STAND UP - THE ELEVATED EDITION

Stand Up's entry in the long-running series of Jethro Tull deluxe boxed sets is notable mainly for the live show from Stockholm that takes up much of the second disc. Having been broadcast on Swedish radio, the Stockholm show's previously been widely bootlegged, but obviously you're going to get the best-sounding version from the most pristince sources here.

Given its origin, the sound quality is pretty decent, though that does mean it ends up capturing some problems arising from the band working with unfamiliar equipment they'd been lent for the show. Nonetheless, the performance is fascinating because it hails from January 1969 - meaning it captures the band roughly halfway between the end of the sessions for their debut, This Was, and Stand Up itself.

If you've heard This Was, you might have cottoned on already as to why that's a big deal: Tull's debut album doesn't entirely sound like the rest of their discography because it's the sole album to feature Mick Abrahams, whose guitar style favoured a bluesier approach. Tension over the group's direction saw Abrahams leaving after the album was completed; new guitarist Martin Barre is featured here right at the start of his long tenure with the group, and is even given an entire instrumental 12 minute composition ("Martin's Tune") to showcase his work, though Ian Anderson offers flute and wails to spice it up too.

So far as I'm aware, it's not a piece which has been aired much elsewhere, and offers an interesting midpoint between the bluesier territory the band had previously knocked about in and the new direction that Stand Up was about to herald. In that respect, it's a microcosm of the set as a whole, which offers up My Sunday Feeling, Dharma For One, and A Song For Jeffrey from This Was and early versions of Back To the Family and Nothing Is Easy from Stand Up. The material from This Was is already being given somewhat less bluesy interpretations, evolving in the direction they'd appear in later live renditions, whilst the previous of Stand Up suggest that the band had already confidently found a new trajectory.

Another rarity here is To Be Sad Is A Mad Way To Be, which is something of a last hurrah for the blues side of Tull - it's the furthest they get into the blues in this set, and at a shade under 4 minutes it's one of the slighter numbers at that. One almost wonders if it's a deliberate farewell to the blues, in fact - after all, consider the title and its implications.

If the above sounds like a live set you want to have, then this deluxe edition may well be for you - especially if getting a nicely executed remix of the studio album from Steven Wilson, a big thick booklet about the band's activities at the time, and various additional odds and ends would sweeten the deal for you.