Tull Brao

Minstrel in the Gallery was Tull's most artistically successful and elaborately produced album since Thick as a Brick and harkened back to that album with the inclusion of a 17-minute extended piece ("Baker Street Muse"). Although English folk elements abound, this is really a hard rock showcase on a par with – and perhaps even more aggressive than – anything on Aqualung. The title track is a superb showcase for the group, freely mixing folk melodies, lilting flute passages, and archaic, pre-Elizabethan feel, and the fiercest electric rock in the group's history – parts of it do recall phrases from A Passion Play, but all of it is more successful than anything on War Child.

As with all of the releases in the Extended Versions series, the 2006 Jethro Tull edition is a set of latter-day live renditions of some of the group's best-known classics – which have all been previously released. And as with most Tull releases after, say, 1980, the performances and production here are exceedingly clean-sounding – in other words, the bite of their classic early-'70s period is nowhere to be found. What you get instead are pretty blah versions of such classics as "Aqualung," "Locomotive Breath," and "Living in the Past." But it's always a gas to hear such lesser-known Tull tunes as "Fat Man" and "Nothing Is Easy," both of which are included here, while a truncated version of "Thick as a Brick" (which still clocks in at over nine minutes) is a rare point where the group truly sounds inspired.

Rock Island is the 17th studio album by the British rock group Jethro Tull, released in 1989. The album continued the hard rock direction the band took on the previous effort, Crest of a Knave (1987). The line-up now included Ian Anderson, Martin Barre, Dave Pegg and drummer Doane Perry in his first full recording with the band, although he was already a member of Jethro Tull since 1984. Without a permanent keyboard player, the role was shared by Fairport Convention's Martin Allcock and former Tull member Peter Vettese. Rock Island went Gold in the UK, with good sales also in Germany, where it peaked at Nº 5. There were good sales also for the "Kissing Willie" single, that reached Nº 6.

Jethro Tull was very much a blues band on their debut album, vaguely reminiscent of the Graham Bond Organization only more cohesive, and with greater commercial sense. The revelations about the group's roots on This Was – which was recorded during the summer of 1968 – can be astonishing, even 30 years after the fact…