The Foreword, in which Anderson discusses the history of Jethro Tull and why he hasn’t used the band name for his last few recordings, will especially interest longtime Tull fans. To appreciate the songs, you’ll want to (at least once) follow along with the notes and lyrics in the accompanying 32-page booklet. The succeeding songs address migrations, metalworking, invasions (from the Romans to Burger King), the arrival of Christianity, the Industrial Revolution, and so on.
Doggerland vanished under the waves as the last Ice Age ended but, as fisherman discovered not long ago, the sea floor retains much archeological evidence of human occupation. The first track, “Doggerland,” commemorates the area of the southern North Sea that used to be dry land connecting today’s British Isles with the rest of Europe. Winnowed into lyrics written by “Bostock” and set to music by the real protagonist of the story, Ian Anderson, these materials give Anderson – whose creative scope and energy remain robust even as his singing voice has thinned with age – a walk-in-closetful of pegs on which to hang a sequence of songs evoking nothing less than the history of mankind in his part of the world.
Parritt’s supposed writings range over northern European history from the Mesolithic era to his own – and on into his future, through the whole 20th century and into our own time and beyond. The Gerald Bostock character, hero/anti-hero of the seminal Jethro Tull album Thick as a Brick and its recent sequel Thick as a Brick 2, is back again, having now discovered a manuscript left behind in the 1920s by a malaria-ridden old British soldier delightfully named Ernest T. The 15 songs of Homo Erraticus inhabit not one but two metafictional layers. Always fond of conceptual storytelling, Ian Anderson goes himself one better with his latest prog-folk-metal concept album.
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