‘Thick As A Brick’, Jethro Tull’s fifth LP, is a unique album in the rock canon. It consists of one forty-four minute track, originally split into two sides of a vinyl record with a fade-in and fade-out, for practical reasons only. It features a poem, faked up by the band to have been written by a fictitious eight-year-old schoolboy called Gerald Bostock, his winning entry in a poetry competition. The piece, in excess of fourteen-hundred words, was in fact written by Ian Anderson, Tull’s ‘ferociously focused and driven’ [1.] leader. The band created a whole mythology around the poem in the design of the album’s sleeve, which took the form of a newspaper, ‘The St. Cleve Chronicle and Linwell Advertiser’, featuring the lead story ‘Thick As A Brick – Judges Disqualify ‘Little Milton’ in Last Minute Rumpus’, about how ‘The Society For Literary Advancement And Gestation’ (reduced to the acronym ‘SLAG’) disqualified the prize-winning Gerald ‘Little Milton’ Bostock, ‘following hundreds of protests and threats received after the reading of his epic poem’ on BBC Television [1.]
The ‘newspaper’ also includes a plethora of other ‘fake news’ stories, written in such a way and about subject matter which could believably appear in the local press in many areas of England. The whole thing has been justified by the band, and Anderson in particular, as a reaction to the labelling of their music as ‘progressive rock’, and as a tongue-in-cheek take off of the more po-faced side of the progressive rock canon at the time.
The band have since confirmed that the sleeve actually too longer to make than the recording of the album did!
“The concept itself was a hard thing to sell,” recalls Anderson. “But the Brits entered into that willingly and knowingly, because we all lived through the era of surreal British humour, with The Goons and Around The Horne and then Monty Python. The Americans found it more difficult because they found it hard to separate the fiction from the reality, and in Japan they were just plain confounded and didn’t have a clue what was going on. But in terms of success it had a definite onwards and upwards feel about it, although musically it was more demanding and incessant because it was continuous music without convenient places to stop and pause and reconsider. It involved lots of reiteration, lots of reiteration, lots of variation, lots of development of themes in other guises.” [1.]
Guitarist Martin Barre recalls the genesis of the album, talking in 2004:
“I think when started recording ‘Thick As A Brick’, we didn’t know the end result would be a concept album or whatever you’re calling a concept. I think it just started life as another Tull album, and we learnt the music in the way that we learnt music for ‘Aqualung’, ‘Benefit’, other albums, but it developed along the way, mainly because we were splicing all the bits of music together to make it continuous. I don’t think we were ever aware of what direction it was going to end up going in – It was just something that we did on a day-to-day basis as we recorded it. We rehearsed for about a month in Bermondsey and so some sections of the album, mainly the first, I would guess first half of the album maybe, as much as that, was actually rehearsed in Bermondsey.”
[4.]
Ian Anderson’s recollection is much more sure of the premeditated idea for the record:
“It probably came about primarily because the thing that we’d done the year before, which was the ‘Aqualung’ album, had generally been perceived as a concept album, whereas to me it was just a bunch of songs, as I’ve always said, and so the first thing about ‘Thick As A Brick’ was ‘Let’s come up with something which is the mother of all concept albums’ and really was a mind-boggler in terms of, what was then, relatively complex music and also, lyrically was complex, confusing and, above all, a bit of a spoof. It was, quite deliberately, but in a nice way, tongue-in-cheek and meant to send up ourselves, the music critics and the audience perhaps, but not necessarily in that order, but it was meant in a nice way…This was the period of time when ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’ and a very British kind of a humour, which was not terribly well understood by the Japanese or the Americans when we finally went out to perform ‘Thick As A Brick’ in concert, but they sat politely, if a little confused, through the whole thing and came back next time for more, so it can’t have gone too far amiss…But indeed it was a concept album and a concept album in the sense that, beginning with a preposterous idea that it was written, lyrically anyway, by a twelve-year-old boy (Anderson gets the age wrong here – the fictitious Bostock was eight, and allegedly ‘involved’ with a twelve-year-old girl, which is probably where he got confused…) called Gerald Bostock, if memory serves, and even now people will say “Well, Gerald Bostock must be getting on, he must be into his thirties now” – A lot of people, believe it or not, think that it was a real character! I thought we steered a very good line between making it sound vaguely plausible as a concept, and being quite silly, to the extent that most people would get it, and not be offended if they weren’t quite sure and somebody says “C’mon, they’re just putting you on here”…” [4.] Ian Anderson, quoted in the liner notes for the 2012 CD remaster, puts a lot of store in the band’s ‘new’ drummer at the time, Barriemore ‘Barrie’ Barlow:
“I think it’s very much the case that the band, at the time of ‘Thick As A Brick’, was re-energised by the presence of Barrie Barlow, who’d just joined the band in the months preceding that…His drumming, his detail and his energy, both technically speaking and in terms of feel, really did push things on and I think that definitely raised the game for the other guys. I think we have to thank Barrie for bringing that extra little energy level and spirit into the band…Barrie could handle more complex issues, time signatures and detailed cross-rhythms…Also. ‘Thick As A Brick’ is a kind of zenith of Jethro Tull’s era of camaraderie. There was a real social and band kind of feeling at that point and that saw us through a few great years together.” [1.]
