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Ian Anderson interview

Ian Anderson today

Jethro Tull

 

Ian Anderson has blazed an unorthodox trail in the music business for over forty years as flautist, vocalist and frontman to Jethro Tull. Their unique blend of styles demonstrating, once again, just how broad a 'genre' rock music can be. Ian has over thirty albums under his belt both as a solo artist and with Tull, including the classics Aqualung and Thick As A Brick. The band's longevity is mainly attributable to the continued presence of Anderson despite numerous other personnel changes and due too to his strengths as songwriter and musical visionary.

Passionate about a number of topics in addition to music, we caught up with Ian and this is the interview he gave to www.retrosellers.com

 

 

 

 

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Ian: Hello David. Here I am. Sorry, I rang a wrong number just now and spoke to some chap who could have been you!...
 
Digger: It was a lot more likely in the old days with the old finger dial to get a wrong number, wasn’t it?
 
Ian: I think you have to try that much harder these days.
 
Digger: Congrats on the MBE. What impact has it had?

 

 

 

 
Ian: Wow. I don’t think anyone’s actually asked me in those terms where I have to think about it! I thought about it at the time, because it was a difficult decision to make. Awarded an honour by the then Tony Blair government. And at the point when I learned of this it was, in fact, a Gordon Brown government. And it was only my wife who pointed it out to me after I’d agreed to accept it that it must have pre-dated the Brown era and that it was a Tony Blair period of awards. Because the awards are given essentially by a committee at Westminster. Not to suggest that Tony Blair himself would have known anything about it, probably. But, nonetheless, it felt, because I was opposed to many of the policies of the Blair government, I would have found it difficult to have accepted had I received notice of that award some months earlier. Unfortunately, they sent it to the wrong address and it only cropped up with me when Number Ten called my son. Because I was on tour in America at the time, and I got a message at 4 ‘o clock in the morning saying “We need to know right now.” And so I said “That’s very kind of you, I’ll try and be there.” But afterwards I found myself thinking “Whoops!” However, in the spirit of the occasion, to be awarded a peer group award it’s something that I suppose you have to accept generously. And say it’s part of the tradition of Britain to give awards to people for years of toil and good service of the country in some way. Although one has to be a little dubious about what value there is for ‘Services to music’, which is what I think was the excuse. On the other hand when you see some rich banker whose services have simply been to take huge bonuses and make a pile of money you have to worry about some of the other folks who get awards far loftier than a mere MBE. So, in that context, I think of the MBE as the village postman award where people plug away doing stuff because they are motivated to do it because they are serving the community in some way. I think of it when I find myself on a tour, on a train, going to some God-forsaken little town in some far flung part of the country to play a concert to 1,500 people in a town hall. And risk trying to get back to my hotel room on a Friday night when the pubs are chucking out – not that they do anymore, which is half the problem. People just drink on and on and it spills out onto the street and it’s actually quite terrifying.
 
Digger: Most towns are the same these days.
 
Ian: The last couple of tours I have found myself taking circuitous routes back to my hotel to avoid walking down the high street. It is pretty much across the board throughout the country.
 
Digger: You can blame the councils, because they are the ones that grant the licences and who allow pubs, bars and nightclubs to take over a string of buildings in the town centre whose soul purpose is to sell drink.
 
Ian: I’ve no problem with people having a good night out on a weekend or whenever, it’s just that, sadly, most people can’t hold their drink and they have the capacity of children when it comes to absorbing alcohol and maintaining some element of dignity.
 
Digger: It’s a British thing though, the extremes. The Europeans seem to have got the balance right. They seem to understand alcohol more and it’s more a part of the culture so that they don’t binge drink.
 
Ian: There are places where you have to cross the other side of the street quickly in Europe as well, but generally speaking it’s my experience that it’s less frightening being out on the streets of Europe or, indeed, in north America than it is in the UK. It’s unsavoury in some towns. Mentioning no names, there are places that unless you are looking to pick a fight or get involved in one you would be advised not to be wandering around and the sad thing is that some of our great theatres in the UK are positioned right in the midst of all that. I do think it’s rather alarming for the audiences who come to our shows and spill out of the theatre at night and really are taking their lives in their hands when they try to find their car or use public transport. And three quarters of an hour later when I’m on my way home it’s probably got considerably worse.
 
