“So wasteful… such a futile and pointless gesture”: Ian Anderson sent a flute into space, and William Shatner followed later. The Jethro Tull leader wishes neither of those things had happened

Ian Anderson and William Shatner — (Image credit: Getty Images / YouTube)

Jethro Tull’s first album in nearly 20 years arrived in the form of The Zealot Gene in 2021. While discussing the release with Prog, band leader Ian Anderson also talked about their third album, 1970’s Benefit, which was being reissued at the time.

He described it as a “dark” work, explaining: “I was writing the songs when we had our first year of touring the US in 1969. They were long tours and a real culture shock for me, having grown up with an awareness of America – but only through TVs and movies and comics. To actually be there and experience the real America was a bit shocking.”

Asked if he felt there were any high points on the record, Anderson chose one particular song – leading to an off-tangent reflection on his connection with the original space race, and the current one.

“The one that springs to mind is For Michael Collins, Jeffrey And Me, which is about the commander of the Apollo missions. He died recently, of course. He wasn’t the guy who got to go to the Moon, but who sat alone waiting to see if his buddies would make it back.

It always struck me as a very poignant, because of the loneliness, the responsibility and the certainty that if his two buddies didn’t make it back for whatever reason, and he had to come back alone to Earth, that there would have been people who would have hated him and accused him of abandoning them. I always imagined how it must have been for him.

Musically speaking, the song is a bit twee. But I always had a fascination with space travel... as long as it’s not Elon Musk! Wasteful, fantasy-filled... I mean, when you’ve got the helicopter and the private yacht and you’ve got, you know, the converted Boeing 787 as your private jet, then what do you do? ‘I know, I’ll have a space rocket! And I’ll go into space and pretend it’s for research!’

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I’m appalled that someone I know – Bill Shatner, whose spoken-word record I played on a while ago [2018’s Shatner Claus] – fell for the invitation to go on that trip into space. It seemed so wasteful in terms of the environment; such a futile and pointless gesture, just for publicity for the corporate body that put him briefly into space.

But again you could aim personal criticism at me, because I have in my house a flute that spent five months on the International Space Station [in 2011]. I worked out how much it cost to take that 900-gram flute into orbit and safely return it to planet Earth, and it was about $15,000.

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That amount got burned up in order to do a duet with a US astronaut, Catherine Coleman, when I was in Perm in Russia on the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first flight [Anderson and Coleman performed a passage from Bourée]. Some of the old guard of the Russian space programme came to the show when I did it.

It seemed like a nice way to engage with that world. I suppose you’d have to drive a Porsche around for a couple of years to equal the amount of fuel burn – which is something that only occurred to me somewhat after the fact.”

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Johnny is a regular contributor to Prog and Classic Rock magazines, both online and in print. Johnny is a highly experienced and versatile music writer whose tastes range from prog and hard rock to R’n’B, funk, folk and blues. He has written about music professionally for 30 years, surviving the Britpop wars at the NME in the 90s (under the hard-to-shake teenage nickname Johnny Cigarettes) before branching out to newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent and magazines such as Uncut, Record Collector and, of course, Prog and Classic Rock.