MARTIN BARRE

Every month we get inside the mind of one of the biggest names in music. This issue it's Martin Barre. From the shy kid who learned music to avoid having to ask girls to dance, he conquered the world with Jethro Tull, a band that sold out the Los Angeles Forum five nights in a row in 1975, shifting some 100,000 tickets in the process. The guitarist reflects on not letting fame go to his head, his guilt at staying with Ian Anderson in Tull at the start of the 1980s, and his enduring hunger for new music with the Martin Barre Band.

- Words: David West

“It’s not the obvious reasons, like the fact that I’m 79,” says Martin Barre about his decision to write his autobiography, A Trick Of Memory: The Autobiography Of Jethro Tull’s Guitarist, taking the title from his 1994 solo album. “It strikes me that everybody has a story to tell. When I look back at my family, my parents, aunts and uncles who are long gone, there are things I want to know about them and I’ll never know. Everybody should leave something, whether it’s for 10 people or 100,000. I’m not pompous enough to say I’m part of history, but you were there when history was being made is the best way of saying it.”

Calling Barre part of musical history is an understatement. Across 45 years and 20 studio albums, Barre was integral to the sound and success of Jethro Tull. His first album with the group, Stand Up, topped the British charts, and then they hit No.1 in the US with the back-to-back releases Thick As A Brick and A Passion Play, before winning a Grammy for 1987’s Crest Of A Knave – a result considered so unlikely the band didn’t even attend the ceremony.

When Tull disbanded in 2014, Barre picked up the solo career he’d begun in the 1990s. When Prog chats to the guitarist, he’s prepping for an acoustic tour and an appearance at the 2025 Aye Write Book Festival in Glasgow to talk about his first foray into prose.

“I’ve always led my life by doing things I’m scared of,” he says about sharing the bill at Aye Wright alongside such literary and political luminaries as Irvine Welsh, Jeanette Winterson, and Nicola Sturgeon. “I don’t know why, I’m not a brave person, but there’s something in me that makes me say yes.” So far, so good!

In your autobiography, you talk about being a very shy youngster. Was the guitar a shield that you could hide behind?