New I.A. Interview

[Herbert]

To jam -- improvise -- an interview with Ian Anderson, who leads that typically quirky rock band called Jethro Tull, is as easy as trying to improvise a new cricket batting shot against Shoaib Akhtar.

For one, rock music's famous flute player sends you a pre-interview All Too Frequently Asked Questions list, with long answers, that cover all your 'licks' -– pet musical phrases, here meant to mean standard questions.

The ATFAQ list includes regular questions like his take on music of the new millennium ('Since the mid-seventies, the development has been more technological rather than musical'), if he feels bored of playing the same songs every night after so many years ('If they were not decent songs, then I certainly would'), how long he plans to carry on as a musician ('As long as it remains a challenge and my health permits.'), the secret of Tull's longevity ('The loyalty of our fans keeps us in work and pocket money.')

It also includes some 'what you would classify as different' questions like: If you could choose the words for your epitaph, what would they be? ("'Thank you and goodnight'. Or perhaps, 'Any chance of a wake-up call?' I think that probably covers it.")

So, Features Editor and talented guitarist Sumit Bhattacharya was stricken with a severe case of journalistic stage fright when he got the opportunity to speak to Anderson over the phone from Cologne on Monday afternoon.

The 58-year-old musical maverick is in Germany to do a television show called, wait for it, the Unlimited Charts Show.

"I must confess when I was first asked to do this I said I don't think that's quite what I should be doing," Anderson begins, but "apparently they have an edition this month devoted to the more rock side of things." And as Jethro Tull have been a big hit in Germany, the band is going to play a song on the show.

"As television shows always are, an awful lot of waiting around and sitting around just for three minutes of musical performance. Not my idea of fun, but there you go, it's part of the job," Anderson adds with signature matter-of-factness.

On the eve of Jethro Tull's India tour (they play in Mumbai on January 31 and February 1 and in Bangalore on February 3) this is the first of a two-part interview where the legendary rock musician talks about life, the universe and everything, including Chicken Tikka Masala.

It's an honour to be speaking to you.

Thank you very much. Nice talking to you too.

It's going to be your third time in India. What's new?

Third time in India to play music professionally, but probably my 10th time in India to visit. Because I have been to India quite a few times as a civilian, on vacation with my wife. In fact, once even before I got married. I made it as far as New Delhi with a girlfriend. But she got sick about 12 hours after we arrived and was not having a good time. So we abandoned the rest of our vacation and headed back to the UK. Otherwise I've always had a pretty good time in India.

I did get ill once. I can understand what it's like when foreigners come over and they get a nasty bug they picked up -– usually on the airplane. It works the same for you guys. You come over to England and go to a pub and have Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding and maybe your tummies aren't up to it either!

Although if you come to England and want to enjoy England's traditional, most-eaten family dinner, then the chances are that you'll actually be eating Indian food -– well actually you'll be eating Bangladeshi food. There are 10,000 so-called Indian restaurants in the UK, mostly run by Bangladeshi families as opposed to Indians, but they're mostly called Indian restaurants.

Chances are if you ask for our national dish, you will be given a curious mixture of Chikken Tikka Masala -– apparently Britain's favourite Indian meal, but, of course, we know it's a bit of an invented concoction. It's hardly the purest of Indian cuisine.

Even the British Army has been prescribed that.

That's right! Probably it will come to little freeze-dried packs for astronauts (laughs)! Probably the one and only British astronaut so far has probably had his personal allocation of freeze-dried Chicken Tikka Masala to eat in space, whilst the Americans have Chicken Wings or something (laughs)!

I don't know what Americans eat, really -- lot of salads and a lot of weird stuff! A lot of deep fried stuff, that's where we go.

Where is your personal favourite place in India? It's a big country.

It is, and that's why, rather like North America, it's difficult… When people talk about the USA or Canada, they think they are talking about just a little country where they can have their easy idea of relating to a particular town or particular people or particular accent or language. But, of course, it's just so big that from one side to the other, and from north to south, it's like visiting 10 different countries.

I think India is very much like that.

A lot of people who go there on vacation -- and perhaps just sit in their beach hotel in Goa -- think they have been to India. I've had a lot of people who go to Goa think they are actually on an island somewhere off the Indian coast.

Anybody trying to 'do' India as a tourist really has not just one vacation ahead of them but perhaps 50 vacations to be able to take it all in and get some clear idea of all the different places and all the different sights and smells and history.

I am but a novice, having been just a few times to India. I have never been down to Kerala, which I am quite looking forward to doing. But it's unfortunately not served directly by any airlines from the UK. You have to go via somewhere else, and it takes a long time, and it means yet another flight.

As a rather fearful flier, and my wife's also not happy about flying, we try and make our occasional vacations as simple as possible. Prolonging the agony by taking more than one flight to get there is not our idea of fun.