Digger: What does your Scottishness mean to you?
 
Ian: It means about as much as being English because my father was Scottish, my mother was English. Essentially I had family backgrounds in two of the four nations that make up our United Kingdom and it’s something I suppose I’ve always carried with me, a sense of Britishness rather than being simply Scottish or English. And although it’s traditional it would appear that we take our nationality after our father rather than mother. I remember as a child finding that rather odd without knowing what the word ‘sexist’ meant – it seemed a little bit odd. It was convenient because having been born and brought up in Scotland I was quite happy to avoid too much Englishness lest I get into yet another fight in the high street for being from Scotland’s southern peninsula. So, I think I probably thought of myself as Scottish up until the age of 12 when I came to live and go to school in England when I had to adopt a rather broader view. Within days of starting school people were trying to call me ‘Jock’ which I actually took real exception to. It’s a bit like being called ‘Chalky’ if you were a Caribbean second generation schoolboy. It did feel a little bit offensive and a bit like targeting you in a sort of a nationalistic way. I think for that reason I’ve never been much of a flag waver and I’ve never really taken to the idea of national pride going too far beyond the terraces of the football stadium.
 
Digger: The proms?

 

 

 

 

 

Ian: Well, it’s kind of alright when it’s in that sort of silly way, but you see it rearing its ugly head not only in our country but also historically in many countries and, even in the wake of 9/11, there was a bit of flag waving going on in America which I found was taking a slightly ugly turn.
 
Digger: With the taking of Baghdad, they made that real mistake of placing the stars and stripes on statues and buildings.
 
Ian: But only a few months later the quiet word went out to American forces to start to remove and play down the American flag in terms of it being on uniforms, on vehicles and so on and so forth as they finally woke up to the inevitable. It was creating an on-going feeling of conquest, combined with some notion of vengeance and retaliation. And some of the other motives that were behind the Bush administration launching itself into a country which, at that point, the weapons inspectors had demonstrated had no really threatening arsenal of weaponry. Further that they were unlikely to be able to get it and who were pretty much under the control of the west anyway in terms of sanctions and over flying and so on. This was simply a Bush and Blair piece of histrionic flag waving to get their names in the history books – every Prime Minister or President probably thinks you can’t be a REAL Prime Minister or President unless you’ve got a decent war to your name. Unfortunately, Blair grew up in a long shadow that was left by Margaret Thatcher. And Bush needed a war and by God he got one. I think Tony Blair, even now, and I’m not one who believes he’s all bad... I think there is a naivety and a charm to Tony Blair and certainly in many ways he proved to be a very diligent, hardworking, public servant but he made a couple of really, really big mistakes. No-one better than Tony Blair knows that this morning. ( The European President has just been appointed and it’s not Blair.) He’s waking up this morning thinking “The Job I always wanted didn’t come to me.” And up until the last few days he might have been hoping that somehow it might slide his way but at the time Tony Blair left government we all believed that he had his sights set on European Presidency. And it would be a very different one to the one it will be under the Belgian bloke whose name we don’t even know or most of us don’t even though we’ve heard it repeated on the news during the last few hours. What the Europeans wanted was a relatively low-key choice.
 
Digger: He’s Mr. Rompuy. I know because they have already made the joke about rumpy pumpy.
 
Ian: Oh, did they? Good, just when I saw him on TV in the wee small hours I thought “God, he looks a bit like Denis Thatcher.” The ghost of Maggie has come back to haunt us.
 
Digger: Can you tell us who your favourite songwriters are, or were?
 
