fairfaxtimes hat geschrieben: My first question is, how has being from Scotland influenced your music?
ANDERSON: Well, the first things I ever listened to when I was a child were Scottish folk music and church music, and I suppose there is some influence that's carried on through my life with both of those music forms. But I think, in the first two years of being a professional musician, that ... those influences didn't feature in what I was doing. I was really most influenced by blues and jazz, so it took two or three years before I started to go back and look at some of my earlier influences in addition to the blues and jazz stuff.
Is the imagery in your songs inspired by the environment in Scotland?
ANDERSON: Well, some of it is, but not until really in the mid to late '70s. It became more prominent in my efforts.
How did that happen?
ANDERSON: It happens organically. When you're working with a certain kind of set of ideas, you're always looking to expand and find new influences and, in my case, I've always been an eclectic musician who draws upon musical influences from other places, not just necessarily the world in which I grew up. … It happens without me really trying. It's just a natural inclination.
Could you share the moment when you decided to bring the flute into your music?
ANDERSON: Well, I was originally a guitar player back in the mid to late '60s and then discovered that Eric Clapton was the hotshot guitar player down in London. So, I realized I was never going to be of that caliber of musician and that maybe I should find another instrument to play that wasn't so commonplace as the guitar was. So, for no particularly good reason, I just chanced upon the flute. Didn't know how to play it, never held one in my hands before, just seemed like it might be a fun idea. A few months later, I managed to get some noises out of it, and a couple of weeks later, I was playing it onstage.
Interesting. I understood that you don't like The Beatles. Is that true?
ANDERSON: That's not right. No, I have great admiration for the songwriting skills of The Beatles; I wasn't a Beatles fan when they first appeared. I thought they were very good at what they did, but it didn't really appeal to me musically. But around the time of the Revolver album, I became more interested in what they were doing because they, too, were drawing upon other influences and embracing elements of classical music and folk music, and by the time they got to “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” of course, they had become, I suppose, one of the first progressive pop bands. They weren't a rock band, but we saw them developing musically with great ideas, working with George Martin. It was a very creative period of time. It had its impact on me, and I hugely enjoyed what they did. I have great admiration for them, but I wasn't a fan of The Beatles' early pop music.
There is a focus on poor people in your songs, so I wonder; did you grow up in poverty?
ANDERSON: Well, I would describe my parents as lower middle-class. They were professional people, but they didn't have a lot of money. We weren't poor. We didn't go hungry. We lived in a reasonably OK house, but we certainly weren't well-off. During my teenage years, I just remember having really no money at all. I had to go and do a little bit of work in my spare time when I was at school to try and put some money into the household. Later, when I was at art college, I did the same thing, working during the holidays to try and earn some money and gave some to my parents to cover the cost of my being fed and having a roof over my head. So, we certainly weren't well-off, but by the same token, we weren't poor.
Can you tell us something about poverty?
ANDERSON: Can I tell you something about poverty? Well, goodness me. Yeah. Poverty is all around us. We live in a world that's sharply divided between those who have and those who have not, and we, in the more affluent West, are busy consuming most of the world's resources while those who have not are struggling to have anything to eat. But, on the other hand, they have usually a pretty low impact on the environment and are certainly not to blame for climate change, whereas my parents' generation and my generation are the ones who have to shoulder the blame for the world we live in, the over-exploitation of resources, the changes that are well afoot, now, in terms of the increase in the Earth's temperature and the impact that's going to have in terms of food production in the future. We will see poverty ... my grandchildren and great-grandchildren will see poverty like it's never been seen before. It won't just be in the slums of Mumbai or in the poorer parts of downtown London; it'll be everywhere. We're all going to experience poverty in years to come.
So, this-
ANDERSON: That's my-
This is how you-
ANDERSON: Feel about that.
Wow. So, this is how you see the future as an artist?
ANDERSON: No, I see the future as being dead; I won't be around at that time. Give me another 10, 20 years; the impact of climate change will only really be getting to the point where even Donald Trump will have to admit that it really is happening. But he'll be dead and gone, at least in terms of political power, so I think we're not the important ones. It's the children and grandchildren we leave behind us who are going to be those who have to cope with a very radically changing world in the next 50 to 100 years.
Let's talk about education. In one of your interviews, you mentioned that you chose to be expelled from high school to avoid being caned (as physical punishment was allowed in British schools at the time), so how do you see the education system these days?
ANDERSON: Well, my advice to anybody would be to work as hard as you can to get a good education and do all the things that parents and teachers tell you to do because--
Hanan: Really?
ANDERSON: I mean, I certainly don't advocate that people do what I did. You should stay in school, do your best and see if you can get qualifications and go to university and get a proper career. But if you're a little bit crazy, maybe you'll decide to be a rockstar or a movie star or do something, and then no one is going to stop you if you have that determination. But it would be very bad to start off by telling people, "Hey, run away from school and do what you like and don't worry about having an education. It's not important.” Of course it is. For most people, it's imperative. It's not just important, but it's vital that they stay at school and do their very best and get qualifications.
So, do you think the education system could be better?
ANDERSON: Well, it wouldn't have made a big amount of difference to me. It would've just cost me another three to five years of my life before I could be a musician, and I was in a bit of a rush. So, I really wanted to get on and try and get to some level of being a professional musician before I was 20. I couldn't afford to stay and decide to have a go at it after I left university, which would've been a little bit late to be starting in the world of music.
Are you still experimenting with music?
ANDERSON: It's hard not to experiment with music because whenever you sit down to work on a new idea, or even, perhaps, you're working with an old idea, then experimentation, for me, comes naturally because improvisation and developing ideas, it's something that is ... it's what I do. Experimenting means sometimes ... in fact, it means, a lot of the time, that you have to learn to deal with failure because not everything you try to do works out. But that's part of the creative process, to ... try different things. Some, maybe a few, may turn out to be good, and the majority probably won't. But that's experimentation; whether you're working in a science lab or sending a man to the moon, you're going to have some failures.
What should we expect from your coming performance at MGM National Harbor?
ANDERSON: Well, you can expect what you like. So, it's a mixture of music, mainly taken from the first 10 years of Jethro Tull getting noticed internationally. Most people who got to know about Jethro Tull back then, it was that first period of 10 years, end of the '60s through to the end of the '70s, when Jethro Tull became well-known in many countries around the world. So, we're focusing on ... mostly, that era of our music and we are trying to stay pretty close to the original arrangements of the songs, present them with a lot of video material and a few special guests who pop up on the screen behind me.
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PHOTO BY ROB SKARIN
What is your favorite thing to do in the DMV area?
ANDERSON: Well, my favorite thing to do, really, is go to bed and wake up early the next day because I've never been there with any free time to go and explore. On one occasion, I think ... on one occasion, a friend of mine invited me to the White House ... He was the press secretary for George Bush, and he was a great friend who also played the flute, which is how I got to know him. So, he invited us to the White House, and I sat in one of the press briefings and then went back with him to his office to hang out for a while in the White House. It was a very educational moment, seeing and feeling the heart of the American administration. I didn't get to meet the president. He was busy and heading off somewhere else on some business, but he didn't do the press briefing.