This Is Not Love

The Zoo Crew has got this one cranked up for all you Zoo Freaks out there. We’re spinning “This Is Not Love” off Jethro Tull’s 1991 album Catfish Rising, and it hits like a cold wind off the sea. Ian Anderson wrote every note and every line, and the track opens the record with a driving riff that feels more hard rock than the pastoral flute stuff a lot of folks remember from the seventies. Lyrics paint a picture of a couple stuck in some closed-down seaside town in the off season—winds howling, rains spitting, empty drugstore postcards freezing those sunburst summer memories. The waves snap at their heels half-heartedly, and the singer keeps asking how come the other person already knows this whole thing ain’t love. It’s not a soft ballad. It’s the sound of something coming apart while the weather turns ugly.

Catfish Rising was the band’s first album of the nineties and the first to feature keyboardist Andrew Giddings. Anderson talked about wanting to circle back to the blues roots without just copying the early days. He said it was about bringing that old feeling into the nineties with the musicianship they’d built up over the years. The record has a raw, live edge in places, and “This Is Not Love” was pulled as a single that climbed to number fourteen on the US rock charts. That kind of airplay shows the track still had some muscle even when a lot of people thought Tull was past its commercial prime. The album sits between the harder sounds of the late eighties and whatever came next, and this opener sets a tone that mixes cynicism with a little dark humor.

One of the better stories floating around from the time involves Anderson on a BBC Radio 2 show hosted by Gloria Hunniford. The program leaned toward a more middle-of-the-road audience, and she decided “This Is Not Love” was a little too rock for the slot. She pushed instead for “Roll Yer Own,” another cut from the same album. When she asked him to say a few words about that track, he tried waving her off from the other side of the mic. She kept pressing. Finally he told her he was searching every word in his vocabulary to avoid saying “female masturbation” live on the radio. She got mad and told him to get out of the studio. He has told versions of that tale more than once, and it fits the kind of wry, slightly awkward situations that seem to follow him around. The song itself stayed in the set for a while after the album came out, showing up in news updates from the official site years later when the band was touring behind later records.

Jethro Tull started out as something quite different from the progressive rock machine that filled arenas. Ian Anderson was born in Dunfermline, Scotland in 1947 and moved with his family to Blackpool when he was a kid. He picked up guitar and harmonica, formed early groups with schoolmates like keyboardist John Evan and bassist Jeffrey Hammond, and they played blues and soul on the northern club circuit under names like the Blades and the John Evan Band. By late 1967 most of the original crew had headed back north for steady work, leaving Anderson and bassist Glenn Cornick in the Luton area. They linked up with guitarist Mick Abrahams and drummer Clive Bunker, and a booking agent with a history degree suggested the name Jethro Tull after the eighteenth-century English farmer who invented the seed drill. The name stuck because it was the one they were using the week the Marquee Club offered them a residency.

Anderson has said he switched to flute because he knew he was never going to match the guitar players coming out of London at the time. He carried a flute, a harmonica, a tin whistle, and a copy of a Jack Kerouac book when he left home. The early Tull sound was still rooted in blues, and their first album This Was in 1968 reflected that. The one-legged stance, the ragged overcoat, and the way he sang through the flute all came later as the band started stretching out. Those Blackpool connections kept resurfacing over the years—Evan, Hammond, and drummer Barrie Barlow all passed through the lineup at different points. The whole thing began as a bunch of northern kids trying to get booked, changing names every week because they weren’t good enough yet to stay under one, and then one history-loving agent handed them a moniker that stuck for decades.

Listening to “This Is Not Love” now, you can hear some of that same restless energy. The flute cuts through the riff, the lyrics stay sharp instead of getting flowery, and the whole thing still sounds like a band that never quite settled into one lane. Anderson has kept the group going through lineup changes and shifting styles, and the official site still lists Catfish Rising among the studio albums with a short note about returning to blues and folk roots. For more on the band and whatever they’re up to these days, check the official Jethro Tull website. They keep an active presence on Facebook, Instagram, and X. Fans also gather in groups like the big Jethro Tull Facebook community where people swap stories and old set lists. And if you want more of this kind of freeform rock without the commercials, you’re already in the right place with THE ZOO. We’ll keep the records turning.