The now-familiar, catchy, acoustic guitar riff is what starts off ‘Thick As A Brick’ and becomes a recurring theme throughout.
“Really don’t mind if you sit this one out…”
Ian Anderson’s vocal cues the addition of flute and then the bass and drums, followed by the full band. The life of Gerald Bostock is told in rhymes and riddles, through oblique references and obscurities. Anderson may have, in hindsight, explained the connection with Monty Python and a very British humour, but the album is very definitely Tull and they put their own recognisable stamp on it all the way through:
“Really don’t mind if you sit this one out
My words but a whisper – your deafness a SHOUT.
I may make you feel but I can’t make you think
Your sperm’s in the gutter – your love’s in the sink
So you ride yourselves over the fields
and you make all your animal deals
and your wise men don’t know how it feels to be thick as a brick.” [2.]
Boy becomes man, through puberty and a very British upbringing playing board games while huddled round the fire while the rain hammers down outside?:
“See there! A son is born – and we pronounce him fit to fight.
There are black-heads on his shoulders, and he pees himself in the night.
We’ll make a man of him put him to trade
teach him to play Monopoly and
to sing in the rain.” [2.]
Jeffrey Hammond recalls the space where the band rehearsed the album, in the district of Bermondsey, South-East London, England:
“I just remember being in a basement, a very dank and dirty place, rehearsing. I don’t remember how it evolved.” [4.]
“It was disgusting” agrees Martin Barre, “It was a dreadful rehearsal room…It was sort of miles from anywhere. I remember I had to take Barrie there, we took it in turns, but I remember driving more than Barrie did, and we were always on that dreadful South Circular and we always got there, sort of office hours, the worst journeys, the worst traffic, all these big lorry drivers swearing at you, I was in my little MG, and so, by the time you got there, about an hour and a half after leaving Putney, you were in a foul mood. You then went down into this disgusting,smelly, dark, dirty basement. I remember coffee cups everywhere, it was filthy, it was just a dreadful place…and we sort of shut ourselves away all day learning music, so really something good had to come out of it…” [4.]
“I was thinking about it the other day, cause my biggest memory of learning it was going down to the café for lunch…’Rosie’s Café’, it was, it was down the road in this place near Bermondsey and it was dreadful food, it was sorta pie, chips, mushy peas, pie and custard, but it was served by this gross, huge woman, who had a moustache and a beard, and who’s hygiene was definitely questionable, her apron sort of spattered with blood ‘n’ dirt ‘n’ various other things, and it was always incredibly hot in there, everybody smoked, all the windows were steamed up…I can always picture being in that café, as a part of the rehearsals, but not so musical recollection a recollection at all…” [4.]
Was ‘Thick as a brick’ a new saying in the English language, added by Jethro Tull? Would this be used instead of already familiar colloquialisms for lack of intelligence like ‘thick As two short planks’, ‘thick as mince’ or ‘pig thick’?! It is not clear who is without intelligence here, whether it is Bostock himself, lacking self esteem, the audience, those ruling the land or society itself…
It’s hard to believe that an album with such a pastoral feel and outlook, with so many evocative images of the countryside, could have been conceived in such a metropolitan setting and rehearsed in such squalor! If the photoshoots for the album were representative, there were five very hairy men with checked flat caps and raincoats hanging out for days in a basement and breaking for sustenance at a local ‘greasy spoon’ in an urban borough in South-East London, the UK’s largest metropolis…Despite this, for all his talk about ‘It was a concept album’ and a spoof and playing down the actual talent involved in creating this recording, Ian Anderson doesn’t half create some wonderful poetic phrases and imagery, put to heart-wrenching melodies with more than a hint of nostalgia and times-gone-by:
“The Poet and the painter casting shadows on the water
as the sun plays on the infantry returning from the sea.
The do-er and the thinker: no allowance for the other
as the failing light illuminates the mercenary’s creed.
The home fire burning: the kettle almost boiling
but the master of the house is far away.
The horses stamping – their warm breath clouding
in the sharp and frosty morning of the day.
And the poet lifts his pen while the soldier sheaths his sword.” [2.]
