In The Biblical Sense

I an Anderson is not messing about. A few months ago Prog asked the man synonymous with Jethro Tull about the challenges of post-Covid touring, and when he said, “I expect to be wearing a mask for the rest of my professional life,” he didn’t just mean any old mask.

“I wear none of that namby-pamby flimsy blue stuff,” he tells Prog. “People think it’s sufficient for the job and it’s as useless as a face covering. I wear an FFP2 mask or sometimes an FFP3 mask, because I care about my health and indeed the health of others. I wear a five-layer mask and have done all the time [since the pandemic began], but then they are more difficult to breathe through, especially with any physical exertion going on.”

However robust the protection adopted, though, you would have been forgiven for wondering if Anderson – a man who last year revealed that he was diagnosed in 2018 with COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease), causing breathing difficulties even before the pandemic hit – might step back from Tull activities, above all live ones, at this point.

“I’ve become a hands-on ‘supporter’ of Christianity, I suppose. But I do not call myself a Christian because I do not possess the vital attributes – in short, having faith.”

Not likely. Because this is a man still determined to continue working as long as he is physically and mentally able, to the point where he might conceivably “die with his boots on”, as he will tell us later. And maybe it’s that indefatigable creative drive that has helped make the new Jethro Tull album their best for many a year.

The release of The Zealot Gene is one reason why the workload for Jethro Tull is about to ramp up once again in earnest after the enforced performance hiatus. And with the ink barely dry on a Tull lyric book and a deluxe reissue of Benefit having found its way into plenty of fans’ stockings last month, Ian Anderson is as busy as ever.

And if you’re worried about what sounds like a distinctly scary medical condition, he somewhat downplays the seriousness of the situation to . He insists he is simply managing something similar to the asthma he has suffered from since he was young. As he put it more eloquently in a press release last year, the condition has “no impact at all on my daily life as long as I don’t catch a cold or flu virus [he of course adds Covid to