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Jethro Tull - Aqualung

Jethro Tull - Aqualung Youtube Music Videos and Lyrics

Album: Aqualung
Released: 1971

Aqualung Lyrics

Sitting on a park bench
Eying up little girls with bad intent
Snots running down his nose
Greasy fingers smearing shabby clothes, hey, Aqualung

Drying in the cold sun
Watching as the frilly panties run, hey, Aqualung
Feeling like a dead duck
Spitting out pieces of his broken luck, oh, Aqualung

Sun streaking cold, an old man wandering lonely
Taking time, the only way he knows
Leg hurting bad as he bends to pick a dog end
He goes down to a bog and warms his feet

Feeling alone, the army's up the road
Salvation a la mode and a cup of tea
Aqualung, my friend, don't you start away uneasy
You poor old sod, you see it's only me

Do you still remember
December's foggy freeze
When the ice that clings on to your beard
It was screaming agony

Hey and you snatch your rattling last breaths
With deep-sea diver sounds
And the flowers bloom like
Madness in the spring

Sun streaking cold, an old man wandering lonely
Taking time, the only way he knows
Leg hurting bad as he bends to pick a dog end
He goes down to a bog and warms his feet

Feeling alone, the army's up the road
Salvation a la mode and a cup of tea
Aqualung my friend don't you start away uneasy
You poor old sod, you see it's only me

Aqualung my friend don't you start away uneasy
You poor old sod, you see it's only me

Sitting on a park bench
Eying up little girls with bad intent
Snots running down his nose
Greasy fingers smearing shabby clothes, hey Aqualung

Drying in the cold sun
Watching as the frilly panties run, hey Aqualung
Feeling like a dead duck
Spitting out pieces of his broken luck, hey Aqualung

Oh Aqualung

Writer/s: IAN ANDERSON
Publisher: BMG RIGHTS MANAGEMENT US, LLC
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

Aqualung Song Chart

This song deals with our reaction to the homeless population. Jethro Tull vocalist and flute player Ian Anderson wrote the song and called it "a guilt-ridden song of confusion about how you deal with beggars, the homeless." Elaborating in the 40th anniversary reissue of the album, he said, "It's about our reaction, of guilt, distaste, awkwardness and confusion, all these things that we feel when we're confronted with the reality of the homeless. You see someone who's clearly in desperate need of some help, whether it's a few coins or the contents of your wallet, and you blank them out. The more you live in that business-driven, commercially-driven lifestyle, you can just cease to see them.

In this song, Aqualung is a homeless man with poor hygiene. Ian Anderson wrote it about a character he made up based on actual photographs of transient men. Ian's wife at the time, Jennie, was an amateur photographer and had brought the pictures for Ian to look at. Many of the lyrics are Ian describing the men in the pictures.

Jennie also wrote a few lyrics to go with the pictures, which earned her a songwriting credit, so she receives half the royalties from the song. She and Anderson divorced in 1974.

This is Jethro Tull's most famous song, but it was not released as a single. Ian Anderson told us why: "Because it was too long, it was too episodic, it starts off with a loud guitar riff and then goes into rather more laid back acoustic stuff. Led Zeppelin at the time, you know, they didn't release any singles. It was album tracks. And radio sharply divided between AM radio, which played the 3-minute pop hits, and FM radio where they played what they called deep cuts. You would go into a album and play the obscure, the longer, the more convoluted songs in that period of more developmental rock music. But that day is not really with us anymore, whether it be classic rock stations that do play some of that music, but they are thin on the ground, and they too know that they've got to keep it short and sharp and cheerful, and provide the blue blanket of familiar sounding music and get onto the next set of commercial breaks, because that's what pays the radio station costs of being on the air. So pragmatic rules apply."

An "Aqualung" is a portable breathing apparatus for divers. Anderson envisioned the homeless man getting that nickname because of breathing problems. He got the idea from watching a TV show called Sea Hunt, where there was a lot of heavy underwater breathing, and where the main character wore an Aqualung. What Anderson didn't know is that Aqualung was a brand name, and the Aqualung Corporation of North America took legal action after the album came out. The case was eventually dropped, but the threat of a lawsuit was troubling to Anderson. For more about the Aqualung and how it relates to diving, check it out in Song Images .

The album cover was a watercolor painting of the character Aqualung created by the artist Burton Silverman. Jethro Tull's manager Terry Ellis commissioned him after seeing his work in Time magazine. Burton took some photos of Ian Anderson wearing his old overcoat before he painted the cover, and the resulting work looked a lot like a haggard version of Ian, who was not pleased with the painting. Despite Anderson's objections, the cover became an iconic image in rock, but it also resulted in another lawsuit over where the image could be used - Burton felt the band didn't have the rights to use it on T-shirts and other promotional materials.

The unusual audio effect you hear in this song is called "telephone burbles" where you remove all frequencies except for a narrow band around the 1,000 hertz mark. This is to reproduce the sound of a telephone. As Ian Anderson told us: "It's also like when you're addressing a crowd through a megaphone. Or even perhaps the tinny sound of a voice trumpet, which is a non-active megaphone. It's a form of address. It's the sound that woke up young pilots in 1941 and sent them into the skies to battle the Hun. This is the sound of the Tannoy, the calling to arms of young men going up in their Hurricanes and Spitfires. It's something that's very much part of the blood of an Englishman."

Like most songs on the album, this one has a cold ending. That's because Anderson knew he would have to perform these songs on stage, where he liked to have a definitive ending to a song rather than a fade out.

The character Aqualung is mentioned in another song on the album, "Cross-Eyed Mary," which is also a character Anderson created.

Martin Barre's solo in this song was rated #25 in Guitar World's 100 Greatest Guitar Solos reader's poll. (thanks, Mark - Madison, WI)

This song is mentioned in the movie Anchorman after Will Ferrell plays a riff from it on his Jazz flute and says, "Hey, Aqualung." (thanks, Brad Nash - Rochester Hills, MI)

English singer-songwriter Matthew Hales performs under the name Aqualung after this song. Hales had a #7 hit in the UK in 2002 with "Strange and Beautiful (I'll Put a Spell on You)."