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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Vol 35 no. 20. 1972

Jethro Tull : Thick as a Brick

Jethro Tull : Thick as a Brick

I despair of using words to describe here what I feel must be said about Jethro Tull's music.

Thick as a Brick is Ian Anderson's setting of a poem allegedly written by Gerald "Little Milton" Bostock, aged eight, of St. Cleve. The albums cover is a twelve page issue of the parochial St Cleve Chronical and Linwell Advertiser.

The poem is a long monologue, with several recurring ideas, all arranged around the theme of our unreal social system and its acceptance by the masses. It is written by someone quite obviously on the outside who hurls preconceptions and paradoxes under the feet of those blissfully unaware fools that mouth back excuses for their self-imposed cerebral paralysis:

Thick as a Brick album art

Come on ye childhood heroes! Won't
you rise up from the pages of your
comic-books?
Your super-crooks
and show us all the way. Well! Make your
will and testament wont you? Join
your local government. We'll have
superman for president
let Robin save the day.

The style is very evocative, and if you've ever had any doubts about straight life-styles you'll likely find echoes of your thoughts lurking in the deliberately vague text. The fantastic and mystical are present too, usually associated with optimistic ideas of the future:

Do you believe in the day? Do you?
Believe in the day.' the Dawn Creation
of the Kings has begun. Soft Venus
(lonely maiden) brings the ageless one.

which is reminiscent of Buckminster Fuller's "better living through technology" creed.

Of course the music is superb. There are many classic Jethro Tull idiosyncrasies — Anderson's incisive flute is perhaps the most obvious — but a significant amount of new ground is covered as well. The scope is massive, almost Baroque in its elaboration. The new drummer, Barriemore Barlow, lays a very crisp, military foundation which is reproduced exactly up each column of sound, creating a lot of acoustic excitement — a colonnade of accents. But it is the sheer variety of sounds that overwhelms, from magnificent bursting explosions of noise to soft moments of transcendentally fragile beauty. The detail is presented carefully so that boredom never catches up Throughout the text appears the line:

Your wise men don't know how it feels to be thick as a brick.

which appears to be a message of the album: When you know how much is unknown then you can know what is known.

— Philip Alley