Grins like a demented Steptoe Senior. Sniffs extravagantly and loudly. Snot running down his nose.

Can't wait! My favourite JT album by a country mile.

I will have to break my not rebuying things I've already rebought rule. I love "Aqualung".

...I'll say that again - STEVEN WILSON of PORCUPINE TREE - is the sort of chap who occasionally spots internet threads of appreciation and drops by to say hello.

Steven, if you're out there, welcome to Wordsville! We are largely all in awe of your King Crimson remasters/remixes, and look forward to the Jethro Tull one. Come and tell us, if you wish and feel able to, what the bonus tracks are.

Or if you don't feel able, you could just pop by and nod your head discreetly to the following:

Lifes A Long Song EP, Lick Your Fingers Clean, Wondering Again... and ALL remixed...? :-D

...published on June 16 2011. Here's some extracts of their interview with Ian Anderson (currently touring the US in an Aqualung anniversary tour):

The word has already leaked out that the surround-sound mix for Aqualung is going to be coming out very shortly, in the next couple of months, right?

It’s scheduled for September release by EMI as a collector’s edition with all the remixes, the original masters, some bonus tracks, and some alternative recordings of a few songs that were uncovered from the original master tapes. So, it’s a big project. It’s three months in the making – we’re just finishing the artwork now, and we should be ready to release it in September.

Were you there to help supervise some of the remixing? Is this the first time you’ve met and worked with Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree?

That’s correct.

So what do you think of his prowess of as an engineer? Have you heard the King Crimson remixes that he did?

No, I haven’t. Steven Wilson did a very good job – he’s a little younger than me, but he has an avid interest in some of the classic albums of that era. His approach is very sympathetic and very respectful to the original presentation. He’s given it a lot more sonic clarity and more authority. Now it sounds a lot punchier and a lot cleaner for the digital age.

The sound is an improvement from the rather muddy mixes which resulted from working in a studio that was very much an untried and untested room with terrible acoustics and equipment problems. It made it a bit of a nightmare to record the original album. So it’s good that Steven Wilson had a chance to revisit all that in a way that would fill me personally with some horror, to have to go into the studio and start work on something like that again, even with fresh ears or after all that time. Apart from which I’ve been on the road doing concerts a lot. So I wouldn’t find it very easy to fit it in time-wise anyway. But then he’s done a very good job.

Once the remix process started, were there any specific corrections that needed to be made before you settled on a final mix that you were happy with?

You have to remember that these tapes are very old tapes. When you are working with old tapes, chances are you’ll have a bit of a tradeoff. You can tidy things up, you can clean some things up with contemporary digital technology; however, it’s true to say that some of the oxide will have been lost from the tapes, from playing and just age. Some tapes are really too old and too fragile to work with safely. You have to bake them in an oven to try and get everything to glue to the backing of the tape again, and you have to try to keep the oxide intact long enough to give it a couple of passes to get some high-fidelity, professional-standard, digital copies made. In the case of Aqualung and indeed Thick as a Brick, I made one-to-one tape copies of those about fifteen years ago. So we actually have backup multi-track tape copies, as well as the original tapes.

That is very good foresight on your part!

They were the only two I actually took the trouble to do, but it was definitely worth doing in terms of having some contemporary tape stock with those with the material copied one-to-one in the analog tradition. It was worth it. I’m pretty confident. Some of the very old tapes are actually in better condition than the tapes from the late seventies and early eighties, at which point tapes were becoming thinner and theoretically of better quality; they in fact were very fragile, and some of the worst tape stock is actually from the early eighties. That was a bad time for certain batches of tape. But going back into the late sixties and early seventies the tape was much thicker. Because of the thickness of the tape, there isn’t as much tape on a reel, so you didn’t have as much playing time per reel. That was kind of good because of the quality of the tape. It was more solid, more resilient, thicker tape, and the oxide stuck to it better. Then tapes got thinner in order to put more tape on a reel and get more playing time.

How much did your first wife help you with the lyrics of the Aqualung album?

