"I don’t keep anything I don’t think is good enough.” Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson is a hard man to please. Here's his take on Martin Barre, Tony Iommi and four other guitarists who have shaped his music for six decades

Jethro Tull are the undisputable prog-rock titans. Led by vocalist, flutist and sometimes acoustic guitar player Ian Anderson, Tull has reeled off albums, like 1971’s Aqualung, 1972’s A Passion Play and 1987's Crest of a Knave, that defined a generation of nerdy music lovers.

Over that time, Tull has been defined by a host of guitar players that includes Mick Abrahams, Tony Iommi, Martin Barre, Florian Opahle, Joe Parrish and Jack Clark. Their six-string talents have proven over the group's nearly 60 years that, while Tull is certainly flute-forward, it is a guitar band — and often an electric guitar band — through and through.

Great as those players are, though, make no mistake — it’s Anderson who’s steering the six-stringed ship.

“I remember sitting in the studio with Martin Barre, recording solos for the Crest of a Knave album,” Anderson tells Guitar Player. “He would come up with ideas, and I would say, ‘Well, that’s great… maybe take that, and then in the next eight bars, maybe try something like this…’ and he would respond to that. We would, hopefully, within an hour or two, get all those guitar parts done.”

While Anderson and Abrahams clashed over the direction of the band, he says the dynamic with Barre and most players who came afterward was about “working together and trying different things.”

But when push comes to shove, as the man with the vision, Anderson has the final say...

“Sometimes,” he corrects.

“I hear something that’s not right, and I stop the tape,. rather than let someone waste time and energy by carrying on. It’s better to stop and say, ‘Oh, can we just go back on that?” he explains.

“Then, we wind back five seconds and drop in again. It saves time overall. And I like to save as much time as possible in the recording studio. I don’t keep anything I don’t think is good enough.”

And when it comes to guitars, Anderson’s ear is particularly acute.

“I recognize it immediately when I hear it,” he says. “Whether it’s me recording or one of the guys, I prefer to say, ‘Stop. Let’s go back on that and repair the damage. I don’t have a lot of outtakes. It’s called ‘destructive recording.’ As soon as I press the red button again, it’s gone forever and in comes whatever I’m replacing it with.”

Here, Anderson offers his thoughts about the half dozen guitarists who have passed through Tull.

Mick Abrahams

Founding guitarist Mick Abrahams left the group after the release of their 1968 debut, This Was. He went on to form his own more authentic blues group, Blodwyn Pig.

"The blues were certainly there in the case of Mick Abrahams. That was his background. He was very much blues and rock and roll—and very much American music. I love to listen to American music and still do today — not just the blues but some other music, too. But I don’t want to imitate it.

"The players in the band now have a degree of flexibility and independence, but they have guidelines to work to. So if someone’s doing something that I feel is really not working or not right for the record, then I will hopefully politely convey that to them before they expend too much energy going down that approach.

"And that’s always been the case, really, working with all the guitar players after Mick."

Tony Iommi

Best known as a founding member of Black Sabbath, Iommi spent little time in Tull, filling in for Abrahams when the band was recruited to perform on the Rolling Stones' Rock & Roll Circus event in December 1968. He left soon after and returned to his band Earth, which went on to greatness as Black Sabbath.

“Tony came down to play with us for a little while to see if there was a special musical relationship that we might develop. And Tony, who was and is a great player, is still one whose initial work came from blues and was developed by Black Sabbath as a whole into the beginnings of what became heavy metal.

"So he took the blues and did something new with it, because, really, heavy metal was new. And I think that Tony was a great player, but he wasn’t right for Jethro Tull for a variety of reasons.”

Martin Barre

Martin Barre joined Tull in late 1968, following Iommi's departure, and remained with them through 2003, making him the guitarist who has spent the most time in the group. For part of that time he played a refinished Gibson Les Paul that turned out to be a counterfeit. Barre has said he felt Tull took a "big risk" hiring him, given that he had no blues guitar experience. But Anderson could already see a different path ahead and thought Barre was the right choice.

“The good and interesting thing about Martin’s playing was that he was aware of the blues, but he wasn’t a blues player. He could play a bit in that style, but he was mainly interested in a broader background of music, as was I. So he fitted much better into the songs that I was writing for our second album, Stand Up, in 1969.

“He was a much more broad-based musician with a lot of interest in different styles of music. Oddly, Martin was never really into folk music, so that, for him, was maybe a bit more of a challenge to try and get interested in some of the songs that I was writing.

“That music had a lot more in the way of influence from English, Irish and Scottish folk music, which didn’t come naturally for Martin. But, you know, being a musician of skill and ability, as he was, he quickly would learn to find a way to play a solid part in those songs.”

Florian Opahle

German guitarist Florian Opahale performed with Ian Anderson from 2003 to 2019 and with the reformed Jethro Tull from 2017 to 2019.

"Florian began studying acoustic classical guitar, and he knew about the blues and rock music, too. But classical music played quite a part in the music that appealed to Floridan."

Joe Parrish & Jack Clark

When Opahle left the band at the end of 2019 to focus on production work and family, Joe Parrish stepped in. He was succeeded by Jack Clark, who joined in 2024.

"Like Florian, Joe and Jack have an interest in classical music. They're very interested in the crossover between folk music and rock music and the crossover between classical music and rock music. So, I suppose they fit right in because that’s their musical upbringing.

"I mean, for guys in their 20s, they had amassed a lot of musical knowledge and musical skills based on what we would call 'hard folk rock,' rather than gentle or acoustic folk rock.

"But, you know, they were very easy to integrate into the band, as was Florian. So, these are the guys who are the focus of the guitar part of the band these days, though I play acoustic guitars and write songs using guitar. But they play their parts in the music, but in the music writing, rather than the finished recordings.

"Even with a guitar player like Jack — who started working with us occasionally in 2022 and then took over full-time in February of last year — he feels already like a very established part of the band, even though he's technically the third guitar player in five years or six years."