Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson has taken a swipe at Mick Jagger in a new edition of the Now Spinning Magazine podcast.
In a wide ranging conversation the 77 year old singer talked, among other things, of the demands of the job of fronting a band at his age. He suggested that combining singing and playing the flute was becoming quite a challenge for him.
“It depends what you do,” he explained. “You can be physically animated, but there’s a degree to which you can only do so much if you’re playing a flute. If you are Mick Jagger and you’re just running around with sort of shout-out vocals, then, yeah, no disrespect, but Mick Jagger didn’t set the bar very high in terms of vocal skills right from the very beginning.”
Anderson continued: “So, he’s a shouter, and he doesn’t have to really hit the notes or necessarily be terribly great on intonation or phrasing or anything. He’s a shouter, and he runs around in a very animated way, and that’s great for someone who’s - whatever - a couple of years older than me, or three years older than me. That’s fine. But it’s not that easy if you’re trying to play a flute … there is a limit to what you can do. And it tends to be that if I’m not playing the flute, I’m singing.”
Point taken about Jagger’s singing style, but surely the Stones frontman (who turned 82 on Saturday) deserves some respect for the physicality of his performance? Most 82 year olds would give their eyeteeth to ‘run around in a very animated way’ the way that Jagger does on a nightly basis when the Stones are touring.
Reflecting on his own health, Anderson said that: “I seem to have overcome my problems with finding out late in life that I was asthmatic. That is now virtually completely under control and it doesn’t cause me problems at all.”
The interview was conducted before last week’s news about Ozzy Osbourne, whom Anderson brought up as an example of a performer struggling against the limits of their body. “Luckily, I’m not in a position of poor old Ozzy Osbourne or equally poor old Phil Collins, or Billy Joel or a whole bunch of other people whose performance has been essentially terminated forever because, although they’re still alive, they’re not physically capable of doing concerts. And that’s hopefully a way off in my life.
“But you’ve gotta face reality,” he said. “I’ll be 78 in a couple of weeks’ time. And that’s bringing with it a few issues.”
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