That’s a touchy subject that I really don’t want to get into. It was based on some material which she provided. It was one of the very rare attempts to have a joint effort in writing any music, let alone lyrics. I’m a loner. I like to work alone, but once in a while you try to do something with other people musically or, on this very rare occasion, sometimes lyrically. I think she remembers it a little differently to how I do.

How important was American FM radio in 1971 to get the album tracks played in America to set the tone for the popularity of the album?

It was incredibly important. It’s interesting to note, however, that Aqualung, was a fairly universal success story for Jethro Tull, putting the band on the map internationally, was successful in a lot of countries where there was no radio play at all. I think it was by word of mouth, by reputation and by approach of the fact that it was talked about. It had a place in the subculture of music, at least as far afield as the ex-USSR countries, the Latin American countries, and in some of the more Latin countries of Europe like Italy and Spain. In these places, Aqualung is a big album without getting any radio play. In fact in the UK it hardly got any radio play and we still don’t today.

So yeah, it was important in America, because that was the medium and that was the culture. But it certainly managed very well without radio exposure in other countries. I think Aqualung probably contains two or three songs that have had a lasting impact and are still played on radio today. I think that’s why the album over the years has become a benchmark of Jethro Tull’s singer/songwriter kind of music as well as its full rock features.

It was at the point when I was feeling a little more confident to sit in the studio on my own and get some music onto tape without the other guys being around. So there are quite a few tracks that were recorded really around the vocal and guitar parts. I mean songs like “Wondering Aloud,” “Slipstream,” and “Mother Goose,” and “Cheap Day Return.” They are rather more like singer/songwriter kind of acoustic songs.

The other guys would be involved in overdubbing their contributions to the master track that I put down. That was the way of getting that kind of intimacy. I thought that everything revolved around the master vocal and master guitar part. I didn’t like to add my vocals on afterward. They were always one of the main ingredients.

One of the things that was interesting about “Wondering Aloud” was that I sang and played it twice, and I think it was the first of the two takes was the one that was declared to be the master, and we overdubbed string quartet, too, whereas take two has some piano playing as well, but no strings. It is interesting that there is just the two takes, both with the relative master vocal recorded live. We decided to include the version without string quartet, just as it was recorded live.

So are there any completely unreleased pieces that you are putting on the Aqualung reissue?

There was really nothing that has never been released. I’ve been all through the catalog in years gone by. If it had not been released, there were a few incomplete songs that were just doodles. Maybe there was just a demo put down, but they are not complete songs, just incomplete backing tracks. The men at EMI were kind of hankering after putting one of those incomplete ideas out just for the fans, and I said “No.” That’s a bit like getting out of bed in the morning and being photographed for a fashion magazine, bleary-eyed, in your underwear. It’s not for public consumption. It’s a private moment involving us all to the point where you go, “This doesn’t work.” Especially when these bits are not very well played, it doesn’t serve the reputations of the musicians when you are just fooling around in the studio with an idea that doesn’t go anywhere. I have to draw the line somewhere, and I’ve drawn it pretty firmly a long time ago with a few pieces of music that were incomplete and could be subsequently given some degree of completion. Like on the – I forget what it was called . . . it was an album I did back . . . it was Nightcap.

Oh, right, the bits and pieces record! Fans of A Passion Play were very happy to be able to hear the precursor of that.

Yeah, well, that’s it. There was some of that stuff that was sufficiently well played and sufficiently well formed, and even if there were songs that had not yet had lyrics written to them, there was a melody. Some melodic flute additions were made to the original backing tracks, just to give them something to make them worth listening to. But there are relatively few of those around, and they’ve all been released by now in one form or another.

Are you planning anything of a similar nature for the Thick as a Brick anniversary?

It’s a bit early to talk about that now. It will be a little while before I turn my attention to that one. You can ask me again in December or early January and I might be able to answer your question. At the moment I’ve got a little work to do between now and the end of October when we finish our tours this year.

...I'm not a huge fan of interviews as audio on CDs. It always feels like filling up space for the sake of it. And adding three 1969 BBC tracks relating to Stand Up - which had all been released previously - as extras on that particular reissue was just bizarre.

