“It doesn’t get anywhere close to The Dark Side Of The Moon, but a few years ago it had clocked up 12 million sales. That’s pretty big!”: Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson on the band’s classic album — with the “bloody awful” cover

Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson is still immensely proud of the band’s most famous album — even if he hates the painting on the album’s cover.

That album is of course Aqualung, released in 1971.

In an interview with Classic Rock in 2020, Anderson named Aqualung as one of the definitive Tull albums, if not the first…

“I think in many ways Stand Up [released in 1969] was the first really important album,” he said. “It was the one where it was now a band that wasn’t the same as everybody else. It was becoming something much more individualistic.

“Following that there was the Benefit album," he said, "which was rather dark, more bleak.

“Stand Up had some fun moments. Benefit is a bit down.

“And then Aqualung comes along, which was more the singer-songwriter thing, set aside the big bombastic rock songs.

“For some of the songs I was in the studio on my own, playing acoustic guitar, which I was then feeling a bit more confident about playing.

“It wasn’t that it was folk music, but it was acoustic music, which the band would to some degree add other components to.

“So that album is an album of contrasts. But it wasn’t a huge hit out of the box.

“It did okay, a bit better than the previous ones, but not hugely. But it just kept on selling, so over a period of time it was building until by the end of the ’70s it was our biggest album sales-wise and to this day still is.

“It doesn’t get anywhere close to touching The Dark Side Of The Moon, but a few years ago it had clocked up twelve million sales. So that’s pretty big, but over a long period of time.

“There are songs on that album that I’m pleased to have in the repertoire, Locomotive Breath or My God or Aqualung and some of the acoustic things that are perhaps a little more whimsical and personal.”

In that interview Anderson was also keen to put an end to a long-running misunderstanding about Aqualung.

“It was not a concept album,” he said. “It had three or four songs that kind of hung together. The rest of the songs had nothing to do with each other in terms of musical style or lyrical content.

“The packaging is so important. Aqualung was well packaged and presented in a way like it was tied up with a ribbon. It looked like it was something important.

But he added: “The only rubbish thing about it was the bloody awful painting on the cover, which I never liked.

“The character on the cover is a homeless person. My first wife, when she was studying photography, had photographed some homeless people, and that was the source of the song Aqualung.

“Many of the songs I’ve written over the years have come from either a photograph or a memory. I think in terms of visual imagery, something I share with many British musicians who went to art college.

“That’s how Aqualung developed, as a series of little visual images that I made into songs. But when the artist, Burton Silverman, delivered this painting for the album cover, based, I think, on a photograph he took of a homeless man in the Strand… it looked like me!

“I’d been really emphatic about it — I’m not this character. I’m not a homeless person. I’m a spotty middle-class English kid. I’ve never had to sleep rough on the street, and I don’t want to be pretending to be that character.

“But our manager, Terry Ellis, had obviously had a quiet word with Silverman: ‘Make it look like Ian, we’ll sell more records.’

“So the character on the cover looks like a cross between me and John Lyon when he was Johnny Rotten [in the Sex Pistols].

“That might explain why John Lydon later said that Aqualung is one of his favourite records!”