Grade: C+

I bought the ‘seminal’ Jethro Tull double album Thick as a Brickfrom a secondhand shop when I was nearing my 13th birthday. I played it once and then wrote off the £1.85 of my pocket money with buyer’s grave remorse. Sometimes, when the yearning for that much better decade, the 1970s, overwhelms me I take it out of my vinyl collection as a salutary corrective: remember those ten years also gave us Baader-Meinhof, Idi Amin, the IRA and Jethro Tull.

If folkish prog is on offer, I prefer the Strawbs, even if Dave Cousins is clearly a lot dimmer than Jethro’s idiosyncratic and likeable Ian Anderson. The Strawbs had one or two songs, though. Jethro had just one: ‘Life is a Long Song’, with its affected vocals. And its bloody flute. Has there ever been an instrument less suited to rock music? No, it doesn’t make it better if you play it standing on one leg.

The bloody flute is all over this. Jaunty most of the time, occasionally, er, plangent — either way I kept seeing Ron Burgundy leaping from table to table. This is Jethro’s first in 22 years (no, no, don’t rush on my account, boys), a meditation upon the human condition — for which many thanks. ‘Soshana Sleeping’ is nicely built and there is a welcome hard-rock grit on ‘Barren Beth, Wild Desert John’. The title track is pompous, ponderous and goes on too long, quelle surprise. ‘Mine Is The Mountain’ has, for me, the distinct whiff of Nigel Tufnel and David St. Hubbins.

Punk may have been a blind alley — but listen to this and understand precisely why it happened.