But what’s this? Has Gerald got into trouble with the law?! There is an undertone of angst and questioning of authority in the writing, probably coming from Anderson himself who was somewhat rebellious, leaving school and home in his teens to embark on a career in rock’n’roll and even within the musical fraternity an outspoken non-conformist:
“LATER.
I’ve come down from the upper class to mend your rotten ways.
My father was a man-of-power whom everyone obeyed.
So come on all you criminals!
I’ve got to put you straight just like I did with my old man
twenty years too late.
Your bread and water’s going cold.
Your hair is too short and neat.
I’ll judge you all and make damn sure that no-one judges me.” [2.]
And there’s no way that anyone who’s not from Britain, or of ‘a certain generation’, could make head nor tail of these references:
“So! Where the hell was Biggles when you needed him last Saturday?
And where were all the sportsmen who always pulled you though?
They’re all resting down in Cornwall
writing up their memoirs for a paper-back edition
of the Boy Scout Manual.” [2.]
Anderson has said may be elements of his own background in there – emotions, feelings, schooldays and other experiences – but that he tries not to make his lyrics too autobiographical. The passages are expressions of how a child may view the world, with streams of consciousness and veiled references to events and life at the time. The ‘poem’ goes from descriptions and nods to everyday life in the British Isles to a timeless, ageless lyrical fantasy, backed as always by the band’s musical virtuosity and Anderson’s quality writing:
“Do you believe in the day? Do you? Believe in the day!
The Dawn Creation of the Kings has begun.
Soft Venus (lonely maiden) brings the ageless one.
Do you believe in the day?
The fading hero has returned to the night – and fully pregnant with the day,
wise men endorse the poet’s sight.
Do you believe in the day? Do you? Believe in the day!” [2.]
In a 1972 interview on Australian TV, a very hairy Anderson, resplendent in black leather jacket and railwayman’s cap, smoking a cigarette, espouses a disdain for the drug culture and promotes lucidity in life. He goes on to emphasise the importance of awareness of your surroundings and the fact that he writes about what he experiences. Anderson also points to his dislike of repetition in music (although acknowledging that there is some on ‘Thick As A Brick’, for good reason), from the point of view of not making the same album twice, and that every year should bring something new.
Listening to the LP, you get no inkling of this, but Ian Anderson describes how much pressure the band were under to deliver, some of it apparently self-inflicted:
“Maybe rather foolishly, we had a finite period of time to record all of this, I mean to write, rehearse and record all of it and, foolishly I think we’d booked a rehearsal studio and the recording studio couple of weeks later, so everything just had to go to a timetable and it would begin usually with me waking up in the morning in North London, having maybe about two or three hours to feverishly attempt to write some music by late morning when I would jump in a cab or the tube or whatever and rush down to the Rolling Stones’ rehearsal studio, in Bermondsey I think it was, where I then pretended that this was music I’d written weeks before…and we ran through it with the band and they would put their ideas into it and their thoughts into it and we would develop that, alongside the music we had rehearsed the day before and the day before that, so it built up sequentially, day-by-day. It started at the beginning and every day we added another bit of music and sometimes it would maybe reprise one of the earlier ideas in some way, so we’d go back and kinda re-work an earlier thought and, basically by the end of I think about two weeks, we had the whole thing rehearsed beginning to end, in the way that we were actually going to record it, with all the arrangements in place and off we went to the studio and it was done…from memory perhaps in about eight to ten days of recording, which was really quite quick, but we did have it all rehearsed as a band, so we all knew our parts theoretically…” [4.]
Bass player Jeffrey Hammond agrees that the approach brought success:
“I think that went very well, I mean some of them were fist takes, quite a few of them weren’t they…some sections near the beginning, I remember the backing tracks going very well.”
As does guitarist Martin Barre…
“Yeah, I think we tried to make it spontaneous…sort of a working day, we’d arrive sort of eleven, twelve o’clock and then tune up and, that was it, there was no sort of messing about, we worked pretty hard…”
How Barre could think that ‘a working day’ would start at ‘11/12 o’clock’ we will never know – Let’s put that down to rock star syndrome many years later!
And so it comes to a close, the final reprise of the initial refrain, and the listener is already sad that it’s coming to an end…Is this a metaphorical progression for Bostock from making ends meet to arriving at a comfortable middle-class destination? It’s an English summer, heady, insects everywhere and fields ripe with golden corn, we’re coming over the crest of a ridge with friends and there’s open countryside ahead, following a ‘right of way’ down to a woodland and a country pub where folks are sipping on cold drinks and enjoying the last rays of the day:
“So you ride yourselves over the fields and
you make all your animal deals and
your wise men don’t know how it feels to be thick…as a brick.” [2.]
In 2012, ‘Thick As A Brick 2’ was released as a solo album, Anderson saying that he wanted to imagine what Gerald Bostock might be doing and thinking fifty years on. None of the musicians on the recording of the original featured on this reprise.
