For a 77-year-old who just a few years ago was told he was terminally ill, and on “a slippery slope to inevitable death”, Ian Anderson looks and sounds in remarkably fine fettle. And creatively, he and Jethro Tull, the band with which he will forever be synonymous, are on a prolifically productive roll the likes of which we haven’t seen since their 70s and early-80s prime.
Released last month, Curious Ruminant is the band’s third album in just over three years since they were reanimated as a recording act with 2022’s The Zealot Gene, the first Tull album of new material in 23 years. So what has inspired this sudden late-career burst of activity? And is it really any dignified way for a man in his midseventies to behave?
