Jethro Tull’s Ian anderson is heading to Australia for a tour playing the hits that made him and the band famous. So there’s no confusion the tour is dubbed “The Best of Jethro Tull with Ian Anderson”. Sean Sennett chatted to Anderson at his home in the UK about the tour, his new albums and the hardships of a ‘full’ passport.

TOM: When did you first come to Australia?

Ian: It was 1972 and we played the album Thick as a Brick all the way through. I thought it was appropriate this year when we come back to Australia and New Zealand we would do a recap on that original Thick as a Brick. It features heavily in the selection of music we’re playing in the final days of December.

TOM: How is it going back and doing Thick as a Brick 2? Did it feel intimidating, especially after that?

Ian: We always played little snippets of Thick as a Brick in the repertoire over the years. It’s commonly featured in the set list, but to play the whole thing top to tail as it was originally recorded is something that we only did a few times back in ’72. So I would say it wasn’t particularly difficult for me. There were a couple of guitar chords I had to really think about what is this inversion, these are kind of weird inversions I had to work hard to sort of decipher what it is that I recorded. That held me up for a few minutes in a couple of places, but otherwise it didn’t take very long for me to learn it all again.

Of course, the other members of the band, a few of whom weren’t born at that point, were faced with a bigger task. For them there was a lot more analysis and careful writing down of all the original parts, and learning to play them. But they’re all accomplished musicians and I dare say they found it somewhat easier to play than their predecessors did at the time they recorded it.

TOM: I was curious about your song writing process now as opposed to when you started out. Can you talk me through that? Do you get a germ of an idea and work on it meticulously for days, or do things tend to write themselves quickly?

Ian: I think they’ve always come fairly quickly, but the emphasis has shifted slightly over the years, in the sense that to begin with, like many people writing lyrics, I was possibly a little intimidated or embarrassed to put words and thoughts on paper. They were not very adventurous. They tended to talk about very basic, stereotypical emotions.

But that was just at the beginning. By the time I got to the second album, I think my song writing was beginning to get a little more involved. But it probably came to fruition in the fourth year, the year of “Aqualung.” I was writing about topics that were not just how do I feel today or on the subject of relationships. They were topics that were much more observational or more emotional in the sense of being about issues like homelessness, or organised religion and child prostitution. If you’re going to do that stuff, you’ve got to get the bit between your teeth and be bold enough to put it on paper.

I probably had in my fourth year the courage to do that. These days, it just comes naturally because I think I’ve got reasonably good at being a writer and using the devices that writers use to draw people in with a bit of whimsy, a bit of humour, a bit of vernacular, a bit of heavyweight stuff. And you present it in a way that you hope will be invitational to a listener, and draw them into it with curiosity, and not preaching at them, or telling them what they should believe or think. I’m just saying think.

TOM: When you started the band and started your professional music career, there was a lot of great music being made. Did you sort of feel you were riding the Zeitgeist at that time?

Ian: I think the feeling was very competitive with most bands. You always had that feeling from growing up that it was a battle to get a gig. It was a battle to keep the gig, and play there again. It was a battle to get on a festival. You were competing against your peers at that time.

If you were the opening act for Led Zeppelin I mean you didn’t humbly go on and know your place. You went out to try and give a 35-minute good account of yourself, and make yourself a hard act for the Zeps to follow. Once or twice we probably managed to do that on a tour, but the point being it was competitive. You might feel a certain peer group kinship with your fellow musicians, but I’m sure they do in the locker room at Wimbledon before a final tournament. Maybe not before, but probably after, when the job is done and losers have to pat the victor on the back and say good show.

TOM: A song like “Living in the Past,” how did that come about? How was it written?

Ian: My manager, Terry Ellis said — if I’m correct, it was a holiday somewhere on the outskirts of Boston, where we were staying. My manager Terry said, “We’re away from England for 13 weeks on this first sparse US tour. We need something to keep the pot boiling. Could you quickly whip upstairs to your room and write a hit single we could record next week in New York, and send it back to the UK and get it released, to keep the name of the band before the small coterie of emerging fans happy?”

I said to humour him, “Sure, just give me an hour. I’ll be back.” So I went upstairs and decided to write the most uncommercial, three and a half minute song I could muster, from the title “Living in the Past.” It was hardly trendy and contemporary, and it was in 5/4 time, which of course was commercially a no-no because you couldn’t really dance to it, unless you had two and a half legs.

In spite of the fact that many rock stars were reputed to have two and a half legs, if the caster/plaster girls with Jimi Hendrix and others, if anything to go by. But the task was duly executed. We recorded it in New York, and I think I overdubbed the vocals and did the mixing in San Francisco a couple of weeks later.

Against all odds, this slightly out-of-time and out-of-tempo tract did become a top-10 hit in the UK. And a couple of years later was re-released for the American market, and became a bit of a hit there too. I think to my pretty certain knowledge it was the second and probably the last time that a tune in 5/4 time signature would make it into the top-10 of the charts. The first of course being Dave Brubeck’s famous “Take Five.”

To see if I could repeat the trick, Dave Brubeck’s second attempt much less successful than the first was a piece called “Unsquare Dance” which was in 7/8. I decided to give that a crack in 1976 with a song called “Ring Out Solstice Bells.” And rather like Dave Brubeck, it was less successful than the first one. It only made the top-20, not the top-10.

It was sort of one of those challenges. You’re trying to prove that you can make some unconventional ideas still work. it’s a bit of bloody  arrogance and a bit of showing off. But it’s rather rewarding when you can leave behind you a piece of music which doesn’t fit the usual regimented prerequisite of a pop song, other than being relatively short, which it has to be to get radio play.

