Geoff Tobia Jr.

Revisiting the impact of Jethro Tull's 'Aqualung' 50 years later

Inspired by The Beatles, Jethro Tull formed in the U.K. to write music and cashed in on sounds that progressive rock bands like Cream, Led Zeppelin and King Crimson were pioneering in the mid-to-late 1960s. As lead singer Ian Anderson explained in a 2018 interview with Decades TV, “It was the beginning of that improvised music slipping into the popular format. It came via blues, it came via Black American blues and it had impacted a whole generation of young, middle-class, white British boys, most of whom went to art colleges.”