Having said that, I played the CD on the way into work today - for the first time in ages. Those acoustic songs really are fantastic (Cheap Day Return, Mother Goose etc) - full of atmosphere and nostalgia and quirkiness and the confidence of youth. Here's hoping the new edition adds all the genuinely relevant extras (mostly from the 'Living In The Past' 1972 compilation), in addition to the odd alternate take as referred to by Steven and Ian above...

...that wolfgangsvault.com have around 70 mins colour video of Jethro Tull opening for the Who in 1970, when 'My God' was the new song from the forthcoming LP in the set. Streaming for free at:

http://www.wolfgangsvault.com/jethro-tull/video/with-you-there-to-help-m...

he finally gets around, if he ever does, to reissuing the full version of "Living In The Past" that was only ever available from Japan in SHBM-CD form.

It's been languishing on my Amazon wish list since Cross-Eyed Mary was knee high to a flautist. It's one of those titles that's only ever available second-hand for the price of a salmon farm.

...as will Carol From Luton: a proper, lovingly mastered CD release for the LITP album in its full UK form (who knows, maybe adding some same-period curios, but only at the end as clearly defined bonuses so as not to compromise the much loved original running order) and with a reproduction of the incredibly luxuriant UK vinyl booklet/gatefold arrangement (a thing of wonder) would be a splendid idea.

But I have a feeling we might not get it, for all sorts of reasons: EMI/Ian will no doubt feel it's been superceded by other compilations; its exclusive tracks will have already appeared as bonuses on other expanded CDs; and not least its 40th anniversary - next year - is clearly going to see some kind of deluxe version of Thick As A Brick. (Though the existing deluxe version is hard to beat, I'd have thought - unless it will be another Steven Wilson remix. And if so, he'll have a hell of a job on his hands with that one...).

But here's hoping, anyway...

...edition of The Times.

He's not crazee about JT following Slade (well, whatever passes for Slade these days) at a forthcoming festival.

Blackfield,s last album only came out a few months ago, his new solo album,s out in September (plus solo tour) and now this!!

edited highlights of an interview with Ian Anderson:

IA: In September, there’s a collector’s edition of the Aqualung album being released by EMI, which I just finished working on in conjunction with Abbey Road studios. An engineer has remixed the album very nicely in 5.1 surround as well as stereo, so the collector’s edition will have the original mixes, the remixes, the 5.1 mixes and about 11 bonus tracks, including some outtakes from the album, which we were able to find amongst the old tapes stored at Abbey Road studios these days.

Will the 5.1 mix be on SACD or Blu-ray?

It’s not on Blu-ray. It will be released as a pack with a CD and DVD. We only just finished this in the last week or two. Believe it or not, I have a CD of the remixes sitting on my desk that arrived a couple days ago, but I only got back a couple of days ago from a Latin American tour. I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet, but I will to do that tomorrow morning. I listened to the final mixes, but I haven’t heard the actual mastered versions, which had been put into the final trim at Abbey Road studios.

Going back to the making of Aqualung, wasn’t it your first wife Jennie who came up with concept for the title track?

She had a photograph of some people she had been photographing when she was studying photography at a college in London. Her assignment was to go and photograph homeless people in South London, which she did. She came back with the photographs and she had written on the back of a photograph some description of one of the characters. The picture caught my eye and the word she used to describe him. And so I said, “Let’s make this into a song.” So we did and it became the title track of the album.

On the copy of Aqualung I have, she gets full credit for the song.

She was my first wife and that was a nice way of saying good bye.

I read the sessions for Aqualung were problematic — a new studio, new bass player who didn’t really play bass, scheduling. With all these issues, did you have any idea you were making such a pivotal record?

We did because we knew it had to be. It was either the beginning of the slippery slide to oblivion or it was going to be another step up in terms of a career. I won’t speak for the others, but I was very conscious of the fact that this was a pretty important album and it had to be a bit of a landmark album. We’d done OK with three albums, but this was the one that was going to make or break us. It wasn’t an easy album to make from a technical perspective.

