50 years of Aqualung: A Tull-style tribute

A tribute to Jethro Tull's album Aqualung on its 50th anniversary 

By Narendra Kusnur

On first hearing, the lyrics made no sense. “Backward on my bench,” Ian Anderson seemed to sing on rock band Jethro Tull’s Bursting Out album. It was only after a friend insisted that I discovered he was singing “Aqualung my friend” – not that I understood that term either.

This was in 1982, when as a college-goer in New Delhi, I was being exposed to music that would later be called ‘classic rock’. Yes, it was fashionable those days to drop names like Traffic, Santana, Doors and Cream. With Tull, knowing the “Poet and the painter” lines of ‘Thick As A Brick’ or singing ‘Backward On My Bench’ was good enough to prove your elite snobbery. The intellectually deprived bunch danced to ‘Funky Town’.

It took me a few months to get borrowed, assorted and unpaid-for cassettes of Tull albums, including Aqualung, Songs From The Wood, Heavy Horses and Stormwatch. At that point, little did I knew that I would eventually interview Anderson six times - twice in person, thrice on the phone and once over mail, besides being in regular correspondence with him thrice a year. The gentleman that he is, Anderson responds to each mail, often with a slice of his famous wit, a description of his cats and a mention of Indian curry dishes.

All this comes to mind today with the album Aqualung completing 50 years on March 19. Having heard it for close to 38 years, the songs still sound fresh, like I'm tasting the smell. In fact, the only time I skip forward is during a replay of my once-favourite ‘Locomotive Breath’ – though I blame myself for overhearing it myself. Yet, it's a song I have frequently hummed in the shuffling madness of Mumbai rail journeys, imagining the guy next to me with steam breaking down his brow is playing a flute solo.

Over the years, different lines have had different meanings to me. “When I was young and they packed me off to school” from ‘Wind Up’ reminded me of childhood. “Wondrin’ aloud how we feel today” from ‘Wondrin’ Aloud’ was meant for a bright sunny day, a damp gloomy night and anything in between. “Snot is running down his nose” from ‘Aqualung’ and “Your nose feels like an icicle” from 'Up To Me' were for a bad cold, or maybe just bad grooming. And I remember clearing an exam when I went unprepared but kept singing “Do you still remember December's foggy freeze” from 'Aqualung' on a cold winter morning in the dim-m-m and distant past. The line “Brush away the cigarette ash that's falling down your pants” from 'Cheap Day Return' was for the nicotine breaks. Maybe, I'll find new meaning when I’ll be an “old man wandering lonely, taking time the only way he knows”.

There were the instrumental parts too. Martin Barre’s parts made me flash my air guitar, feeling like a dead duck, spitting out pieces of my broken luck, wondrin’ aloud why I could never tune my guitar and play barre chords like him. The flute solo of My God made me try standing on one leg like Anderson, often tripping and almost breaking my jaw, till my neighbours sang “People what have you done?” flashing their half-assed smiles and the book of rules.

When it was released, the British press had described Aqualung as a concept album, probably because three songs (‘My God’, ‘Hymn 43’ and ‘Wind Up’) reflected Anderson’s views against organised religion and the education system. In an interview to this writer three years ago, Anderson had clarified, “Aqualung was not a concept album. Just a collection of songs though there was a connection between two or three of them.” He of course agreed that Thick As A Brick definitely was, and reflected the “surreal and cynical British humour of that time, specially Monty Python.”

So really don't mind if we sit this one out. My word’s but a whisper your deafness a shout. In a year, Thick As A Brick will turn 50. Hopefully, we will “paddle right out of the Covid mess” by then. I’ll spin me back down the years and the days of my youth, and narrate my experience with that album as the flowers bloom like madness in the spring. And if you’ve forgotten by then, remember, you poor old sod, you see, it's only, uh-me.