He is a multi-instrumentalist who also plays harmonica , keyboard, bass guitar, bouzouki , balalaika , saxophone and a variety of whistles.
Ian Anderson was born in Dunfermline , Fife , Scotland, the youngest of three brothers, to an English mother and a Scottish father. Anderson said, "I am a Brit. I'm a Brit. I see myself as a product of that union. Anderson's family moved in to Blackpool , England, where he was educated at Blackpool Grammar School.
While a teenager, Anderson took a job as a sales assistant at Lewis's department store in Blackpool, then as a vendor on a news stand. This was a soul and blues band, with Anderson on vocals, guitar and harmonica; he had yet to take up the flute. In late , Anderson was still holding down a day job, namely cleaning the Ritz Cinema in Luton , including the toilets, in the mornings, "which took me half the day" he said in a later interview. He took an old, chipped urinal from the cinema storeroom and had it for a time after leaving the job.
It was not, however, the urinal which "was bolted to the side of John Evan's Hammond organ on stage" and figured in early s Tull performances. At this time, Anderson abandoned his ambition to play electric guitar; this was allegedly because he felt he would never be "as good as Eric Clapton ".
As he himself tells it in the introduction to the video Nothing Is Easy: Live at the Isle of Wight , he traded his electric guitar in for a flute which, after some weeks of practice, he found he could play fairly well in a rock and blues style.
