Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson Next Album – Homo Erraticus

I have been a fan of Jethro Tull since the début album, This Was in 1968. Jethro Tull and Traffic were my favorite bands from 1968-1970. They both hailed from England. I played the This Was vinyl LP daily on my hi-fi phonograph. I hung out with a group of Tull fans in 1969 my senior year in high school. We all went together to see Jethro Tull perform Stand Up at The Fillmore East July 3, 1969.

I have seen Jethro Tull and Ian Anderson perform live eight times these past 46 years. Our last Jethro Tull concert was at Mohegan Sun Casino Arena in 2012. They performed the Thick As A Brick 1 & 2 show that evening. Here is my review from their October 4, 20102 concert.

Ian Anderson has given us several concept albums over the decades. His first and most famous “alter-ego” was the character he developed, Aqualung. The rock press perceived Aqualung as a concept album. Ian Anderson insists it is merely a collection of rock songs.

Aqualung was followed by a more curious concept album, Thick As A Brick in 1972. This record featured a rock first: one continuous song on both sides. The second major alter-ego that Ian Anderson forged was that of an 8-year-old boy Gerald Bostock.

Ian Anderson has returned twice since to the fictional Gerald Bostock personna, first with Thick As A Brick 2 (2012). (Whatever happened to Gerald Bostock?)

TAAB2 focuses on Gerald Bostock, the fictional boy genius author of the original album, forty years later. “I wonder what the eight-year-old Gerald Bostock would be doing today. Would the fabled newspaper still exist?”^[1] The follow-up album presents five divergent, hypothetical life stories for Gerald Bostock, including a greedy investment banker, a homosexual homeless man (shades of Aqualung..), a soldier in the Afghan War, a sanctimonious evangelist preacher, and a most ordinary man who (married and childless) runs a corner store; by the end of the album, however, all five possibilities seem to converge in a similar concluding moment of gloomy or pitiful solitude.^[2] In March 2012, to follow the style of the mock-newspaper cover (The St Cleve Chronicle and Linwell Advertiser) of the original Thick as a Brick album, an online newspaper was set up, simply titled StCleve: www.stcleve.com. – Courtesy of wikipedia

Ian Anderson will be re acquainting us with Gerald Bostock when he releases his next album Homo Erraticus on April 14th. “As Gerald Bostock says, ‘We’re all from somewhere else – get over it.’”

Homo Erraticus marks his return to songwriting, and it’s based on an unpublished manuscript by amateur historian Ernest T. Parritt (1865-1928).

In Homo Erraticus Parritt examines key events of British history with a string of prophecies stretching to the current day and the future; visions of past lives caused by the delirium of malaria generate the characters through whose eyes the stories are told, including a nomadic Neolithic settler, an iron Age blacksmith, a Christian monk, a turnpike innkeeper and even Prince Albert.

Written earlier this year, commencing 09.00 hours on January first, it chronicles the weird imaginings of one Ernest T Parritt, as recaptured by the now middle-aged Gerald Bostock after a trip to Mathew Bunter’s Old Library Bookshop in Linwell village. Bostock and Bunter (sounds like a firm of dodgy solicitors) came across this dusty, unpublished manuscript, written by local amateur historian Ernest T. Parritt, (1873 -1928), and entitled “Homo Britanicus Erraticus”.

The illustrated document summarizes key historical elements of early civilisation in Britain and seems to prophesy future scenarios too. Two years before his death, Parritt had a traumatic fall from his horse while out hunting with the Vale Of Clutterbury Hounds and awoke with the overwhelming conviction of having enjoyed past lives as historical characters: a pre-history nomadic neolithic settler, an Iron Age blacksmith, a Saxon invader, a Christian monk, a Seventeenth Century grammar school boy, turnpike innkeeper, one of Brunel’s railroad engineers, and even Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria. This befuddled, delusional obsession extends to his prophecy of future events and his fantasy imaginings of lives yet to come….

Bostock has returned once again to lyric writing, basing his new effort on the Parritt papers and I have had the fun and frolics of setting all to music of Folk-Rock-Metal stylings.

But you can call it Prog.(Copyright © 2014 – Ian Anderson Group of Companies)