Ian: Well my favourite songwriters were not Lennon and McCartney. Everybody seems to think, you know, these great songwriting partnerships and great songwriters who delivered the world’s great hits and there’s no doubt at all that Lennon and McCartney, although mostly McCartney as it turns out, wrote some absolutely groundbreaking very memorable pop tunes. But I don’t actually enjoy them that much and I was never really a great fan of The Beatles growing up. I much preferred the music of jazz and blues and that’s what I was listening to. Mostly acoustic rather than electric. My favourite songwriters were a bit more obscure, I suppose. Cat Stevens, as he was then, wrote some very good folky pop tunes and I think Bob Dylan contributed a lot to the concept of the singer-songwriter without actually leaving behind a legacy of great work. I think he left behind a few good tunes but his great offering was actually the idea of the singer-songwriter. He was the one that really brought that home to a generation of people that you could sit down and simply strum the guitar and sing a halfway decent tune and make a living and, of course, he spawned in his wake the likes of Donovan and various other crooners. But I think we often forget that some of the great songwriting skills that came from the less ‘poppy’ singer-songwriters of that era. People like Roy Harper and Bert Jansch - they in their way took some of the elements that made Bob Dylan a universal force and didn’t achieve his popularity but left behind them some absolutely sparkling repertoire. There are some people who love the music of Nick Drake, although perhaps they’ve only discovered it in recent years since he became something of a cult really. And it is sadly the cult of the dead – there is something romantic about the tragedy of young lives lost to drink, drugs and despair.
 
Digger: What about songwriters like Ray Davies?
 
Ian: Well, Ray Davies was actually on tour I noticed at various places in America I was at in the last couple of weeks. And I rather applauded the fact that he was out on tour doing something with a choir rather than necessarily singing The Kinks’ jukebox hits. So, in that sense, I suppose you always have to admire someone who is a restless soul who is going out there and trying to do something that isn’t just the repetition of the Status Quo. Nothing wrong with what they do but it is repetitious and more of the same and every performance I guess is more or less like the last.
 

 

 

 

 

Digger: It’s what they and their fans like.
 
Ian: Yeah, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. And they do it well and bring a lot of comfort blanket joy to a lot of people. But somehow the comfort zone is not a great place for me and for other people who are a little more restless. And who want to go into sometimes more uncharted territory and challenge both an audience and yourself to deliver something that isn’t necessarily what people expect. But giving people a little bit of what they expect is probably a good idea if you don’t want to be too confrontational and I gather Yusaf Islam, as he is now known, had a bit of a rough ride in his opening concert now that he’s returned to the stage. And perhaps a bit of a salutary lesson that if you do come back, even if you change your name, the punters want to still hear the greatest hits. And because the Cat Stevens repertoire was essentially quite ‘poppy’ I think it’s kind of difficult to have somewhere else to take that kind of music without trying to recreate what you did 35 years ago. That’s a tough nut to crack if you’re in your late 50s or 60 years old.
 
Digger: What are your biggest achievements and what would you still like to accomplish?
 
Ian: Em, well I think there’s one simple thing and that’s achieving, by demonstration, that you can actually have a long and fairly profitable career playing music without being driven by the obvious controls of commercialism and without having to fall into the clutches of record companies, managers, agents, record producers telling you what to do. I have been lucky enough to have survived for a long time doing what I wanted to do and taking on the mantel of management and producing records and doing a lot of the nuts and bolts stuff as well as the creative stuff.
 
Digger: And running businesses as well.
 
Ian: That’s not particularly important to the music. The thing that I find an achievement there is demonstrating to other musicians is that you can, once in a while make it without having to conform. There have been a few other people like that. Frank Zappa, up until his death, had continued to prove that in the face of commercial pressures he could still make a living and present the world with some very interesting and challenging and diverse music. When you go back to the songwriters, both he and Captain Beefheart were probably the two Americans that I most enjoyed and to this day would probably place pretty much head and shoulders above everybody else. In terms of fitting into my particular tastes. I revere them in quite different ways for their quirky input into the world of popular and rock music and I think they stuck to their guns for the most part. Although poor old Captain Beefheart went through a sticky patch in the post Spotlight Kid/Clear Spot era and tried desperately to have a hit and it was just awful and the Magic Band split up and it all went pear shaped. He did make quite a few good records after that but at a time when his health was failing and the world had decided they didn’t need cranky, weird, wacky and rather dangerous people – because he was a dangerous man. I mean in the sense that he brought a lot of havoc around him and was not an easy person to work with. Having had Beefheart and his merry men on tour with us we obviously got to know them quite well. The good the bad and the ugly.
 