TOM: With the new record, Homo Erraticus, what was the jumping off point for that? Did you have a lot of songs and cull it down to the final running order, or do you sort of start with one and add, brick by brick?

Ian: Rather in the same way as I think the other more conceptual pieces, like the original Thick as a Brick, or Too Old to Rock ‘n’ Roll: Too Young to Die! These things were writing as a concept and once you’ve got all the ideas and the general subject material, maybe some of the titles, you’ve got it all on paper, then you sit down to write it. You sit down to actual tackle it bit by bit, and build upon that sketch that you’ve outlined in the first place. That was how it was done. And it was done, for me rather importantly, by having a deadline to follow, and a definite starting point and finishing point.

I knew in the early part of last year that if I started at 9 a.m. on January the 1st, 2013, that I would want to try and complete it by the end of the month, which I did, in March, when I was away for a week’s holiday I made the demos in a hotel room in Barbados, and sent the demos and all the lyrics and chord sheets and stuff to the band, knowing we wouldn’t be recording it until December. But at least they had it on their laptop computers for nine months or eight months before they had to turn their attention to writing out all the elements, and preparing their own ideas for what they would play to join the dots together.

And so we went into rehearsal all able to play it through immediately, in a sketchy outline form. And then the finer points of the arrangements, the tuning of everything in the sense of making sure peoples’ parts are very complementary, that you shift the emphasis here and there from one instrument to another. And above all, keep it all very playable live, by not getting into too many overdubs and complexities.

Then we had an album that was delivered absolutely to the day on schedule, which was a couple of weeks before Christmas, couple of weeks after Christmas, and we delivered it on the 15th of January ready for mixing and mastering, which took another 10 days or so to get that process done. It was completely on schedule because it had to be, to meet the release date, which had been decided in November.

That’s what you have to do if you’re a professional musician; you’ve got some deadlines. And you can goof off and hang around a studio waiting for inspiration to strike, but it’s not a very productive way of conducting your life, especially when you get as old as I am. Life may not offer you second chances. You need to crack on with it, and when you feel you’re energised and committed to doing a project, then you’ve really got to get a lot of energy and focus going to make sure it all goes to the plan, or you go off piece, as you inevitably do here and there.

At least it’s in a controlled experiment and you don’t try and sky on the rocky bits, like poor old Michael Schumacher. You know you’re free to kind of go into places that are a little more experimental, a bit more taking a chance, but you don’t get foolhardy. You don’t waste time. You don’t risk an accident, because you’ve got to every day probably get four minutes of real-time recording done.

TOM: I guess it’s interesting, people have a very romantic idea of an artist’s life, waiting for inspiration to strike, and you record when you’re in the mood. I guess like a lot of those classic records, they’ve been made under the pump like you’ve said before. You’ve got one hour to write a hit.

Ian: I’m sure I remember reading that in a couple of cases, one was with U2 I think when Bono had failed to write any lyrics, and the rest of the band had completed all the backing tracks, and they were getting fairly annoyed that he was just going la-la-la through the songs, and hadn’t actually written the lyrics yet. There was obviously a lot of pressure on Bono to come up with stuff.

Same thing with Peter Gabriel, on a recording of an early Genesis album. They locked him in a barn because he’d not written the lyrics. They locked him in there and said don’t come out until you’ve got the lyrics done.

There will be pressure from a band when there is more of that cooperative spirit and the singer is perhaps being a little — understandably nervous to commit himself with lyrics, and will make excuses like it’s hard to write the lyrics until I’ve heard the music, and I kind of know where the emotional drive is, and so on.

But in reality, it’s often the other way around to me. I prefer to get the song titles and lyrics done either before writing the music or it becomes an almost simultaneous process, where you’ve got a line of lyrics; immediately it suggests rhythm, immediately will suggest some cadence. And you’re halfway towards a melody when you’ve written the first line, on a good day.

TOM: What’s the difference for you working under the banner of Ian Anderson versus working under the banner of the band? Is it a different metal approach?

Ian: I’m just in two places on the supermarket shelf, really. It’s two brand identities, once perhaps accepted in a more historical sense. One accepted maybe in my twilight years, that I’d like people to know my own name, rather than calling me Jethro or Mr. Tull. If you open the boxes of Corn Flakes, it’s the same old Corn Flakes inside, whether I’m calling it Jethro Tull or Ian Anderson.

Jethro Tull is a band. It’s 28 different musicians plus me. That’s obviously a huge family of people who’ve changed over the years, and I’m very honoured to work with all of them. But I’m the guy who writes the songs and produces the records and manages the band. On some days I’m the travel agent, and I book their airplane flights.

TOM: How many times have you been down here now?

Ian: I think it’s possibly five, I think.

TOM: That’s a few stamps on the passport.

Ian: There’s a few stamps in a few passports, because my passports don’t last very long. They get full of visas when these really annoying immigration officials insist on starting a blank page, just to give you some tiny little entry stamp in some country that half the world’s never heard of. Of course, I’m not referring to Australia here, but I do get annoyed when they use up — obviously, if you’ve got a proper visa, like you need in Australia, the USA, Russia, or India, you’ve got to have not only a full blank page but a blank facing page as well for the accompanying stamps.

When somebody goes and ruins two pages of your passport by insisting on a fresh page for their tiny little stamp to go wherever, that’s really annoying. It uses up passports at a fearful rate, and so I’m always having to reapply every two or three years for a new passport. And it’s such a tedious business, as you probably know.

Ian Anderson plays the Best of Jethro Tull  at the Sydney Opera House (Thursday and Friday, December 11 & 12),  Brisbane’s QPAC Concert Hall (December 13) and Melbourne’s Palais Theatre (December 15).