Jethro Tull‘s Ian Anderson War Child recollections paint a picture of a band navigating a deeply unstable year, one in which an ambitious film project collapsed, a celebrated director turned vicious, and a studio album emerged almost by accident. Anderson spoke at length about all of this in 2014, and his account of the period remains one of the frankest portraits of progressive rock at its uncertain peak.
War Child, confirmed by The Music Universe as the band’s seventh studio album, was released in October 1974. Anderson himself is bracingly unromantic about it. ‘Kind of okay,’ is how he rates it. The real story, though, is what the album was supposed to be before it became an album at all.
The film that never was: Anderson, War Child and the Hollywood wall
War Child began as a film. Anderson had found a potential storyline in threads running through the previous Tull record, A Passion Play, and turned that into a detailed synopsis. ‘It was about 50 pages long,’ he recalls, ‘done to hopefully enlist the aid of professionals from the movie world.’ The subject matter was post-war Britain, filtered through dark comedy. ‘It was a world I knew, but wanted to examine through different eyes. It was a comedy, but more on the dark side of Monty Python than, say, a Benny Hill knockabout.’
The project attracted genuine heavyweight interest. Sir Frederick Ashton, recently retired as director of the Royal Ballet, agreed to be involved. Dame Margot Fonteyn expressed enthusiasm. John Cleese signed on to co-write the script. Character actors Leonard Rossiter and Donald Pleasance both said yes to appearing in the cast. The only immediate snag: both wanted to play God.
Then came the meeting that derailed everything. Anderson sat down with director Lindsay Anderson, and the encounter left a mark. ‘He tore the whole thing to shreds and was very unkind, harsh and cruel about the film when I met him,’ Anderson says. ‘I suspect he viewed me as an upstart, entering a world I knew nothing about. It was very upsetting to have someone you admire being so nasty about your work.’
Bryan Forbes was kinder and agreed to direct. But when the project was taken to American studios for financing, the doors stayed shut. ‘Bryan Forbes was very much seen by them as “Bryan Who?”‘ Anderson recalls. The studios wanted an American director and American actors, and saw no commercial case for a story rooted in British post-war atmosphere. ‘It was written in the twilight zone of dark British post-war weirdness,’ Anderson says. ‘It would never have worked in the States.’ After two or three years of development in the film world, he walked away.
Ian Anderson War Child: salvaging a soundtrack into an album
With the film abandoned, Anderson adapted the music already composed and demoed for the soundtrack. To those pieces he added songs recorded the previous year in France at Château d’Hérouville, which the band called Château d’Isaster. ‘We took Skating Away On The Thin Ice Of A New Day, Bungle In The Jungle and Only Solitaire from Château d’Isaster and reworked them for the album,’ he explains. ‘There was a somewhat folksy feel on War Child.’
The orchestral demos written for the original movie, surfaced on the 2014 deluxe edition, are treated by Anderson with cheerful scepticism. ‘I have to admit that I think these are of dubious value,’ he says. ‘They were written as movie music, and Tull fans have to appreciate they don’t feature the band much at all.’ He describes them as ‘there for oddity value, really’, composed alongside David Palmer, now known as Dee Palmer.
For all its accidental origins, the album arrived in a year that Anderson views as genuinely pivotal. ‘It was a time when everything was in the doldrums,’ he told Prog in 2014. ‘By that, I don’t mean that nothing was happening, but it just appeared that no one knew what would happen next. Anything was possible.’ Two general elections, the miners’ strike, a three-day working week, Nixon’s resignation, all of it fed into an atmosphere of uncertainty that Anderson feels was mirrored directly in music.
‘You can look back at 1974 and appreciate that it was the birth of punk rock,’ he says. ‘You had bands like the Ramones starting up, and a lot of this was due to the anger many people felt.’ He brackets this against the emergence of glam rock, singling out Roxy Music as the act that genuinely excited him. ‘There was a sleazy slickness to the music that appealed to me. The presentation was glamorous and old fashioned, which I liked.’
Tull that year played three nights at The Rainbow in London, with Stirling Moss, the racing driver, delivering the celebrity introduction on each occasion. When an audience member shouted ‘Where’s Jackie Stewart?’ on the first night, Anderson admits he was not entirely sure how Moss received that. Offstage, Anderson himself was characteristically solitary: reading John Le Carré and Ian Fleming in hotel rooms, meeting his future wife Shona, and keeping clear of the roadies’ parties. ‘On the road, I went to my room and read a book,’ he says. And so War Child, born from a film nobody would finance and a director’s withering contempt, became its own thing entirely. The deluxe Steven Wilson stereo remix is available now.
