Jethro Tull – Thick As A Brick

Ian Anderson wrote a 43-minute, album-length single song as a joke — a deliberate parody of pretentious concept albums — and it became Jethro Tull’s first No. 1 in America.

It was meant to be a joke. When critics began filing Jethro Tull alongside the era’s po-faced progressive rock bands after 1971’s Aqualung, leader Ian Anderson decided to give them something truly absurd to chew on: not an album of songs, but a single continuous piece of music, 43 minutes long, sprawling across two sides of an LP, dressed up with all the self-serious trappings of the genre he was mocking. The joke was Thick as a Brick — and the punchline is that it became one of the defining records of the very movement it set out to parody.

Keep watching: Jethro Tull – Aqualung · explore more →

Anderson committed to the bit completely. The 1972 album was packaged not as a record sleeve but as a spoof small-town English newspaper, The St. Cleve Chronicle, and the lyrics were credited to a fictional eight-year-old poet prodigy named Gerald Bostock, supposedly disqualified from a poetry contest for the disturbing content of his verse. The newspaper even contained a mock review trashing the album for its “ugly changes of time signature, and banal instrumental passages” — Anderson pre-emptively mocking his own work so no critic could beat him to it. Recorded in just a few weeks at Morgan Studios in London in December 1971, the music underneath all the satire was genuinely extraordinary: shifting time signatures, folk passages, hard-rock surges, and Anderson’s flute weaving through it all.

The audience got the music even if some critics missed the joke. Thick as a Brick went to number 1 on the US Billboard 200 — Jethro Tull’s first American chart-topper, holding for two weeks — and reached number 5 in the UK. Fittingly, when an edited three-minute single was carved out of the 43-minute whole in April 1972, it failed to chart entirely. You simply could not skim the cream off a piece built to be heard as one continuous thought.

Bringing the impossible to the stage

A 43-minute single song poses an obvious problem live: no band drops three-quarters of an hour of one piece into the middle of a concert set. So on stage, Thick as a Brick became an edited showcase — a distilled run through its strongest passages, room for Anderson’s theatrical, one-legged flute stance and the band’s instrumental interplay. The BBC captured exactly this for its Sight and Sound In Concert series in February 1977, with Tull at the height of their powers, turning the studio puzzle-box into a living, breathing performance.

The piece never left them. Decades on, the band were still performing it, still finding new shape in it — as in this 2008 appearance at the Baloise Session in Switzerland, the intimate Swiss concert series then known as the AVO Sessions.

Watch Jethro Tull perform Thick as a Brick at the Baloise Session in 2008:

That a joke about pretentious concept albums could sustain a band across half a century of performance is the final, richest irony of Thick as a Brick. Anderson set out to satirize the overreaching ambition of prog rock and, in doing so, made one of its most enduring and genuinely ambitious works. Some jokes, told well enough, outlive everyone who was supposed to be in on them.