THE MAGIC FLUTE

The second new Jethro Tull album in two years, Rokfléte, explores Ragnarok, the Norse interpretation of the apocalypse. So naturally, we spoke to lan Anderson about the end of the world.

- Dave Everley

There was a period during the late 70s and early 80s when Ian Anderson began making plans for the end of the world. Born in 1947, he was a child of the Cold War, and the threat of nuclear annihilation had been a permanent presence throughout his life. “It always seemed entirely possible that all of this could end before I had reached manhood,” he says.

Now, thanks to a combination of escalating East-West tensions and having become a first-time father a few years earlier at the age of 30, the Jethro Tull singer’s fears were more intense than ever. The fact that Anderson and his family lived just a few miles away from RAF High Command near High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire didn’t help matters.

“It was, for sure, a hard target for the Russians,” he says. “I wasn’t exactly a survivalist, but I did think quite seriously about an escape plan, what to do if the proverbial hit the fan.”

This escape plan, he says, involved getting the hell out of Buckinghamshire as quickly as possible should the balloon go up. “There were two fuelled-up vehicles, and probably 30 gallons of petrol stashed away. They were the days of easier gun ownership, and there were some fairly serious-looking armaments that I would not have left at home as well.”

As it turned out, real-life nuclear armageddon never came, although a fictional version rears its head on Jethro Tull’s 23rd album, the Norse mythology-inspired RökFlöte. More than once Anderson invokes Ragnarök – the vivid, devastating version of the end times as detailed in the Poetic Edda, the 13th century collection of poems that relate the tales of the Norse gods.