Ian Anderson: Thick As A Brick: Live In Iceland

Prog maverick recreates classic album, and its sequel, on stage.

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Jethro Tull’s one-track album of 1972 simultaneously claimed to invent the concept album and parody it, but either way, it deserves its status as a prog classic.

Tull supremo Ian Anderson came out with a sequel in 2012, updating the original tall tale of schoolboy prodigy Gerald Bostock, and this concert film captures the one-leg flute maestro’s band on stage in Iceland interspersed with various typically obtuse skits, producing a pretty tidy rendition of the original album and its sequel.

Not all fans will be thrilled to see many of the vocal lines taken by backing vocalist and mime Ryan O’Donnell, but if anything it adds to the theatricality of the piece. With bonus interviews and more live footage thrown in, plus impressive 5.1 Surround Sound production, few Tull obsessives will feel short-changed.

Johnny Sharp
Johnny Sharp

Johnny is a regular contributor to Prog and Classic Rock magazines, both online and in print. Johnny is a highly experienced and versatile music writer whose tastes range from prog and hard rock to R’n’B, funk, folk and blues. He has written about music professionally for 30 years, surviving the Britpop wars at the NME in the 90s (under the hard-to-shake teenage nickname Johnny Cigarettes) before branching out to newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent and magazines such as Uncut, Record Collector and, of course, Prog and Classic Rock.