Ian Anderson “I swapped Lemmy’s £30,000 guitar for £30 pound flute.”
Ian Anderson, the flamboyant frontman of Jethro Tull demonstrates how he turned the flute into a rock and roll instrument.
In an exclusive clip from Neil McCormick’s Needle Time, Anderson demonstrates how he learned to craft solos from a simple blues, pentatonic scale. His very visceral style, unusual for a flute player, involves almost singing into the mouthpiece. “I would chirrup and burst the notes out to give it a bit more viciousness,” he explains. “I learnt that not from any other flute player but from the tin whistle and the saxophone.”
In a candid and wide ranging interview, Anderson admits that he is not technically a particularly advanced flute player, but argues that he brings an improvisational freedom to the instrument that classically trained players cannot match. “I was certainly not the best flute player in town,” he says of Jethro Tull’s breakthrough in the late Sixties. “I was the loudest flute player in town. That was my sole credential.”
Anderson will be performing the whole of Jethro Tull’s classic 1972 album Thick As A Brick at the Royal Albert Hall on the 30th of June for the first time in 41 years, before embarking on a world tour. Yet he reveals that his choice of flute as instrument back in the 1966 was completely arbitrary. Originally lead guitarist in the blues group that became Tull, Anderson became disheartened when he heard Eric Clapton playing with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. “You just knew this guy was way ahead of everybody else, me included. And also we were hearing rumours of these other gunslinger guitar people like Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Richie Blackmore. I was fumbling around, relatively speaking.”
So he decided to part company with “a rather battered Fender Stratocaster” which he was struggling to keep up payments on, and find another instrument. The only things he could play were “a little harmonica and tin whistle.” He returned his guitar to the music store with £60 credit from his hire purchase agreement, “the shiny flute was hanging on the wall, and there was a Shure Unidyne III microphone, and I said ‘I’ll have those two and here’s the guitar back.’”
Anderson speculates that the guitar would be extremely valuable now. He had acquired it from Lemmy Kilmister, then of Reverend Black And The Rocking Vicars, and later of Hawkwind and Motorhead. “Being an early 60s Fender Strat with some provenance in terms of its previous owners it is probably worth 30 grand today.” Consider the career he has made from his thirty pound flute, Anderson concludes “it turned out to be a pretty fair exchange.”
Neil McCormick’s Needle Time with Ian Anderson is broadcast tonight at 10pm on Vintage TV, Tuesday 18th June and repeated on Saturday 22nd at 7pm.
Watch the preview for this week's Needle Time with Ian Anderson....
This article was originally published in the Daily Telegraph and is reproduced with their permission.
