Jethro Tull Issues ‘Minstrel in the Gallery’ on Marbled Vinyl

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Jethro Tull are celebrating the 50th anniversary of their album, Minstrel in the Gallery, with a special LP of a Steven Wilson stereo mix, that’s pressed on marbled vinyl. The new edition arrived on September 5, 2025. Originally released on that same day in 1975, the album saw the band going in a different direction from their previous work and returning to a blend of electric and acoustic songs. The new edition is available in the U.S. here, in Canada here and in the U.K. here.

More about the album from the Tull website: The band had decamped to a studio in Monte Carlo which is pictured on the back of the album sleeve with the five minstrels standing in its gallery. The size of the studio also made it ideal for impromptu games of badminton, while the local beach provided its own temptations. Ian Anderson has since opined that such distractions and other personal problems within the band meant that it was not functioning as well as a unit as it had on previous albums, and he found himself taking more of a prominent and introspective role than he would have wished.

The back cover of the Minstrel in the Gallery album.

The upside of that was that the album contained a liberal sprinkling of the type of personal acoustic ditties which had graced the Aqualung album, with the string-adorned “Requiem” being possibly the most romantic song Anderson has ever written, and the closing “Grace” – more whimsical in its romanticism – clocking in at a whole thirty seven seconds. And after the forty-plus minute Thick As A Brick and A Passion Play epics, Anderson once again dabbled with an extended suite of music with “Baker Street Muse,” a seventeen minute four-part observation of the seedier side of his then home town of London.

The acoustic guitar and strings are to the fore in most of the other songs, but the likes of “Cold Wind To Valhalla” and “Black Satin Dancer” then explode into full-blown rockers, with Martin Barre’s electric guitar taking the spotlight as the band thunders along behind him in an adventurous exploration of unpredictable key-changes and time-signatures. That juxtaposition of acoustic and electric has been a feature of Jethro Tull’s music throughout their career, but is perhaps never better exemplified than on Minstrel in the Gallery which, after earlier albums’ tags of “blues” and “prog,” is unequivocally a “rock” album, albeit with a maturity and sophistication both lyrically and harmonically which highlighted Tull’s originality.

Besides Anderson and Barre, the other band members performing on the album were Jeffrey Hammond, John Evan and Barriemore Barlow.

Tull’s extensive catalog, with many deluxe editions including 2025’s Still Living in the Past, is available in the U.S. here, in Canada here and in the U.K. here.