Digger: Album cover art. There's been a demise in this with the advent of CD and downloads. What do you think of that?
 
Ian: In the days of vinyl it was a big part of making the record. It was almost like decorating the Christmas tree or putting the candles on the birthday cake. It was something you really looked forward to in quite a joyous way.
 
Digger: It was the shop window wasn’t it?
 
Ian: Yeah, and some great and quite iconic artwork was created.
 
Digger: Including by you guys.
 
Ian: Well, a bit here and there but there were, I think, a number of great album covers back in the late 60s and early 70s and creative, clever, innovative ideas in terms of the packaging. Because from a purely pedantic point of view that’s all it was. It was just a cornflake box. But people did a lot with that cornflake box because they had a canvas to work with which was manageable even though it was only a foot square. It was something on which you could make a picture, you could do artwork. When it came to the cassette, of course, it just became a cigarette packet-sized nonsense and the CD wasn’t much better. And I think we all, probably if we dig out early CDs, as we go through the years we probably find ourselves squinting and thinking “How the hell did I ever manage to read the liner notes?" Then or now, I know this because I’ve just had to try and change the artwork to try and consolidate for a re-release of the Jethro Tull Christmas album bundled with a live recording from St. Bride’s church last year. We obviously had to do new artwork but reduce the overall amount of artwork to fit into an 8-page booklet. You find yourself up against some really critical problems because just going down in font size is not the answer and it’s hard enough to read anyway especially when you’re having to print on anything other than a clear white background. It becomes really difficult to do artwork and arguably for the growing percentage of music which is purchased or ‘obtained’ via the Internet the artwork is almost irrelevant. It just ceases to be of importance and you can go online and find the lyrics…
 
Digger: Or somebody’s version of them. It’s not always accurate.
 
Ian: That’s about as close as you’re going to get. It’s not always accurate and quite often in desperation if I’m resurrecting some song in mid-tour and I don’t have access to my files of old song lyrics then I go online and ‘dial-in’ to the lyrics and often find there are quite a few mistakes. But it immediately comes back to me what the true lyrics should be. If they misheard  a word I can put it right but it is a good way of people being able to read those words on the Internet. It again poses the question of them being illegally used because they are copyrighted material but on the other hand that’s the changing culture in which we find ourselves and the folks who run the major record companies, if indeed there are many. I suspect that if you knock on the doors of EMI these days there’s just the cleaner there now. It’s rather sad. I mean, I have a meeting with EMI on Monday and I’m wondering if anyone will actually turn up. Within the record companies they still cling to the notion that someone’s going to unveil a new business model that will make the industry profitable again but those times are not coming back. You cannot persuade people after a few years that they should start paying for something after a whole generation of people has got used to the fact that you’re a mug if you pay for it because you can find it on the Internet and not pay for it at all. And, of course, that also applies to movies and almost every form of copyrighted material which is available on the Internet. I think that we have to accept that it will be HUGELY damaging to future generations of creative people that they can’t protect their copyright and there is going to be no substitute for it. So the folks who are prepared to go out there and allow their work to be disseminated without any form of remuneration are likely perhaps not to be the people who are best at their craft. And musicians in the future will find it very difficult to have any way to cover their costs, let alone to make money. I think most musicians are perfectly happy to male a living wage doing what they do, on average, but that's going to be come increasingly impossible and for young bands starting up today. They're expected to go out and play for nothing and if they make a record it's their home made record made in their bedroom and they have to be able to flog a few at the gigs to be able to pay for the petrol for the van. And that's it. There will also be the few who rise and there might be the winners of some God-awful talent competition on TV at the weekend rather than people with any real individuality or talent and originality.

