Ian Anderson Slams ‘Incredibly Rude’ Fans Who Shout at Concerts

If you plan to attend a Jethro Tull concert, Ian Anderson kindly requests you stay quiet during the performance.

“I wanna be free of feeling that I am in any way having to comply with other people’s wishes and other people’s demands,” the frontman explained during a recent conversation with Classic Album Review. “And the more demanding an audience [is], by the way, the less I enjoy it.”

Anderson went on to note that cultural differences can lend to concert behavior which he doesn’t enjoy.

“I could name Brazil, for example, where audiences think it’s okay to whistle and shout and boo and shout out the names of songs they wanna hear,” he noted. “I actually find it incredibly rude, and I really don’t enjoy that. It’s not every concert I’ve played in Brazil, but I encountered it a couple of times last year when I was on tour in Brazil, and that’s the way they are. There are other national stereotypes where people do behave that way. You will encounter it sometimes in the U.S.A., where people think it’s OK to shout and whistle. It’s not OK.

“I’m trying to concentrate on playing sometimes quite difficult music, and I don’t like to be interfered with. I like to have the flexibility to be able to do that. And so if the audience set out to somehow manipulate you or influence your way of playing, that’s not good. For me, it is absolutely sufficient, at the end of a song, to see smiles on faces and somebody applauding at the appropriate time. That means everything to me. I don’t wanna be interrupted while I’m performing.”

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Though Anderson insisted he was “not complaining,” the rocker also suggested that his concerts should be approached similarly to ballet, opera or a “Shakespearean dramatic play.”

“I like a respectful, relative silence until we get to the end of a song,” he explained. “Then it’s time to applaud. And some people might find that difficult to understand or something they don’t particularly like, that I would feel that way, but it’s the way I’ve always been. And the way I am, on the rare occasions I go to a concert, I’m not gonna start whistling and shouting and calling out for songs that I wanna hear. Or booing. What’s the point in doing that? You might as well just leave the venue and get to the pub early.”

Ian Anderson Compares Cell Phones at Concerts to Nazi Rallies

Shouting isn’t the only action Anderson dismays during concerts. The singer also shared his hatred of fans who record the show on their cell phone.

“The first time I encountered that, I suddenly flashed back to playing in a concrete amphitheater in the middle of the woods somewhere in the former East Germany that was actually built for Nazi rallies, and I just thought that it must be like that,” Anderson remarked, comparing the way audiences thrust their cell phones upward to the Nazi salute. “There’s suddenly this sea of arms shooting into the air, and you suddenly notice they’ve got phones on the end of them.”

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Anderson noted that he always makes “polite announcements” telling fans to put away their cell phones during his concerts and that audiences generally understand his reasoning.

“It usually gets a round of applause when they hear my voice saying that, because a lot of people feel the same way,” he noted. “They haven’t come to a concert and paid good money for a ticket, only to have to stare at the screen of the person in front who’s holding it up.”