We had one or two difficult times in the studio, which resulted in several attempts to record some of the songs. It wasn’t that they were bad — they just weren’t quite right. Some of those outtakes are on the collector’s edition. They’re part of the evolution to the final product. A couple of the songs we played live on stage for months before we actually went into the studio to record them. It wasn’t an easy album to make mostly surrounding the technical issues, working in a brand new studio using untried and untested equipment, which unfortunately was letting us down. It wasn’t an easy ride.

And you ended up playing lead guitar on “Locomotive Breath”?

Well, I play one of the guitar parts and Martin Barre plays the other. In fact, I was listening to those in the multi-track about three weeks ago in the studio and I said, “Hold on a minute…let me just see who’s playing what here.” We had three attempts to record it that were spectacularly unsuccessful and this was about the fourth time we tried to do it. So I went on out into the studio and just did a kind of metronome bass drum and high-hat track for three and half minutes or whatever. And then I went out and played some guitar parts with an electric guitar. And then we overdubbed some tom-toms and cymbals…well, our drummer did. And the bass part and the guitar part and tacked the keyboard introduction to the beginning.

It was rather like making a Pink Floyd album. None of us were in the studio at the same time (laughs). The only way to record that (“Locomotive Breath”) was to sort of lay it down. It has a sort of metronomic pulse. It wasn’t gelling as a band piece. So I went out and did it in a rather artificial way, but it resulted in the desired effect.

...Carol From Luton has got in touch off list (but of course!) to say: "here it is". And "it" turns out to be a monumental package - book, vinyl, 2CD, DVD & Bluray. Remixes, remasters, unreleased alt takes, rare quadrophonic mixes... it's an act of Aqualunacy. But, obviously, very welcome. And probably very expensive. I hope I'm right in saying I believe there'll also be a 2CD vanilla version available for those of us who don't live in castles with bespoke hi fi systems personally installed by Jonathan Richer (how appropriate!).

Check it all out here:

http://jethrotull.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=general&t...

...unlike the new Macca deluxe version of 'McCartney' which - to my astonishment and irritation - doesn't find room of either its 2 discs [totalling 35 mins and 27 mins] for either side of his same-period 'Another Day' single (and which has single handedly put me off buying a copy), this 2CD effort features ALL the possible additional tracks (Wondering Again & Just Trying To Be from the 'Living In The Past' comp; the 'Lick Your Fingers Clean' lost single; the 'Life's A Long Song' EP) PLUS a handful of early/alternate takes. And almost everything in a new mix too. Fantastic!

And for those who really need the 70s quad mix, the original LP mix, the 5.1 mix and whatever else, its there on the DVD/BluRay.

I thought last year's 'Stand Up' deluxe edition was lacking in much that was new or improved (using the existing 2003 remaster, re-using the 1970 Carnegie Hall concert - albeit remixed, but surely more appropriate to a 'Benefit' deluxe edition - and adding only one BBC session track and the uncut B-side '17' as tracks otherwise unavailable on CD. It was a lost opportunity to release the full 1969 Swedish radio concerts, let alone collect up the extant 1969 TV clips on a DVD.

As far as I'm aware there's no film at all of the 'Aqualung' line-up, which was an unusual tranistional one between the 1969-70 line up and the 1971-75 line-up - Jeffrey Hammond-Hammond had replaced Glenn Cornick on bass, but Barriemore Barlow had yet to replace Clive Bunker on drums. Having said all that, it's a tiny bit of an oversight not to have included the 'Life's A Long Song' promo film on the DVD...

Anyway, let's have some of this:

...here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Aqualung-40th-Anniversary-Special-Jethro/dp/B005...

Sounds terrific on headphones - and don't the alt versions of Up The Pool and My God sound fascinating?

on iTunes a couple of days ago, and I would like to go on record as saying that it sounds FANTASTIC! Such an improvement on the 25th Anniversary re-issue. Well played, Steve Wilson from out of The Porcupine Tree!

:-)