Jethro Tull got its name from a booking agent who loved agricultural history
Struggling for repeat bookings on the London club circuit, a Blackpool blues band kept changing its name. One alias, borrowed from an 18th-century agriculturist, happened to be on the bill the night the Marquee Club offered them a residency, so it stuck. Their frontman had been playing flute for about two weeks.
Ian Anderson was born in Dunfermline in 1947, grew up in Edinburgh and moved to Blackpool in 1960, where he studied at the grammar school and spent two years at art college hoping to become a painter. With schoolmates John Evans and Jeffrey Hammond he formed a band; Evans, inspired by seeing the Beatles on television, took up drums before switching to organ, and the group grew into a six-piece soul outfit called the John Evan Band, the surname shortened because Hammond thought it sounded better.
In November 1967 they moved to Luton, about 30 miles from central London, and signed with managers Terry Ellis and Chris Wright. A six-piece proved unaffordable, so Anderson, bassist Glenn Cornick, guitarist Mick Abrahams and drummer Clive Bunker regrouped as a blues band. Anderson cleaned the Luton Ritz Cinema to pay rent. Under aliases such as Navy Blue and Candy Coloured Rain they rotated through London clubs, and their first single in February 1968 was miscredited to Jethro Toe.
Anderson's switch to flute was deliberate. Frustrated that he could not match Abrahams or Eric Clapton on guitar, he wanted something more idiosyncratic, and he treated every gig as a flute lesson. The instrument, plus a big overcoat from his father, defined his early image. When a Sunbury-on-Thames crowd went wild for them at a jazz and blues festival in August 1968, it made them, in Cornick's words, a big band from that moment.
Their debut This Was appeared in 1968. With Martin Barre replacing Abrahams, the folk-tinged Stand Up reached No. 1 in Britain the next year, Aqualung in 1971 became their international breakthrough and biggest seller, and Thick as a Brick in 1972 cemented their progressive rock identity. The band stopped recording in the 2000s and split in 2011, but Anderson revived the name from 2017 and returned to studio albums in the 2020s.
Source: Jethro Tull (band)
