Living in the Past

Living in the Past was a non-album single, released by Island in Britain on 2 May 1969 with Driving Song on the B-side. Terry Ellis wanted a single to keep the band's British momentum going while they toured America. Anderson told Songwriting Magazine that he promised Ellis a hit while really winding him up, and wrote it in 5/4, after Dave Brubeck's Take Five, so that nobody could dance to it and Top of the Pops would pass it by. He picked the title, he said, because it was about as far from contemporary as he could get, and he counts the lyrics among his worst. Speaking to Top Pops in July 1969, though, he said a band could make a good commercial record without compromising its musical integrity.

The backing track was cut on 3 March 1969 at Vantone Sound Studio in West Orange, New Jersey, with Anderson on flute and vocals, Martin Barre on guitar, Glenn Cornick on bass and Clive Bunker on drums, and strings arranged and conducted by Lou Toby. Anderson later described the song as a critical look at the naivety of the hippie movement and its fashionable pretence of revolution. It reached number 3 in Britain and gave the band their Top of the Pops debut that June. In 1972 Chrysalis made it the lead single of the Living in the Past compilation, in a remix with organ in place of a flute overdub, and it reached 11 on the Billboard Hot 100, their first US Top 20 hit.

Live and covers

It is one of the band's most played songs, fifth on setlist.fm behind Locomotive Breath, Aqualung, Thick as a Brick and Bourrée, and Anderson plays it under his own name too. In some eras it appeared as an instrumental, or as a fragment inside a flute solo or A New Day Yesterday. CCS made the first cover, an instrumental, in 1970, and Maynard Ferguson, Midge Ure, Cud, The Connells and Keith Emerson have followed. The upload in the hypersongs web is the 2001 remaster from the compilation The Very Best of Jethro Tull.