What's with Western musicians and India? It probably started with (John) Coltrane. more than just the country it's about the music and the sort of philosophy you attach to the country. Does that play a role? When you think of India, do you automatically connect those wires in your head?

I don't think I connect with either the spiritual or philosophical aspects of Indian music, but it is purely the sound of Indian music and the kind of little questions it poses to you as a musician that make it fascinating.

I was drawn to Indian music when I first heard it as a child -- not only to Indian music but amongst other things that I heard.

And perhaps the most obvious popularization early on in my life was when the Beatles started to introduce elements of Indian instruments and the little kind of motifs that sounded reminiscent of what we heard in Indian restaurants (laughs).

I had an Indian drummer in the band back in 1967. So, growing up with a huge population of Indian, Bangledeshi, Pakistani and people in my country, we felt perhaps connected with India in a way that maybe we weren't so connected with some of the other immigrants to the UK.

I think Indian people have brought with them a quiet set of definitions of their culture and their background. And it's gradually become part of the English way of life.

These days, in a very expanding and confident India, we are ready to receive the full onslaught of Indian movies, of Indian music, of contemporary Indian music -– which is becoming more and more popular in other countries of the world.

A confident, forward-thinking India is now ready to unleash its much wider and more contemporary array of artistic and entertainment-based ideas and creative thoughts to a much more open and anticipating world around it.

I think we have the best to come from India in music and entertainment terms. It's always interesting to see these evolutions take place.

So, Indian music is -– I think, with us, as in music and entertainment -– is not about philosophising or spreading religious values. It's not about necessarily spreading moral values. It's actually just about -– on a more abstract and artistic level -– giving us a more uncomplicated look into Indian creativity and passion, without necessarily trying to drum other values into us.

It's the right time for India to make a lot of impact around the world with its arts crafts and entertainment.

And it's clearly doing that in a much bigger way than ever before.

That Ian Anderson's wit can cut you down to size is evident from his All Too Frequently Asked Questions note to journalists, where he emulates a routine interview.

Sample this answer to the question 'Do you have Family? A wife? Children? Where do you live?'

Ian Anderson: 'I enjoy the company and love of my wife of 23 years, Shona, two children, James and Gael, both at University, five cats, two dogs and some horses and chickens. We live in an eighteenth century English country house with a recording studio, 400 acres of wheat, barley and trees about 100 miles west of London. Disgusting isn't it? Want to swap? Thought so.'

So, in the second part of his interview with the Jethro Tull frontman, talented guitarist and Features Editor Sumit Bhattacharya treads carefully with his questions till rock's most famous flautist wraps up the telephone conversation with a genial, "Thank you for your time and attention."

Don't miss the first part of the Ian Anderson interview: Jethro Tull and the Chicket Tikka Masala invasion

When you tour a country do you consciously take the time out to watch people and observe the culture or is it just fly in, give interviews, play and fly out?

Sometimes, regrettably, it is fly in, give a few interviews, play a couple of shows and fly out. But in that brief time, as a working musician, you are interfacing with people both in the audience and the people around you -- the people in the media, the people you are working with on a more pedantic level, the crew, people in the venue… If you keep your ears and eyes open you still learn a lot about a country when you are there working with people.

I think the danger is as a tourist if you come in, then you are either going to remain in your little beachside bubble or you are going to be transported around the five essential things a tourist must do. You are transported in your little bubble with your tour guide who carefully edits out the bad bits and makes sure you receive the good bits. And that isn't necessarily the most productive of experiences. Nothing wrong with it, but it's not going to perhaps give you as much as I think I get because I'm there in a working capacity.

I'm there to become involved with in a very direct and sometimes quite emotional way. So I think I learn more when I come to work and do concerts than I would as a tourist.

Coming to music, you had said in an interview that Hotel California was 'stolen' from a Jethro Tull song.

Well I have never made that allegation.

I have pointed out that other people have told me that. And I think they wouldn't use the word 'stolen' -- that's a little over-ambitious, a little over-egging the reality. I know The Eagles played with Jethro Tull when they first started. They were actually our support band in 1972. And I believe at that time we may well have been playing that song -- my song which they said Hotel California was like (Hums the tune, which sounds the same as On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair). We used to know, it was called. And the thing is Hotel California shares something of the same melody but definitely the same chord sequence.

I have always said -- in good humour and joking spirit -- 'Hey, I wish I had written Hotel California. Well maybe I did!'

People hear, it's not deliberate plagiarism. They hear something, and quite often accidentally -- or sometimes intentionally -- will take elements of somebody else's work and incorporate it into their own.

But I take that as a compliment, not as an insult, or having something stolen from me.

There are only 12 notes in the Western musical scale. The chances are in your lifetime as a songwriter and musician you're going to find yourself picking out of those 12 notes -- a few of them in the same order that somebody else did.

