The session sheet for Catfish Rising reads like a game of musical chairs. Three different keyboardists appear across the album, each credited on a single track or a handful of songs. Andrew Giddings played on three cuts, Foss Patterson on one, and John Bundrick also turns up on a lone piece. For a band that had spent two decades honing a signature flute-and-guitar identity, this revolving door behind the keys suggested a record assembled from fragments rather than a single settled lineup.
The core quartet holds
Catfish Rising arrived on September 2, 1991, as Jethro Tull’s eighteenth studio album. Chrysalis Records issued it, and that date sits 35 years before the current year of 2026. The core quartet held firm: Ian Anderson on vocals, acoustic and electric guitars, mandolin, flute, keyboards, drums, and percussion; Martin Barre on electric guitar; Dave Pegg on acoustic and electric bass; and Doane Perry on drums and percussion. That familiar spine kept the project coherent even as guest players drifted in and out.
The album continued the hard rock and blues direction the band had pushed through its two previous releases. Progressive rock still flickered around the edges, but the heavier guitar attack and blues phrasing had moved to the center. Anderson’s flute, once the group’s calling card, now shared space with Barre’s riffs and a rhythm section built for forward motion. Catfish Rising leaned into that momentum rather than retreating toward the folk-prog textures of earlier decades.
Andrew Giddings arrives
Andrew Giddings made his first appearance on a Jethro Tull studio album here, contributing keyboards to three songs. His arrival marked a quiet transition; he would go on to become a longer-term presence in the band’s orbit after this record. Alongside him, Foss Patterson and John Bundrick each added keyboard parts to a single track. The scattered credits point to sessions pieced together across different studios, dates, and likely different moods, with Anderson stitching the results into a coherent whole.
Matt Pegg, son of bassist Dave Pegg, played bass guitar on several songs. Scott Hunter recorded drums and percussion for one track. These contributions expanded the cast beyond the touring lineup, giving Catfish Rising a looser, more collaborative texture. The image of a father and son sharing bass duties on the same album is a small, human detail buried in the liner notes, but it speaks to the informal, workshop-like atmosphere that surrounded the record’s creation.
Split track listings across formats
The track listing differed between the vinyl and compact disc editions. Collectors who bought the LP and the CD were not getting identical music; each format carried its own sequence and selection. Chrysalis Records released both versions simultaneously in 1991, but the divergence meant the full Catfish Rising experience depended on which shelf you pulled from. This split track listing became one of the album’s enduring quirks.
Outtakes and live versions from the Catfish Rising era spilled onto single B-sides throughout the early nineties. “Night in the Wilderness” appeared on the flip side of many singles released during this period. A live rendition of “Jump Start” turned up on the back of several pressings of the single “This Is Not Love.” These B-sides offered fans alternate takes and concert recordings that expanded the album’s footprint beyond its official running order.
A muscular consolidation
The sound of Catfish Rising blends progressive rock, hard rock, and blues rock into a single, muscular statement. Anderson’s mandolin and flute still surface, but they sit inside a guitar-forward framework driven by Barre and the Pegg-Perry rhythm section. The album doesn’t announce a reinvention so much as a consolidation, taking the harder edges of the group’s late-eighties output and pushing them further without abandoning the melodic instincts that defined Jethro Tull.
Thirty-five years on, the record remains a snapshot of a band working through transition. Three keyboardists, a father-and-son bass pairing, split track listings across formats, and B-sides that kept spilling into record shops. Catfish Rising never tried to be a grand statement, and that may be why it holds its own in the catalog. The music moves with the confidence of players who know each other’s instincts, even when the session sheet looks like a revolving door.
Listen for the moment when the flute drops away entirely and Barre’s guitar takes the lead, with Perry’s drums pushing underneath. That is the album’s true center of gravity: not a single definitive lineup, but a band trusting its core to hold while the edges stay deliberately, productively unsettled.