Six years later, in 2018, Jethro Tull celebrated fifty years from their first album ‘This Was’, released in 1968. The band were named after 18th century English agricultural pioneer Jethro Tull who was instrumental in the British agricultural revolution and have worn Ian Anderson’s interest in the pastoral past of the agricultural landscape on their proverbial sleeve ever since. From seventies songs like ‘Heavy Horses’, mourning the passing of a bygone era and later songs about industrialisation like ‘Farm On The Freeway’, their later comment on the march of ‘progress’, the change from pastoral landscapes to urban sprawl, Tull have maintained agriculture as one of their main themes.
Formed in Luton (or Blackpool, depending on what you read), England in 1967, and originally a blues band, they recorded three albums, ‘This Was’ (1968), ‘Stand Up’ (1969) and ‘Benefit’ (1970) before ‘breaking through’ commercially with their ‘Aqualung’ album in 1971. It was certainly an unlikely album to act as a catalyst for a rise to the top, given the title track’s subject of a withered, long-haired ‘down-and’out’, sitting on a park bench, smoking a ‘dogend’ and ‘eyeing little girls with bad intent…”.
‘Consummate blues guitarist’ (Anderson’s words) Mick Abrahams was the original Tull guitarist, appearing on their debut album only and helping the band make their name by performing, amongst other venues, in the Marquee club in London. Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi also famously joined Tull briefly, for one gig only in fact, The Rolling Stones’ Rock’n’Roll Circus in 1968 and notes that his band mates in ‘Earth’ weren’t happy – He went back to them and they “became quite successful!” (as Black Sabbath!). “He really inspired me”, says Iommi about Ian Anderson (and some may not know that Iommi is a fellow flute player!).
Although Tull started life as a blues band, Ian Anderson has said that this was because it was the prevailing club music of the time, and he does not understand the adoption of what was black American music by Caucasians, to the extreme of faking a vocal accent as well as the emotion and circumstances which created the genre. He was much more comfortable with the direction the band took, forging their own individual sound.
Although the Tull stable has featured a somewhat ‘revolving door’ of musicians since their early days, the line-up established on ‘Thick As A Brick’ lasted for a few years in the early to mid seventies:
Ian Anderson – vocals, acoustic guitar, flute, violin, trumpet, saxophone
Martin Barre – electric guitar, lute
John Evan – piano, organ, harpsichord
Jeffrey Hammond (as “Jeffrey Hammond-Hammond”) – bass guitar, spoken word
Barriemore Barlow – drums, percussion, timpani
Hammond was replaced by John Glascock on bass but the other musicians remained the ‘core’ of the band, both on record and live, until the late seventies.
One highlight of the Tull back catalogue is their brilliant 1978 double live LP ‘Bursting Out’, with multi-lingual introduction by the famous Claude Nobs, founder of the Montreaux jazz festival: (in Swiss German) “Gueten Abig mitenand, und herzlich willkommen in der Festhalle Bern!” (in Italian) “Benvenuto Italia!” (in French) “Bonsoir. Ce soir, j’ai le plaisir d’accueillir des amis de longue date” (in English) “Good evening, sit back, relax, and make yourselves comfortable to enjoy an evening with Jethro Tull!”
Ian Anderson has continued to front the band to date, in distinctive white shirt and dark waistcoat, still standing on one leg in trademark flute-playing pose, obviously not “Too old to rock’n’roll” and still “too young to die”?!
‘Thick As A Brick’
Released: 3rd March 1972
Label: Chrysalis
Production – Ian Anderson, Terry Ellis
Recorded – Morgan Studios, London, August and November 1971
Art direction – Roy Eldridge
‘Thick As A Brick’ tracklisting:
Thick As A Brick (Part 1)
Thick As A Brick (Part 2)
References and quotes:
1. ‘Thick As A Brick’ – 2012 CD re-master sleeve notes
2. Collecting Jethro Tull – The complete Jethro Tull archive for fans and collectors: http://www.collecting-tull.com/Albums/Lyrics/ThickAsABrick.html
3. http://jethrotull.com/discography/
4. Interview with Ian Anderson, Martin Barre and Jeffrey Hammond about ‘Thick As A Brick’, 2004 https://youtu.be/WPsl77Czuw4
Lyrics and music:
1. Thick As A Brick’ – 2012 CD re-master sleeve notes
2. ‘Collecting Jethro Tull – The complete Jethro Tull archive for fans and collectors: http://www.collecting-tull.com/Albums/Lyrics/ThickAsABrick.html
Photographs:
Thick As A Brick’ – 2012 CD re-master sleeve notes
Eddie's Rock Music A-Z 