Jethro Tull were on a high in 1973 as they set about recording the follow-up to acclaimed concept album Thick As A Brick. But when all Ian Anderson’s plans collapsed, he was forced into an about-face. The resulting record, A Passion Play, remains one of his biggest regrets. Prog explored the story in 2024.
In July 1973 Jethro Tull delivered the follow-up to Thick As A Brick, with expectations of matching the 1972 album’s success. And while A Passion Play did indeed follow TAAB to Number 1 in the US, it generated a split in opinions between fans and critics.
But if everything had gone to Ian Anderson’s original plan, the record would never have existed. It wasn’t the project they’d set out to work on at the Château d’Hérouville in northern France – a property known as ‘the honky château’ by artists who’d recorded there, including Elton John and Pink Floyd.
“We were in a very positive place musically,” former Tull guitarist Martin Barre told Prog in 2024. “Ian had some great songs and great ideas. But the studio kept constantly breaking down and interrupting the flow of music.”
On top of that, the living conditions were unhygienic, verging on the intolerable. “It was altogether unpleasant,” Anderson recalled. “One or two people got scabies from dirty bedlinen.”
Subsisting on meals of unidentifiable cheese, undefined meat (later discovered to be horse) and sediment-seeped wine, most of the band fell ill. “Everybody was struck down with explosive diarrhoea,” Barre said. “We’d be doing a take, then you’d hear an ‘Ohhhhh!’ and the clatter of drumsticks, and that’d be Barrie [Barlow] running to the nearest toilet. It was horrific.”
Eventually Anderson called a band vote – should they find somewhere else in Europe or should they head back to London? “Two of them quite liked living in Switzerland, and two of them wanted to go home and see their mums,” he said. “So the casting vote was down to me. I thought, ‘Let’s all go back to London and start again in Morgan Studios,’ where we’d recorded Thick As A Brick.”
Anderson didn’t just dump the château – he dumped all the work Tull had done there and elected to start a new album from scratch. “I rejected everything aside from one piece, which cropped up on the War Child album [the single Bungle In The Jungle]. I just thought we needed a clean sheet.
“It was just a case of, ‘Well, we’d better get on with it and start again’, so we did. We probably lost about three or four weeks in the wasted session in the château, but we pushed ahead with the replacement as fast as we could.”
Barre recalled: “We probably groaned, but it was a more positive approach to start again.”
With time pressing, Anderson went home and put together the songs for the new project quite quickly. The resulting material was, like TAAB, a concept album – only in a much darker vein, tracking a journey through the afterlife and the fears and risks involved, and presented as a single piece of music. “It had a more downbeat and rather serious theme, in contrast to the frivolous, upbeat material we’d attempted in the château,” he said.
He believes the album was launched more or less at the time he’d envisaged for the scrapped work. Like its predecessor it topped the charts in the States – but it shattered the delicate dynamic the band had developed with the press. Former supporter Chris Welch of Melody Maker called it “very poor music indeed” while the best Rolling Stone could say was: “An intellectual tease inflated with portent – but devoid of wonder.”
It wasn’t necessarily bad design – enthusiasm and over‐attention to detail made it quite a hard thing to listen to
Then the split rumours began circulating. Anderson only discovered people were talking about his band’s demise when he saw the headline in Melody Maker. It turned out his manager, Terry Ellis, had conspired with the editor to run it as an attention-seeking scam. “It just made it sound like we’d stomped off into the sunset because of some bad reviews,” Anderson said unhappily in 2024.
In 2017, writer and Tull expert Martin Webb confirmed A Passion Play’s status as “a Marmite album,” telling Prog its notable features were: “considerably more alto sax than flute, a myriad of ever-changing time-signatures, and cryptic lyrics charting a journey into the afterlife – broken only by the interlude of the Lewis Carroll-type nonsense poem The Story Of The Hare Who Lost His Spectacles, which tends to date the album somewhat.”
Accepting that, for some, the album “is a work of genius and it will always be their favourite Tull album because of its complex intensity,” he continued: “For others, it’s nothing more than overblown and slightly pompous. Too prog rock by half!”
Ah yes, the sax. Looking back three years after the record’s 2014 reissue, Anderson told Prog: “I tried to persuade Steven Wilson that we should give that one a miss on the remix series! But he insisted on wanting to do it. I said, ‘Can we ditch all the saxophone for a start and try to thin it out a bit… so it isn’t so dense and impenetrable?’ Steven persuaded me that all of these things have their part; and we made it a little bit more transparent and listenable, I think.”
It particularly suffers from the saxophone, which is really just a damned annoying thing to have done. I don’t know what got into my head
He added: “The reason A Passion Play was like that wasn’t necessarily bad design – it was enthusiasm and over‐attention to detail that made it quite a hard thing to listen to. As a record producer, I failed on that album. I didn’t impose myself on the proceedings in the way I should have done to tame it down and create some contrasts and balance.
“It particularly suffers from the saxophone, which is really just a damned annoying thing to have done. I don’t know what got into my head… but there you go.”
“By the end of track two, we’re into something like our tenth different time signature,” Prog said in our review of the 2014 edition, “but Wilson still plucks a fair bit of wheat from the chaff: the fluttering flutes on The Memory Bank sound like a bank of starlings swirling overhead, and the memorable mini-hooks amid the bouts of instrumental tourette’s sound more pronounced, offset by the lyrical humour that was always present.
“The soft synthy intermissions of Forest Dance #1 and #2 sweetly bookend the distinctly ‘WTF’ qualities of The Story Of The Hare Who Lost His Spectacles … the kind of jokey indulgence few bands would get away with now. But as a period piece it’s still a compelling curio.”
Much of the honky château material appeared in the years following A Passion Play’s release, notably as part of 1993’s Nightcap album, where it was bundled under the banner ‘The Château D’isaster Sessions.’ Anderson added new flute parts in place of unfinished vocal and melody lines. Versions with the Wilson touch came with the 2014 edition, of which Prog argued that “some of the sessions might have offset the madness quite well, and elegant folk fancies like Sailor and Only Solitaire will certainly make for easier listening for any relative newcomers to the Tull back catalogue.”
It was perhaps a victim of its time – another apparently impenetrable concept record in an era stuffed full of them
Prog’s sister title Classic Rock ranked A Passion Play at No. 12 in the band’s 21-album discography to date in 2016, saying it had “gained a more sympathetic audience as years have passed, and deservedly so. It was perhaps a victim of its time – another apparently impenetrable concept record in an era stuffed full of them – and it also came a year after Thick As A Brick, a record that had sent up the entire notion of concept albums in dazzling style.”
In 2018, while breaking down Tull’s catalogue in his own words, Anderson once again sounded some regret, calling it “the ‘step too far’ album” and adding: “Steve Harris [Iron Maiden] loves A Passion Play. I’m glad someone liked it!”
