In a new chat with the host of ‘Out of the Box’ on Q104.3, Jonathan Clarke, Ian Anderson talked about how Tony Iommi used backing tracks while performing together.
“Well, the only person who was live was me,” the musician replied when asked if Jethro Tull’s performance with Iommi in December 1968 for ‘Rock and Roll Circus’ was live. “The band, we were performing to a tape because we were playing a piece of music that had been… Our guitar player by then had left, Mick Abrahams.”
He continued, “And so Tony Iommi, who we knew and had done a bit of playing together with he, he came in to mime the guitar part. But he was a little embarrassed. I think his fellow bandmembers in Earth, who, after a name change, became Black Sabbath, I think he had his hat pulled down over his eyes so they wouldn’t recognize him as playing with Jethro Tull — or whatever.”
“But he was actually miming to the part, and I was singing live to the backing tape that the rest of them did. It was a bit embarrassing, really, because everybody else on The Rolling Stones’ ‘Rock And Roll Circus’ was indeed performing live, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono and Keith Richards and the members of The Who, as well as the members of The Rolling Stones,” Anderson further recalled about the performance.
The rocker added, “It was all very live and very genuinely a live performance. And I felt a bit of a charlatan by virtue of the fact that I was singing to a backing track. But we’d been asked to do it. And we explained what the situation was, and they seemed happy enough with that. So we turned up for a couple of days in a TV studio near London.”
The Rolling Stones film ‘Rock and Roll Circus’ was Iommi’s only show with Jethro Tull. After playing with Jethro Tull, Iommi returned to Earth. Directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, ‘Rock and Roll Circus’ was filmed in 1968 for a planned BBC special.
The Rolling Stones—Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Charlie Watts, and Billy Wyman—hosted the show, performing songs like ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ and ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want.’
