Jethro Tull Frontman: Aqualung Flawed

Jethro Tull’s 1971 album Aqualung may be a certified classic, but the band’s frontman calls it flawed. “It wasn’t a great sounding album,” Ian Anderson tells Bloomberg. The church-turned-studio where it was recorded was “big, echoey, daunting and rather dark,” he notes. “It had all the ghosts of its past, and plenty of technical problems. At the end of the sessions, I wasn’t sure what we’d got.”

Still, the album sold 7 million copies, and the British band began a 15-city tour on Wednesday to celebrate its 40th anniversary. The band will play the full album—being re-released as a remixed edition—during every one of the tour’s shows. But if you go, don’t drown out the band with your cheers. "It’s particularly disheartening," Anderson says, "when I’m trying to play the intro to 'My God' and someone is hooting over something that is, to me, a very important part of the song," he says. "It’s not a football match. And if that sounds a bit snobbish, then tough." (More Jethro Tull stories.)