Buying the albums sampled on “You Can All Join In”.
All versions of the album of course give the personae dramatis:
Ian Anderson…flute, organ, claghorn, piano and singing.
Mick Abrahams…guitar, nine string guitar and singing.
Clive Bunker…drums, hooter and charm bracelet.
Glenn Cornick…bass guitar.
The Collectors Edition CD package comes with an insert with notes from all the band members and some photos. I’ll start with Ian Anderson’s, which are of course the longest:
“This was the very first Jethro Tull album, made in the summer of 1968 for the paltry sum of about £1100, borrowed from the National Westminster Bank of Watford via some persuasion by the father of our manager Terry Ellis.
“”Yeah, and it sounds cheap too” some wag might offer in the light of the mega-budgets attached to the inaugural recording of many a new band in the years to follow. But it was a quick and simple affair for us to get down on tape those performances and arrangements already tried and tested on the stage of the Marquee Club in London’s Wardour Street.
“A couple of songs, notably Move On Alone and Round were the products of studio imagination, and there was an overdub or two which fleshed out the uncluttered sound of the group.
“From the ashes of the John Evan Band had risen, staggering uneasily to its feet, the bluesy and hopeful young quartet of Anderson, Abrahams, Cornick and Bunker. Mick Abrahams’ forceful but lyrical blues guitar was the driving force behind the early efforts, adorned by my tentative but hopefully improving flute-playing which had commenced a few months earlier.
In the summer of 1967 [the summer of love!], a while before meeting Mick Abrahams, I had quit playing guitar and traded in my trusty 60’s [sic] Fender Strat (which had once belonged to Lemmy of Motorhead) for a cheap and cheerful student flute which gleamed and glittered on the wall of the music shop in Lytham St. Annes. The Selmer Gold Seal was its name and the same humble model was the first instrument of another flautist who began his career a little while before I did. His name was James Galway.”
More from this remarkable man’s notes next time. In the meantime, this is the first of those photos:
Tagged: Clive Bunker., Glenn Cornick, Ian Anderson, James Galway, Lytham St. Annes, Mick Abrahams, Selmer Gold Seal
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