Benefit is the album where Jethro Tull turned dark — a brooding, minor-key record made by a band worn out by touring and at odds with their record company. Released in 1970, it brought John Evan’s keyboards into the fold, bade farewell to bassist Glenn Cornick, and pointed directly toward Aqualung.

The short version

Benefit (1970) is the third studio album by Jethro Tull, recorded at Morgan Studios and produced by Ian Anderson with Terry Ellis. Anderson, guitarist Martin Barre, bassist Glenn Cornick and drummer Clive Bunker are joined by pianist John Evan, credited here as a guest. Harder and gloomier than Stand Up, and written entirely in minor keys, it reached number 3 in Britain and became the band’s first gold record.

A hard year, and a new keyboard player

Jethro Tull came off a punishing year of American touring exhausted and unhappy with their label. Ian Anderson has said the mood fed straight into the songs: Benefit has a harder, slightly darker feel than anything before it, and its lyrics are more personal and more sardonic, several of them shadowed by his relationship with Jennie Franks, who would become his first wife. Into this arrived John Evan, an old bandmate from Anderson’s pre-Tull days, brought in to add piano and organ. Evan warned that he would stay a year or two at most. He remained for a decade, and played on every Jethro Tull album of the 1970s. For Glenn Cornick, the founding bassist, it was the opposite: this was his last record with the band.

The sound

Benefit is Jethro Tull in transition, and the more interesting for it. The bluesy swagger of Stand Up is still there in Martin Barre’s thick, sludgy riffing, but around it the arrangements grow ornate and strange, folk textures creep in, and John Evan’s piano and organ open up a new harmonic space. Anderson uses the flute as a rock instrument rather than an ornament, his acoustic guitar often sounding alongside Barre’s electric. The studio work is unusually adventurous for 1970: a backward-recorded flute opens the album, and a sped-up guitar drives ‘Play in Time.’ Every song is in a minor key, and the record broods accordingly.

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The songs

‘With You There to Help Me’ opens on that reversed flute and alternates whispered menace with searing guitar. ‘Nothing to Say’ and ‘To Cry You a Song’ ride hypnotic Barre riffs, the latter carried by a voice that seems to come through a rotating speaker. ‘For Michael Collins, Jeffrey and Me’ takes its title from the Apollo astronaut who stayed in orbit while his crewmates walked on the Moon, and from Anderson’s old schoolfriend Jeffrey Hammond; it stretches from hush to fury. British copies close side one with ‘Alive and Well and Living In’; American ones swapped it for ‘Teacher,’ whose ominous riff plainly anticipates ‘Aqualung.’

Reception and legacy

Benefit reached the UK Top 3 and became the band’s first gold album, and the tour that followed took them to the Isle of Wight Festival before a vast crowd. It has since been overshadowed by the record that came next, and it is routinely described as underrated. That is fair. This is the bridge between the blues band of This Was and the progressive one of Aqualung: John Evan’s arrival changed the harmonic possibilities, Anderson’s writing turned inward, and the riffs grew heavier. Glenn Cornick left after the tour to form Wild Turkey, and Jeffrey Hammond took his place. Nothing about Jethro Tull sounded the same again.

The verdict

Benefit is not the first Jethro Tull album to buy — Aqualung comes first, and Thick as a Brick after it — but it may be the most rewarding to discover next, and it deepens with every listen. Moody, inventive and unexpectedly heavy, it captures a great band caught between two identities and making a virtue of the confusion. Come for the reversed flute of ‘With You There to Help Me’ and the riff of ‘To Cry You a Song,’ and hear the exact moment Jethro Tull became a progressive band.

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