Jethro Tull
Album: Nothing Is Easy: Live At The Isle Of Wight 1970 (CD & DVD)
Label: Salvo
Tracks: 8
Website: http://www.salvo-music.co.uk

One of Tull's most celebrated performances ever was the storming stage set they delivered at the Isle Of Wight Festival on 30th August 1970, bang in the midst of a period of tension across the festival site itself as well as within hippiedom generally (the ideals were unravelling as the dream was rapidly turning sour, with a battle of hippies vs establishment constantly raging). This new Salvo package gives us the band's performance on both CD and DVD, but with crucial differences in presentation and perspective. The purely audio CD, in essence "the live album", naturally presents more of a sense of a continuous performance, and thus is pretty satisfying in its own right for the purpose of home listening (on the usual understanding that much of the banter and other in-between stuff like tuning has been edited). The band were on splendid form on that occasion, and the set revisited older numbers like My Sunday Feeling and Bourée as well as premièring newer material (My God), featuring some exceptional soloing and - on the reworked Dharma For One - a rare early vocal turn from Martin Barre. Oh, and an arguably somewhat indulgent piano solo from John Evan during With You There To Help Me…

The 79-minute DVD takes the form of a 2005-vintage documentary by Murray Lerner that uses as its basis excerpts from a candid interview with Ian Anderson displaying insight and sense and imparting due perspective on the events of the 1970 IOW Festival. What comes across more than anything, of course, is that na?ve politics made for often distinctly unpleasant scenes and times, but that music was what brought folks together - always has done, and always will do. So the film is basically a social document intercut with concert footage, which presents extracts from, or virtually complete performances of, individual songs (with two or three numbers missing entirely from the film), and also the band's rendition of A Song For Jeffrey culled from the Rolling Stones' Rock & Roll Circus movie. The DVD also includes a photo gallery - fairly standard as these things go. What we do gain, however, from viewing this DVD is some feel of what marked Tull out from other classic rock bands of the time, and the film is definitely worth seeing, even if the musical meat (and principal interest) of this package lies undoubtedly within the audio CD.

David Kidman