Martin Barre played his first-ever gig with Jethro Tull on the penultimate day of 1968 in the small town of Penzance, Cornwall, fresh off replacing Mick Abrahams as the band's lead guitarist.
Following a series of auditions and try-outs with formidable electric guitar names like John Mayall's Bluesbreakers' Mick Taylor and (what would later become Black Sabbath's) Tony Iommi, the band settled on Barre.
While he didn’t necessarily fit the band's then-blues-rock sensibilities, he played a crucial role in defining its future – and most commercially successful – sound.
“They’d taken a huge plunge into the unknown getting me onboard as a guitar player,” Barre recalls, in the new issue of Guitarist.
“Tull were a blues band and Ian [Anderson, the sole continuous member of the band] didn’t see that going the distance. He was quite clever, looking ahead with the music. So he took a big risk having me there.”
Barre's next few tours with Jethro Tull were a real baptism by fire. In 1969, the group supported Jimi Hendrix in Scandinavia and embarked on an extensive US tour with Led Zeppelin and Vanilla Fudge.
“I was truly terrified because in the first few months, I was on the same stage as every one of my heroes: Mike Bloomfield, Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix. I was really in at the deep end,” he says. “So I see those first years as building up an identity.”
Jethro Tull's longest-serving guitarist had previously spoken about this intense period of his life, which also saw his exponential growth as a musician while rubbing shoulders with the who's who of the guitar world.
“I was so new to touring. Hendrix was a masterful guitarist, a genuinely humble person, and he was always very nice to me,” he said in a 2015 Guitar World interview.
“Within the first two years of my joining Tull, we shared the bill with most of the major guitar heroes and bands of the day, including Jeff Beck, Joe Cocker, Chicago, Led Zeppelin, the Grateful Dead, and the Who, to name a few.
“You name the band in 1969 and ’70, and we probably played with them!” he concluded.
For more from Martin Barre, plus new interviews with Brian May and Jim Weider, pick up issue 517 of Guitarist at Magazines Direct.
