The Jethro Tull Under Wraps reissue has brought Ian Anderson back to one of the band’s strangest and most divisive chapters: a period bookended by the supernatural, nuclear paranoia, and a stage stunt he now admits was a step too far. Speaking ahead of the expanded release, Anderson traces the arc from his true solo debut, Walk Into Light, through to the synth-heavy Tull record that divided the fanbase in 1984.
Peter-John Vettese and the Making of a New Sound
The pivot towards electronics was driven largely by Anderson’s creative partnership with Peter-John Vettese, the Scottish keyboardist who had joined Tull in 1982. According to the Jethro Tull official website, Vettese was with the band from 1982 to 1985 and earned recognition as second-best newcomer from Keyboard magazine in 1983, a sign of just how quickly his profile rose during that period.
For Anderson, working alongside Vettese on Walk Into Light meant navigating genuinely new terrain. ‘It seemed like a challenge to either embrace new electronic sounds and see what it might do for me, or just ignore it completely and stay in an analogue world with my head in the sand,’ he says. The technology was new to Vettese too, which Anderson found useful. ‘It helped that Peter and I sat down to work together. The technology was new to him too, and he was very excited by it all.’
Collaboration itself was unfamiliar ground. Anderson had long been the sole compositional force in Tull. ‘I never really worked with anybody at all in a compositional sense,’ he recalls. ‘He would come up with a lot of little musical ideas, and I would say, “Oh, that’s good. Maybe we can put that here, and I can build something on there.”‘ The results were recorded in a newly completed studio built into a barn adjoining Anderson’s Buckinghamshire home.
Ghosts, Cold War Dread, and the Jethro Tull Under Wraps Sessions
That studio came with complications. Vettese took up residence in the attic of Anderson’s 16th-century manor house, built over the remains of a nunnery razed after the Reformation. Strange things happened. ‘I can recall going in there having left everything set up from the night before, and I walked in to find all the faders had been moved and knobs turned, despite the studio being locked and alarmed,’ Anderson says. ‘Somebody (something) had moved everything.’ Vettese, reportedly terrified, kept a light on through the night.
The fear outside the studio walls was of a different order entirely. Anderson’s home sat roughly six or seven miles from Strike Command, a facility jointly operated by British and American forces beneath a chalk hill near High Wycombe. ‘We always had many cans of gasoline, and two or three vehicles, ready to flee to more friendly shores on the west coast of Scotland or somewhere,’ he says. That Cold War anxiety feeds directly into Under Wraps, the surveillance narratives of tracks like Tundra and Later, That Same Evening are not idle genre exercise.
Under Wraps was released on 28 November 1984, according to the Jethro Tull official website. Lyrically it ranged widely: espionage thriller atmospherics sat alongside a gentle mockery of Thatcherite consumerism on the opening track Lap Of Luxury, where Anderson’s aspirational targets were modest. ‘Buy me a Datsun or Toyota,’ he wrote. ‘I wasn’t singing about Rolls Royces or Jaguars.’
For all its ambition, the electronic sheen divided opinion. Anderson is sanguine about it now. ‘Maybe we went too far in one direction,’ he says, drawing a line back to A Passion Play as a precedent. ‘We just have to accept that you can’t please all of the people all of the time. But it wasn’t really that radical. Certainly not as big a step as Bob Dylan took when he went electric.’
The Remix, the Live Show, and a Stage Trick Best Forgotten
The reissue’s centrepiece is a remix by The Pineapple Thief‘s Bruce Soord, who also overhauled Walk Into Light. Plans to replace the drum machine parts with live drumming came to nothing, Anderson spoke to drummer Scott Hammond, who balked at the scale of the transcription work involved, and the record company were not minded to fund it. Instead, Soord remixed the original drum samples. ‘That seemed a much better way of arriving at a real drum sound,’ Anderson says. The raw material rewarded the effort: revisiting the session demos reminded Anderson of just how sharp the playing was. He singled out Martin Barre’s guitar work and Dave Pegg’s bass lines as being among the best of their careers.
The Under Wraps tour’s Hammersmith Odeon show from 9 September is included in expanded form in the new box set. Five songs from the album were played that night, though only three were recorded. The stage production leaned into the album’s shadows-and-intrigue theme, but one element has not aged well. At the end of the second or third song, Anderson explains in the new sleeve notes, ‘a naked woman would jump out of her paper packaging and run across the stage in strobe lighting.’ He is unambiguous about it now: ‘There are two reasons you couldn’t do it today. First because it would be politically incorrect, and second you have to give warnings about using flashing lights. Not one of our finest moments, in retrospect.’
Under Wraps: The Unwrapped Edition and Walk Into Light (The Bruce Soord 2026 Remix) are on sale now.
