“Bands like ELP, Yes and Genesis were seen as over-the-top, showing-off kinds of performers. And to some extent I felt that, too”: Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson decided to lampoon prog and ended up making “the mother of all concept albums”
Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson conceived 1972’s *Thick As A Brick* partly as a satire of progressive rock’s increasingly grandiose, self-important tendencies. Although he admired the music’s ambition, he felt bands such as Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Yes and Genesis could seem overly showy, so the album deliberately exaggerated prog’s excesses; it nevertheless became one of the genre’s defining works.
Presented as a single, continuous piece split across the two sides of an LP, the album was framed as a setting of an epic poem by fictional schoolboy Gerald Bostock and packaged with a spoof local newspaper. Its elaborate music, shifting styles and comic conceit made the joke unusually convincing, turning Anderson’s lampoon of the “concept album” into what he called “the mother of all concept albums”.
- *Thick As A Brick* began as Ian Anderson’s satire of prog excess.
- Its spoof concept became a landmark progressive-rock album.
- The album parodied grand ambition while embracing it.