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There are rock bands…and then there's Jethro Tull. Led for over thirty years by an inimitable flutist-singer-songwriter, this band ascended to fame with a long string of hits, several dramatic comebacks, and even a 1988 Grammy Award. Refusing to duplicate themselves, a constant core the band has remained even as their sound has undergone a number of transformations. And their reach is wider than you think. In 2003 alone, rock bands like Coldplay, Radiohead and Blur made pretty good radio singles, with the influences of Jethro Tull running prominent throughout their music: Metallica made a record in which they borrowed a dozen ideas (which they don't understand even slightly) from Tull - and the list goes on. If you've never really been a fan of theirs, now's the time to become one…for this is where it all began…
1963-1967:
Tull began (more or less) as a group called The Blades (named after the club in the James Bond books), making their first public appearance in Blackpool, England's Holy Family Youth Club in late 1963. The band (all teenagers, averaging about fifteen years old) was composed of Ian Anderson (Guitar), Michael Stephens (Guitar), Jeffrey Hammond (Bass) and John Evans (Drums). Their fee for performing that evening was 2 pounds.
By 1966, their name had been changed to The John Evan Band (allegedly at the insistence of Evans' mother, who bought the group's van for them), and John Evans switched from drums to keyboards and "lost" the 's' from his last name (unofficially) because Jeffrey Hammond thought, "'John Evan Band' sounded better". Most of 1966-67 was spent performing in clubs (prestigious and non) in northern England, sometimes under the alternate name The John Evan Smash. Also by this time, Ian Anderson's talents as a songwriter were beginning to emerge and the band built up a catalogue of self-written songs. They appeared on a regional TV program in 1967 and recorded some demos for an independent producer named Derek Lawrence with intent to release a single. However, despite this relative fame, the band was unable to break into the recording industry professionally.
Over the next few months, the band changed names frequently (including such titles as Navy Blue and Ian Henderson's Bag O'Blues), since many "big" club owners were not sufficiently impressed with them to want them back, and the only way to get re-booked was to pretend to be someone new every week by changing their name. Anderson once joked, "The only way we ever knew who we were supposed to be, because our agent never told us, was by looking at the billboard outside the club, and whatever groups were playing, whichever we hadn't heard of before, we assumed that must be us”. Anderson also claims that "Jethro Tull", the name of the 18th century English agriculturist who had invented the seed drill, stuck because that was the name they had been using when they were first invited back to a club (this club, in fact was London's famous Marquee Club).
1968-1971:
Finally, in February 1968, producer Derek Lawrence did release a single by the band, an Anderson/Cornick-written piece entitled Aeroplane (actually a song recorded by the John Evan Band, remixed for the release) with a Mick Abraham's penned tune, Sunshine Day, as the B-side. Lawrence apparently wanted to re-name the band Candy Coloured Rain, but they stuck with Jethro Tull, possibly with some support from Chrysalis. The band's first single was released by MGM, with the band mis-credited as Jethro "Toe," and was basically ignored by the public.
You can read the rest of our feature on Jethro Tull in the January 2004 issue of The Record Music Magazine available at your local newsagent.
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