The band Ian Anderson called “more important” than punk rock

Posted On September 30, 2025September 30, 2025

Ian Anderson isn’t exactly the first person that comes to mind when looking at the scope of punk rock.

Jethro Tull were the embodiment of pretentiousness when the first waves of punk started, and while Anderson could light up a stage, it didn’t do him any favours when he could actually play his instrument properly. But as far as the prog legend was concerned, nothing that the punk wave ever did held as much water as they thought they would have going forward, either.

Granted, this might be the case of the pot calling the kettle black a little bit. Jethro Tull always had a tongue-in-cheek fucking outlook on their own music, and even if they did have a lot more depth than most of their peers, it’s not like people were listening to albums like Thick as a Brick and not realising that they were jumping on the bandwagon of conceptual pieces after being lumped into the prog-rock category.

That’s not to say that Anderson didn’t have a lot to complain about, either. Punk was goddamn loud, abrasive, and not the most polite genre in the world, and it didn’t take long for John Lydon to start spouting out whatever vitriol he wanted to when bands like Emerson, Lake and Palmer were brought up in conversation.

But maybe the animosity came from the fact that Anderson knew that the genre didn’t start in 1976. There had been plenty of artists that were known for challenging the status quo in different ways, and even as far back as the 1960s, everyone from Syd Barrett to Pete Townshend were toying with different ideas that ultimately led to the punk rock revolution a few years down the road.

‘My Generation’ has a good case for being the first official punk rock song, but if there was a band that truly started punk, it was the MC5. None of them claimed to be the greatest musicians in the world, and when listening to ‘Kick Out the Jams’, their non-conformist attitude towards every facet of their playing may as well have been the blueprint for what Malcolm McLaren wanted to do when he put together the Sex Pistols.

And as far as Anderson could tell, what the originals did far outweighed anything else that punk spit out, saying. “Punk was really at its height at the time of the MC5 in 1969. They were more important than anything that came out of the UK in ’76. Punk was supposed to be about gutsy honesty. Most of it was young poseurs pretending to be angry because it was the thing to do.”

Anyone could see that as Anderson being an old man screaming about the music that was much better back when he started, but he did have a small point. There was a sense of cultural change whenever the MC5 played that wasn’t always there when listening to Sex Pistols, and even though they had excellent songs at their disposal like ‘God Save the Queen’, anyone looking for more adventurous stuff would probably have had a better time listening to a band like The Clash.

So while there’s a good chance Anderson wasn’t going to be invited to hop onstage with Sex Pistols or The Damned for any reason, he could rest easy knowing that he was there before punk even began. He had seen bands that were ready to unleash hell whenever they went onstage, and no amount of posturing from Johnny Rotten was ever going to make up for artists who knew how to leave the audience frothing at the mouth. 

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