The year 1971 was a momentous one for prog rock. Among the year’s signal albums were ELP’s Tarkus, Pink Floyd’s Meddle, Hawkwind’s In Search Of Space and Genesis’s Nursery Cryme, not to mention a brace from Yes. The three-minute pop song had become passé. In its place were labyrinthine epics about things like Greek nymphs, moon dogs and strange Russian hogweed. This was music with a default setting of ‘challenging’. Rock music was suddenly taking itself very seriously indeed.
Never mind that much of it actually sounded thrillingly original, the battle lines between new and old – between knotty-browed experimentation and straight-up rock’n’pop – were well and truly drawn. Enter Jethro Tull, who since 1967 had gradually morphed from a fairly conventional white blues band into avatars of something altogether weirder.