As you can imagine, it's getting harder and harder for people to write original-sounding music as we go on. We tend to be rather boringly recreating and reusing ideas that have been from the past 50 years of music.

So contemporary pop and rock music is very often incredibly familiar-sounding to old codgers like me who think, 'Oh, I think I've heard that before.'

It doesn't necessarily mean someone's stolen something. As long as I can remember, there have been lots of cases where things have sounded uncannily like something else, but we shouldn't get our knickers in a twist.

In your All Too Frequently Asked Questions section, you've said music never really changes. So would you say there is no new frontier possible in music anymore?

Well we only have two ears, you know. We have physical constraints -- we have two ears and a certain range of sounds and noises that we find physiologically acceptable; they are not unpleasant noises.

There are lots of noises that actually just make us screw our faces up and we don't like them because they are too loud or too shrill… They are never going to be good musical noises. Music tends to be a little sweeter on the ear.

So we are bound by a physiological condition. Homo Sapiens has a brain and certain receptors that limit what we can call music. Unless we grow more ears or bigger ears or different kinds of ears we are not going to find that we can expand terribly upon the number of sounds that we call musical.

We have ancient instruments -- the percussion instruments, the flute, these are really ancient instruments. No one knows how old they are, they are thousands and thousands of years old for sure. In the case of more contemporary instruments, they are usually still based on things that go back at least hundreds of years. So I think that really not a lot changes in music essentially.

What contemporary musicians have to work with is their own imaginations -- rather more importantly than new technology or new instruments or new skills. Your imagination is the most powerful instrument you have. And that's the one you need to use mostly, even if you're not perhaps the greatest technical expert of your instrument in the world. Doesn't mean you can't write great songs.

I think that's an important thing to remember. And all the computers and all the software written for the computers and contemporary synthesised music they will not make you a great musician. They will just make it easier for you to get a result – but not necessarily a great result.

Is that why experimenting with genres becomes almost a must for musicians who want to keep evolving?

I think you should have open ears to other kinds of music and other cultures. The music comes not only just from musicians who dwell in a musical world. Sometimes the music comes out of aspects of culture that make you perhaps have to think a little more carefully about what you're doing.

There's a lot of music that comes from religious celebration, lot of music comes from other forms of celebration that perhaps have a cultural reference that is alien to us or the way we hear the music. So you have to be a little careful that you're not accidentally slipping into some musical expression that may have connotations to other people that you don't intend.

It would be difficult for me, for example, if I was particularly fond of singing what, when I was a child, were called 'Negro spirituals' -- these days politely termed 'gospel music'. If that was my forte, you know if I had just loved the music, I would have to stop and think, 'Wait a minute. I'm singing something here that is actually about usually rather evangelical Christian music. Is that what I want to do?' And the answer is 'No I don't.' So I kind of steer clear of stuff that is going to sound like gospel music (laughs).

You have to be a little aware of those things, you know. You don't want to tread on the toes of other people, or pretend to be, or come across as being something you don't really intend. Pure, abstract music sometimes has to be considered.

For me to sing black music would be, I always thought, rather absurd. So when I was a teenager listening to black-American blues, it was never really my desire to try and make a living doing black-American blues. Primarily because I wasn't black, and secondly I wasn't American. Thirdly and perhaps more importantly, I couldn't really lay claim.

As a white middle class English boy I could never learn those experiences that gave rise to that music. It's just not something that you can take on mentally from afar. If you haven't been born and grown up with that, it's not in your genes. By all means, take something of a pure musical nature from it, but don't try to convince yourself that you're a real blues musician. I always find that a little absurd. And I'm uneasy when I hear white people playing, concentrating solely on a musical format that they can never really justifiably lay claim to as their own.

But is it always that conscious a decision?

It's not conscious. But when you're asked to rationalise it, when you're asked to intellectualise it -- as obviously I am by journalists, or I might do myself in some ruminating mood, then I'll think it through. But most of the time it's reacting to a piece of music that you're just excited by and moved by and you take a little from it, you learn something from it. But hopefully without plagiarising and hopefully without getting yourself confused as to the implications of some of that music in a more cultural or religious sense.

Where do you love performing the most? And please don't say India because you're due here.

India, honestly, wouldn't be at the top of my list because it is a tough place to play. Not just from the point of view of being there and playing but actually getting there and getting the permission to play there and finding people who can organise concerts for you.

Because it's a tough nut to crack, that's why so few bands play in India. It is really, really hard to put on shows there, and to get there and the economics of it are not really favourable. Because it's expensive to get there and expensive to be there and you don't actually make that much money when you are there by Western standards. So it certainly wouldn't be top of most people's list.

But it's a challenge; it's fascinating and very rewarding once you actually get there.