Please be aware that, while I genuinely like some Tull stuff, I certainly don’t rate them particularly highly in the great scheme of things (their version of “The Dambusters March” is literally unlistenable). I’m well aware that they’re the least fashionable band in the world and will probably remain so forever (I don’t think they’d benefit even from a major Prog revival should it happen, so erratic and wilful is Ian Anderson’s exaggerated troubadour shtick that was critically despised even then). But I do feel that the influence of punk so as to exclude virtually everything in the preceding few years has become overt, and it was partially a genuine expression of historical interest and partially an act of sheer, wilful subversion. At a time when Freaky Trigger is giving ample space to destructions of contemporary sacred cows, I thought I’d turn it round, to praise a band whose awfulness is now pretty much taken as read, to question the orthodoxy.
And I think it’s worked as such.