Ian Scott Anderson (born 10 August 1947) is a British musician best known as the lead vocalist, flautist, and acoustic guitarist of the British rock band Jethro Tull, with whom he has been the only constant member since the band's founding in 1967. A multi-instrumentalist, Anderson also plays harmonica, mandolin, bouzouki, balalaika, saxophone and a variety of whistles.
Born in Dunfermline, Scotland to a Scottish father and English mother, Anderson was raised in Edinburgh before moving to Blackpool, England with his family at age 12. Anderson formed The Blades in 1963 while still in school, a soul and blues band that eventually evolved into Jethro Tull by 1967. Anderson initially played electric guitar, but soon abandoned the instrument in favour of the flute, which would become his signature instrument and a defining component of Jethro Tull's sound. Anderson developed an energetic stage presence, wearing a large overcoat during the band's early years and adopting a signature pose in which he played the flute while standing on one leg. Beginning with Jethro Tull's second studio album, Stand Up (1969), Anderson assumed increasing creative control, becoming the band's primary songwriter and guiding it through a series of stylistic shifts throughout its history, including into the progressive rock that the band would become known for.
Anderson began a solo career in 1983 with Walk Into Light and later released several follow-up albums, including Divinities: Twelve Dances with God (1995), The Secret Language of Birds (2000), Rupi's Dance (2003), Thick as a Brick 2 (2012) and Homo Erraticus (2014). Outside music, Anderson owned several salmon farms from the 1980s to the early 2000s. He was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire in 2008 for services to music.
Ian Anderson was born in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland, the youngest of three brothers, to an English mother and a Scottish father. Anderson said, "I'm a Brit. I see myself as a product of that union." His father, James Anderson, ran the RSA Boiler Fluid Company in East Port, Dunfermline. Anderson's family moved to Edinburgh when he was three. He was influenced by his father's big band and jazz records and the emergence of rock music, but was disenchanted with the "showbiz" style of early American rock and roll stars like Elvis Presley.
Anderson's family moved in 1959 to Blackpool, England, where he was educated at Blackpool Grammar School. In a 2011 interview, Anderson said he was asked to leave grammar school for refusing to submit to corporal punishment (permitted at that time). He studied fine art at Blackpool College of Art from 1964 to 1966 while living in Lytham St Annes.
While a teenager, Anderson took jobs as a sales assistant at Lewis's department store in Blackpool and as a vendor on a news stand.
In 1963, at 15 or 16 years of age, Anderson formed The Blades from among school friends: Michael Stephens (guitar), John Evan (keyboards), Jeffrey Hammond (bass) and Barriemore Barlow (drums). This was a soul and blues band, with Anderson on vocals, guitar and harmonica; he had yet to take up the flute. They played their first show at the Holy Family Church Hall in North Shore.
In late 1967, Anderson was still holding down a day job cleaning the Ritz Cinema in Luton, including the toilets, in the mornings, "which took me half the day" he said in a later interview. He took an old, chipped urinal from the cinema storeroom and had it for a time after leaving the job. It was not, however, the urinal which "was bolted to the side of John Evan's Hammond organ on stage" and figured in early 1970s Tull performances.
At this time, Anderson abandoned his ambition to play electric guitar. This was allegedly because he felt he would never be "as good as Eric Clapton". As he himself tells it in the introduction to the video Nothing Is Easy: Live at the Isle of Wight 1970, he traded his electric guitar in for a flute which, after some weeks of practice, he found he could play fairly well in a rock and blues style. Anderson later explained that he felt he could more easily make his mark in the music world with an uncommonly used instrument than he could with the guitar, and the easy portability of the flute when traveling to live venues made it an appealing option. According to the sleeve notes for the first Tull album, This Was (1968), he had been playing the flute only a few months when the album was recorded. His guitar practice did not go to waste either, as he continued to play acoustic guitar, using it as a melodic and rhythmic instrument. As his career progressed, he added soprano saxophone, mandolin, keyboards and other instruments.
His tendency to stand on one leg while playing the flute came about by accident, as he had been inclined to stand on one leg while playing the harmonica, holding the microphone stand for balance. Anderson became known for his famous one-legged flute stance, and was once referred to as a "deranged flamingo". This stance is depicted on several Jethro Tull album covers. During a long stint at the Marquee Club, a journalist described him, wrongly, as standing on one leg to play the flute, when in fact he was originally playing the harmonica on one leg. He decided to live up to the reputation, albeit with some difficulty. His early attempts are visible in The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus (1968) film appearance of Jethro Tull. This was referenced in the facetious liner notes for Thick as a Brick in a quote about "the one-legged pop flautist, Ian Anderson".
Anderson had already wished to start a solo career in 1980, when Jethro Tull was going to take a break after John Glascock's death. He wrote the album A as a solo record, but had Jethro Tull's Martin Barre participating, and Dave Pegg on bass. Record company pressure forced the record to be released under the Jethro Tull name. His first official solo album was Walk into Light, in 1983, in which Peter-John Vettese played an important role in the electronic direction of the music.
In the 1990s, he began working with simple bamboo flutes. He used techniques such as over-blowing and hole-shading to produce note-slurring and other expressive techniques. Anderson said that around this time his daughter began taking flute lessons and noticed that his fingering was incorrect, prompting him to relearn his extensive catalogue with the right fingering. In 1995, Anderson released his second solo album, Divinities: Twelve Dances with God, an instrumental work composed of twelve flute-heavy pieces pursuing varied themes with an underlying motif. The album was recorded with Jethro Tull keyboard player Andrew Giddings and orchestral musicians. Anderson released two further song-based solo albums, The Secret Language of Birds in 2000 and Rupi's Dance in 2003. In 2003, Anderson recorded a composition called "Griminelli's Lament", in honour of his friend, the Italian flutist Andrea Griminelli.
In 2011, with the end of Jethro Tull touring, and a question asked by his friend Derek Shulman, "What ever happened to Gerald Bostock?", Anderson began to produce a sequel to Thick as a Brick (1972), titled Thick as a Brick 2 or TAAB2, released on 3 April 2012. It was billed as being performed by Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson instead of being a Jethro Tull album proper. Anderson toured, performing both albums in their entirety. A trailer for TAAB2 was posted on YouTube.
Anderson released a new album, Homo Erraticus, in May 2014. He described it as a progressive rock concept album blending rock, folk, and metal music. Peaking at No. 14 in the UK Albums Chart it is his most successful ever solo album.
In September 2017, Anderson announced plans for a tour to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of This Was, and a new studio album in 2019. The band line-up included Anderson, Hammond, John O'Hara, David Goodier (all musicians of Anderson's solo band since 2012), and, since 2019, Joe Parrish, with Barre and Florian Opahle absent from the lineup.
On 2 January 2018, Ian Anderson published a New Year post on jethrotull.com, including a picture of Anderson with the caption "IA in the studio working on a new album for release March 2019. Shhhh; keep it a secret..."