader of an interview!
Guitarist Jack Clark made his recording debut. How did that come about? He’s done an outstanding job, I thought, with the electric guitar.
Well, in the last three albums, we’ve had three different guitar players. Guitar player Florian Ophale was with us for quite a few years. He got to the end of 2019 and decided to give up live touring because he had completed building his recording studio, and he wanted to spend his time recording and producing other artists and working with his wife, who is a professional photographer, in the studio adjoining, which is a photographic studio. So, he quit in 2019. And his place was taken by a young guitar player that I found on YouTube doing some covers of Jethro Tull music and he effectively joined in February of 2020. Just in time for COVID! And so he didn’t actually end up playing with us live on stage until the latter part of 2021 due to COVID, and then subsequently the fact that he couldn’t travel outside the UK because he was too young to be eligible for vaccination at that point. And so he then was with us until February of last year when he decided that he too didn’t want to carry on with live touring because of all the travel which he was finding increasingly difficult to endure, the flights and being in buses and vans and whatever else, it was some driving him a bit crazy. So he was increasingly unhappy with live touring and retreated back to his bedroom to write and record, and plays occasionally with a band which also features Jack Clark as the second guitar player and second vocalist in the band. So, Jack had already played with us two or three years ago standing in on bass guitar when our bass guitarist was unwell and subsequently standing in playing all the keyboard parts on guitar when our keyboard player was away early last year. So Jack knew us, we knew him and I thought, well, give him the first option to take over as the guitar player in the band and from the first concert onwards, it was quite clear he was very able to handle all of that, including older material and newer material. And so this is his first appearance on record as a member of the band.
What was it like working with Andrew Giddings and James Duncan again?
Well, James hadn’t played drums for a long time because he had a very injurious snowboard accident, some years ago, the result of which he was unable to raise one arm to play cymbals. So he didn’t play drums for a long time and he’s starting to play again, but with the cymbals really low. so he didn’t have to do that [moves arm], as the metal plate in his shoulder wouldn’t allow him full mobility. So, difficult for him. But he played in the studio here and considering he hadn’t played drums actively for many years, it was remarkable – his memory, not only for playing music, but the awareness of where drums are and how to play things rhythmically and so on, was back to a level of proficiency again, within it seemed like a matter of an hour or two, but I guess he did put a bit of practise in the meantime once he know that he’ll be doing those songs. With Andrew Giddings, the keyboard part that he did is the one from the demo. So I just kept what he’d done. So, his part was previously recorded.
And then, lastly, I just wanted to compliment you on your work, you recent, narration work, particularly with Opeth on their new latest album.
Yeah, I keep hearing about this and I’d completely forgotten that I’d done it apart from the singer having sent me an email saying that they were playing in Bristol and do I want to go along to the concert night. I thought, yeah I seemed to recall something that he asked me to do. I really had forgotten all about it because I play from time to time on other people’s records. But the passage of time, it was such that it seems like it must have been more than a year ago and I can vaguely remember he sent me a demo, well, not a demo, but a recording where he had done the parts that he was going to do. And he wanted me to recite them in a more Shakespearean fashion, but also with a bit of growly vocal in one place. So I listened to the way he performs on stage and tried, not to replicate but to slip into that demonic growly voice which certain hard rock and heavy metal bands seem to do.
You did it brilliantly.
I don’t know why they do it, but I wouldn’t want to wake up in the morning next to somebody who sounded like that.
You wouldn’t set it as your alarm clock, that’s for sure. It would be wonderful if you could come to Bristol. I’m going to be at that concert.
I’ve a feeling that I’m not available that day, but I think I said to him I might be able to get to sound check in the afternoon, but I can’t in the evening on that day, whenever it was. I haven’t written it in my diary, but my son is going, I think, to the concert, so he will remind me at the time.
I can’t imagine you’d have the time, but if you enter every wanted to go into narration, I can imagine you on BBC 4 reading, you’ve a fantastic speaking voice as well as obviously, we all know, vocals.
Oddly, I have not really been asked to do anything of great importance. I did once do an advertisement for Gilbey’s Gin and I got paid quite a lot of money, for five words, which I had to recite. I did about ten takes and I said, choose what you want, but all I had to say was “Gilbey’s Gin – Dive right in” and variations on that, and, I thought yeah, well, you know, several thousand pounds worth of money just to say five words, I thought this is easy! But my son-in-law is an actor. He does quite a lot of voiceovers and his big buddy, a sort of friend of ours, too is another voiceover person, Bill Nighy, the actor. And they do lots of voice over things, which they all have to do, and be able a little bit to change the quality and tone of their voice to match the mood. Sometimes it has to be very clear cut, received pronunciation, sometimes got to have a little bit more of a northern twang or some other level of accent that isn’t necessarily quite their own. But yes, it’s something that actors do to pay the Waitrose bill, I suppose.
Thank you so much for your time today, Ian. Take care!
Thank you so much, very nice to talk to you and thank you so much for your time.
Originally published in Norway Rock Magazine #1/2025