 

 

   

 

 

Digger: Who are the bands that you rate at the moment?

Ian: Well, if you'd asked me that question when I was 18 or 20 I think I would have been struggling to answer it because I've never really followed the pop charts and I don't really know who's doing what. I mean, I hear names bandied about and occasionally I hear people but I don't think I've come across anything that I thought was substantially groundbreaking in the last 20 years. The big revolutions in music were technical rather than artistic and so rock music today is kind of more of the same. There have been a few little quirky additions, certain little quirky scales have appeared, particularly in the beginning of the 90s I guess we began to hear allusions to more Arabic scales and guitarists started tuning down a tone or a semi-tone looking for a slightly darker and deeper sound. And then they started to slip into some heavy metal and hard rock music. I would say that's about it - there's not anything to my ears that sounds new. Rock music has gone through so many evolutions since it began, arguably, in the late 50s. I think it's covered quite enough ground and I think it's done everything it can do and still be called rock music. Jazz has done everything it could do and still be called jazz. Classical music - there hasn't been any substantial new classical music, the more avant garde it becomes less enjoyable and less intelligible just as free jazz became less enjoyable and less intelligible. And rock music, when it just becomes white noise and in the most extreme forms of metal hysteria, then it ceases to become enjoyable and it just becomes a rather mindless backdrop to fist waving, jumping up and down and taking a lot of drugs. As such it's not very satisfying to anyone with a few working brain cells left.

Digger: That's what the mods and the punks were doing at various times, so it's a generational thing.

Ian: Well, maybe so but arguably the Sex Pistols still had a couple of good tunes and the mods had a lot of good tunes. But these days I think the extreme forms of rock music have become rather tuneless. They're more about attitude, and noise and the visual and they're also about anger. Also about some emotions that you have to worry when they seem to be overwhelmingly the stuff of which performances are made. It's really quite frightening - I've met some of these folks and they always, so far, turn out to be rather nice, gentle, humble people off stage. And yet they go on stage and carve out this amazingly violent and aggressive mindless inhuman kind of performance which I think really doesn't do them any favours and certainly doesn't take culture forward in anyway. There's nothing wrong with a bit of anger - I think a lot of my music then and now depended on a degree of anger and you can use that very purposefully and forcefully whether it's to write a play or a movie or a tune. But you've got to balance it with some of the other stuff which is the tenderness and the whimsy and the romantic. There's got to be something other than meat and potatoes on your plate. We hope that it's part and parcel of songwriting  that you create a little more dynamic than merely having everything just operate on the same level. 

Digger: What makes you laugh?

Ian: The absurd. I suppose what makes me laugh is something that seems on the surreal and absurd side and in that way I'm probably right in the mainstream of what makes most British people laugh. I think there has been, since the early days of radio, a not uniquely but strongly British way of developing comedy in a way that, as I say, is not uniquely British but we've made it something of our own. With the landmark eras of The Goons and The Pythons and the current brigade, like Eddie Izzard, who is like a jazz musician and is thinking on his feet, appearing to go off on all these mad completely random tangents. But of course he's not and I'm sure he's like a jazz musician and it may seem like it's all improvisation but there's a lot of structure and form underlying that illusion of randomness but that's the stuff that makes me laugh - the surreal and the absurd.

Digger: What about sad?

