3. Jethro TullHeavy Horses
Another album that is hugely important to me and also has nothing to do with heavy metal, and also a band I discovered on the radio. This is one of the first albums I bought from my own money, and I was immensely proud to discover it in the record store and to carry it home – this was like a treasure. I loved this album so much and I loved the cover, and the lyrics, and the completely unusual arrangements that Jethro Tull used. I put this album up for me to see from my bed so I could see it at all times. Maybe people find it far-fetched given the music I played later but Heavy Horses has been very influential on me, because it’s also a daring album. By 1978 I was 14 or 15 and I had grown to really like heavy music, and Heavy Horses is at times very heavy, it has a lot of distorted guitar, but it’s more than that – there are different influences on it, there’s normal rock music and there’s folk music on there, and there’s the flute that Ian Anderson is playing. It’s just a very unusual album. At the time bands like Foreigner came up and the whole music gravitated towards being more commercial, but Heavy Horses was an album that you could really imagine being written in some fields with horses – it really reflected its title, and of course the band shots on the back of the album reinforced that.
