"It's still a hodge-podge... largely redundant": Jethro Tull's expanded Still Living In The Past fails to produce much magic from the vaults

Wedged between Thick As A Brick and A Passion Play, Living In The Past was a hodge-podge compilation of early singles, B-sides and tracks from Jethro Tull’s first three albums, released in late ’72 and designed to lure the band’s new legions of fans who had just sent Thick As A Brick spinning to the top of the US chart.

It was titled Living In The Past after Tull’s 1969 breakthrough UK single, which never appeared on an album and didn’t chart in the US. The collection certainly did its job in the States, peaking at No.3 and establishing Jethro Tull as one of the biggest British bands in America, just behind Led Zeppelin.

Jethro Tull - Living In The Past (Supersonic, 27.03.1976) - YouTube

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Fifty-three years later, this hugely expanded latest edition is a five-CD-plus-Blu-ray set but it’s still a hodge-podge, although whether that’s by design or accident is difficult to tell. On the plus side it now includes the rest of Tull’s 1970 concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall that was restricted to two tracks on one side of the original double album. But strangely those tracks have not been integrated into the concert sequence.

The main problem with this collection is that many of the tracks have already been revived and restored on the multi-CD sets that have been compiled for Tull’s early albums, thus rendering them largely redundant here. So restorer-in-chief Steven Wilson has had to root around the vaults to see what else he can come up with.

Jethro Tull - Unboxing of Still Living in the Past - YouTube

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He starts by putting a 2025 glow on eight of the original album tracks that were given a remix back in 1971 in preparation for the compilation. He’s also found an Andy Johns mix of Inside from Benefit, another early version of My God and a demo of Wond’ring Aloud, all previously unreleased, among other bits and bobs. He then set about reassembling the original Living In The Past tracklisting on CDs 2 and 3, except that he slips in an additional early B-side, One For John Gee, that probably should have been on the first CD.

CDs 3 and 4 contain the rest of the 1970 Carnegie Hall concert – lively versions of Nothing Is Easy, With You There To Help Me, A Song For Jeffrey and To Cry You A Song, an extended version of We Used To Know and a pre-Aqualung version of My God. But the 20-minute version of Dharma For One appears to include the edited version that’s on CD3.