Ian: The lack of people ever being able to focus on the real issues. The real issues are not about whether to buy new wind turbines or the new Toyota Prius, the issues are actually about people coming to terms with population management on a global level. And being able to think beyond the selfishness of this, or the next generation in terms of realising that just because they're not there anymore it doesn't give them licence to consume the planet. Which is what's happening. It's been happening since we began but it didn't really matter until about fifty years ago which is when it really started to kick in and we started to see the beginning of a population growth to a level which was unsustainable. When you add that into the, what we are almost politely asked to call, Global Warming. It's not, it's Global Heating, we're not just talking about sublime basking on the Mediterranean shores, we're talking about something which is producing extreme weather conditions already and in the future, combined with increased population, we'll see enormous impact globally. I'm deeply saddened that people, many of them who are my friends, many whom I know, just don't want to think about the realities. The idea that somehow our children or our grandchildren's generation will put it all right is a nonsense because I don't think it is thus far within the human condition to think responsibly beyond the fragility of this life and we really do need to start to develop a more responsible culture for the future. Before it clearly is too late for at least half of the current population of the planet. It's just not sustainable and happily there has been a reawakening of these issue which were taboo to politicians and clergy alike. There was published in just the last few days a UN paper looking at the current scenarios regarding global population and hopefully it will stimulate a long-needed debate. I am a supporter and benefactor of the Optimum Population Trust, a body which looks to try to bring these issues to the public and to politicians. But it's not a body that is suggesting that we have population control and coercive measures to reduce the population. Instead to educate people, particularly in the growing economies and particularly gender-based education. Educating young females in the developing countries - that is going to produce the kind of change we want to see very soon.

Digger: Sometimes you'll see in the paper or hear on telly someone saying "I've got 14 children and 28 grandkids." And the reaction to that is congratulations and applause. I always hate that and think why is the fact that somebody has literally generated all those people a cause for congratulations and why does that person see that as an achievement and something to be proud of?

Ian: They are the human equivalent of stamp collectors. They're people who just like collecting children and there are those poor, sad specimens of humanity who, in the face of any common-sense where they clearly cannot afford the upkeep for a large family, still try. And wherever you find large families, in our country anyway, you're almost certainly going to find spongers. People who are not paying their way and who are blind and for whom the comfort of having more babies is an achievement in itself. Without the aid of the state and the rest of us to support the very few people can support large families. The idea of large families in more traditionally under-developed countries as we might politely call them, is there for a reason because there's a high death rate amongst the new-born and the young. The idea of having a lot of children as a means of having a family income is becoming increasingly outdated. Indeed, small perfectly formed families are the answer and one or two children are a great joy. If you have three, four or ten children, well then that life is precious but it's also, I think, morally indefensible in the world in which we are now beginning to play our increasingly destructive part. And I don't think there is a moral defence and I don't think there's a right. What was then isn't now and the right to have as many children as you want, well, I suppose there is a right but it's not a right that most of us choose to take up because most of us feel we don't want to have more children or we shouldn't have more children. But there will always be those people who say "I just like having them around, the more the better. " Like those insane people who have fifty cats or a barn-full of dogs.

Digger: Which they can't look after properly.

Ian: They can't.

Digger: And the council or RSPCA have to come in to sort them out.

Ian: That's right, and I think the state of the large families in western society means that the people who do it are morally challenged because they take out of society more than they put in. We have to start to become team players, all of us, and to stop at two is a pretty good message for most folks. That doesn't mean that if number three comes along then it's any less valuable and the right to life is still clearly there. But there's an onus on parents to be responsible. If we keep at the current increase then we're talking about a 50% increase in planetary population in just over 40 years and the only thing to mitigate that will be global disaster on a scale that most people can't imagine. But it's difficult to think that's not going to happen in substantial degree in places that can least afford it.

Digger: What makes you hopeful?

Ian: I suppose the hope is simply that common sense - the wedding of scientific opinion with spiritual belief, will somehow come together to offer something beyond a mere pragmatism and that we'll actually start to enjoy the idea that we can preserve human life long term. I mean, there's enough bad stuff out there - a couple of asteroids are wandering around the near universe with our name on them. And there's always the potential for some geological disaster.

Digger: Or a rogue state exploding a device.

