Way, way back in 19,
technically 1970,
Jethro Tull was in the Basing Street Studios,
the brand new studios of Island Records,
recording what turned out to
be the Aqualung album.
And we, along with our good friends,
Led Zeppelin,
we were the guinea pigs
for this new studio
because it was just so recently finished
that a lot of the equipment
had never really been tested.
So Zeppelin got wisely,
as it turned out,
the nice, sexy little recording studio
about this size,
which was nice to work in downstairs,
and we got the place
that had been converted
from an old church.
And the ecclesiastical connotations
were entirely coincidental,
but it kind of sounded
like a church
on a bad night
or a bad Sunday.
And so it was kind of difficult to
work with.
And it's really great to be able to do this
now
after all these years
and be able to play some of these songs again
so that you actually really get to hear clearly
all the wrong notes
that we played in the first place,
which will be faithfully recreated tonight.
The thing about Aqualung,
to my mind,
that sort of set the scene
for years afterwards is that it gave Jethro Tull a formula of electric guitar,
flute and the electric pieces
against the acoustic pieces
and that sort of set the
benchmark
for things that happened on album
s after that.
All of those things had importance
within the music of Jethro Tull,
but it really introduced
the acoustic guitar
and that type of song into what we
did.
I think the acoustic music
had appeared on previous albums,
but not in a very fo cused and
self -contained way.
On Aqualung was the first time, really,
that these acoustic songs
had permission to stand up
and be counted as equally important
in terms of the overall scheme
of things.
people think of Aqualung as a, you know, classic rock album,
but in fact, I mean,
there's a lot of acoustic stuff going on,
I a third of it is,
you know, strumming the bits of wood.