Ian: Yes, that's definitely own goal stuff. If we're talking about the forces of nature then there's a definite risk that we take but I don't think there's an excuse that it doesn't matter what we do because sooner or later a giant asteroid is going to wipe out the planet so we might as well order the new Porsche now. I don't think that's a good way of thinking. I think that we have to suggest that that the big asteroid hasn't hit us for at least many tens of thousands of years and it may well not in the next tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Millions of years from now planet earth may still be wobbling along its course and it would be absolutely awful to think that somehow we snuffed out civilisation through some absurd belief that it was going to all end sometime soon. I'll bet that right now some tosspot banker or investment manager is ordering his new Porsche because the world's coming to an end in 2012 anyway. He might as well speed on the motorway, burnt up a ton of gas and have a good time because he read that. There are people out there stupid enough and selfish enough to do that. I know some of those people and I find it very difficult to look them in the eye knowing that they don't give a f@@k about the future. I'm talking about people really close to me and I don't want to say who they are but I know people who have the view "I don't mind about that, let someone else sort it out." If you were to draw them in conversation along  those lines and they were to say the things that I think they truly believe then I would have no option but to say "I don't ever want to see you in my house again. I don't wanna work with you or see your face." I would be forced to do that and so I find it quite horrifying that there are people close to me who are irresponsible citizens of the planet. That deeply disturbs me. We all do it up to a point but there are those who just don't feel any guilt and they don't feel the need to do their bit and play their part. "I'm just gonna have a good time. I've worked hard and I do what I wanna do." They don't give a s@@t about what their grandchildren will be facing, let along the grandchildren of another person in a far off country in another part of the world. We all have right in our midst these deniers. Times have changed and our two generations, my parents and me, we're responsible for most of the s@@t that's going to be falling on the heads of the next two generations after us and I think that's something we should take to bed with us every night and we should wake up with some resolve to do a little something each day to try and reduce that impact. If you ask me what is hope then my hope is that people will take the view that I've just expounded - that there is some little thing you can do and we can make a difference and that we'll start behaving responsibly and stop waving our f@@king little flags around and thinking only about our national interests and only about our immediate environment. We do have to start thinking in global terms and we'll have to make enormous sacrifices in the future when we deal with issues such as the biggies - population, management of immigration long-term, the free movement of people around the planet - those who are in the worst places as climate change really does bring its effects to bear. What do we do? Do we turn them away from our countries? Do we let them all in and hope somehow that the overfilled lifeboat which is the UK can accept another 50 or 60 million people.

Digger: It's already feeling very claustrophobic here even in my lifetime, you just feel the presence of people more in the UK wherever you go, even to previously remoter areas. And the roads and infrastructure, as well as new housing, have taken up a lot of space.

Ian: I was driving through the wilds of eastern Washington state last week to and from Spokane and I said to my wife, who was driving the rental car, if you look out of the window we're looking at hundreds of thousands of acres visible to us on either side of this straight line freeway - just unerringly crossing this great big space where there are just rolling, very sparsely grassed fields. Only sustenance for some very extensive cattle farming, relatively unproductive vast open spaces. And you look at these and you can see maybe ten miles ahead of you and there's a little farmhouse and it's the only building for literally tens of miles. You look at that and think "How do you square that idea?" You could build ten cities the size of London in that area and it would have visually little impact and room and room to spare to build the monstrosities that are being built in Dubai. You could build, and there's plenty of room on old planet earth to put a whole load more people in a whole lot of big urban centres. However, there is no way to feed and water them and to sustain them. We have these big open spaces but it's absurd to think that we somehow can fill them. We don't have the technology or the ability or the food production, let alone everything else in terms of energy production and the infrastructure required to support those big urban populations. So while we have this vast wilderness, it needs to stay just that way - it's not there to be filled up, because the bottom line is that we have precious few tillable acres. And in years to come we're going to have a whole lot less as the great grain baskets of north America and Canada and middle Europe start to find, as they increasingly are now, that climate change is already having a detrimental impact on our ability to produce food. So it's a frightening scenario and the hope is that between science, what's left of our spiritual world and the guidance and consciousness that comes from our religious leaders will engender something that it beyond mere pragmatism. That we will want to change and want to build a new culture of responsibility. It won't just be because it's that or die and we'll want to do it for more altruistic reasons. That's the hope that I have. Forget politicians - they are servants of the people and they will do exactly what we tell them they should do. The bottom line is they're not the masters, we are the masters in a democracy. But if we don't actually tell them what we want then they will carry on in their own sweet way merely perpetuating their short-lived bit of power rather than doing what they should be doing which is serving the interests of the people. We also have to tell them that we are prepared to do what it takes to make a difference. Thus far we're not doing that and thus far the politicians don't even want to begin suggesting the really scary rules that we have to put in place. You see that all the time - early on in any political administration they will talk loftily about issues of climate change and immigration. However when to comes to the time they are seeking re-election the difficult stuff disappears from the agenda and anything that sounds like it's an imposition goes on the back burner. That's the way it is. If we let them know we are prepared to endure a period of austerity and that we want to be driven by good common-sense and by continuing with this given that growing the economy is absolutely everything. We're constantly being told we HAVE to grow the economy and my answer to that is "Why?" The only reason for doing that is because we want to create more demand for more goods, most of which are very short-lived products. It's actually time to shrink the economy and shrink the population progressively over the next hundred years. It's already happening in some countries where there's a natural reduction in population rates. There's some possibility for optimism but it requires a major culture shift. If I can't count on friends and family for that view I certainly can't count on Mrs Bloggs with her eight children or politicians. 

Digger: Just a couple more questions.

Ian: Sorry David, I'm running late now. I'm talking too much. My fault, not yours.

Digger: Don't worry, that's what an interview is for. I just wondered how much interaction there is between you and your fans with the website? I notice you have a number of articles on there.

Ian: Most of the words on there are words that I have written. I'm not only involved with it, I leave a few little snippets of news stories and posting things to our webmaster in America. Most of it comes from my fingertips dancing on a QWERTY keyboard!

Digger: You have a love of wild cats. Have you been involved with the Born Free Foundation and Travers and McKenna?

Ian: No I haven't.

Digger: The Indian food thing on your website, I enjoyed reading about that. Why do you think there aren't many British restaurants around? You said that Indian has taken over from fish and chips.

Ian: There are lots of British restaurants but they are usually found in places like New York and they're called English Gastronomic Pubs. With grand names like The Duke of York.

Digger: Are they selling roly poly and spotted dick?

Ian: I had a cottage pie after the concert at the Beacon Theatre, NY, just a few weeks ago in a Scottish pub next to the hotel I was staying in. I went and had a really crap cottage pie. They also did bangers and mash and fish and chips and the sort of pub food masquerading as a gastronomic experience. But we do have a lot of great British dishes and they do deserve more of a place in our eating culture. But certainly a lot of places I go to eat there are a lot of traditional English dishes and I quite enjoy, once in a while, stabbing my fork into a faggot (Both laugh) The Americans love the political incorrectness of some of our national dishes and they might be horrified to know that I was opening my mouth to consume a spotted dick. All of these things have amusing connotations for a lot of people but we have a lot of pretty good grub. 

Digger: So, see you in Northampton in 2010. I saw you at St Albans last year - that venue is in dire need of a refurb!

Ian: Well, there won't be many getting any money spent on them for a year or two. Belts will continue to tighten for some months to come I'm quite sure in the entertainment business like everywhere else and it's a tough world out there and part and parcel of the real world. We shouldn't think of this as a recession we should think of it, to use an oft quoted term from the world of commerce and finance, as 'a correction'. It is indeed that, we have been living incautiously for quite a while and it's a salutary lesson and I think if you walk out there 9 out of 10 people you ask will say "Well, yeah, but I'm coping and life goes on and you think a little bit more carefully about what you spend your money on." And of course there are the other 10% who are really hurting but for most people we are pretty good at just tightening our belts and just getting on with things. And making do with a little less is not a bad thing to have to do every so often. It's just a correction. 

Digger: Ian, thanks very much for your time and your thoughts.

Ian: Thanks David. Cheers..