A compilation album that quietly sneaks a new track past its own title is a small act of rebellion. Repeat – The Best of Jethro Tull – Vol II, released in 1977 on Chrysalis Records, promised a look back but delivered one song that had never appeared on any British or American Jethro Tull album. That song, Glory Row, had spent years as a ghost: recorded for War Child, shelved, and then surfacing only on a Spanish pressing of Aqualung. The band's second greatest-hits volume, arriving 49 years ago this year, turned out to be equal parts archive and rescue mission.
The album followed M.U. – The Best of Jethro Tull, the first volume in the compilation series, and its title made the lineage plain. Repeat gathered material from the band's most ambitious progressive rock records, including Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play, but it didn't simply reissue those epics intact. Ian Anderson, the group's driving force, chose edited versions that trimmed sprawling suites into radio-sized segments. The result was a collection that acknowledged Jethro Tull's long-form experiments while making them digestible for listeners who had never sat through a single side-long composition.
The strange route of Glory Row
The strangest inclusion was Glory Row, credited as the album's one previously unreleased track. Its history reads like a map with several borders missing. The song had been intended for War Child, the 1974 album, but didn't make the final sequence. It eventually appeared on a Spanish LP edition of Aqualung released in 1975, where it displaced Locomotive Breath, a song already familiar to fans through the Living in the Past compilation from 1972. For most of the world, Glory Row remained unknown until Repeat gave it a wider audience.
That Spanish Aqualung substitution created a peculiar alternate universe. A listener in Madrid hearing Aqualung for the first time would encounter Glory Row where the rest of the planet heard Locomotive Breath. The decision likely reflected licensing or sequencing concerns, but it had an unintended archival effect: for two years, the only way to own Glory Row on vinyl outside a studio vault was to buy an import pressing. Repeat finally extracted the track from that regional oddity and placed it in the main catalog.
Editing the long-form epics
The compilation also reshaped Jethro Tull's most famous long-form pieces. Thick as a Brick appears as Edit #4, beginning with the line "I've come down from the upper class" from the first part of the 1972 original. A Passion Play is represented by Edit #9, which corresponds to the segment later named Flight from Lucifer. That title did not appear on the original packaging; it emerged on a Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab gold CD issued in March 1998. On current CD editions, the segment starts at 16:58 in the second part.
Ian Anderson's role extended far beyond curation. He produced the album and performed vocals, flute, mandolin, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, soprano saxophone, and alto saxophone. The credits read like a one-man orchestra, though the core band remained present. Martin Barre handled acoustic and electric guitars. John Evan contributed accordion, piano, synthesizer, and Hammond organ, including a piano accordion part. Together they gave the older material a consistent sonic identity across tracks recorded years apart.
Radio logic behind the cuts
The editing choices reflected a commercial logic. Progressive rock in the mid-1970s thrived on album-length concepts, but radio demanded shorter forms. By trimming Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play into discrete edits, Chrysalis could promote Jethro Tull to stations that would never play a full side. The practice also functioned as a gateway: a listener drawn in by Edit #4 might eventually seek out the complete Thick as a Brick. The compilation worked as both a sampler and a strategic compression of the band's ambition.
Repeat also served as a document of Jethro Tull's creative range up to 1977. The tracklist pulled from multiple eras, and the artwork used photographs of the band members from that period, reinforcing the retrospective tone. By the time the album appeared, the group had already established itself as a major force in progressive rock, and this second volume consolidated that reputation. It sat alongside other Chrysalis compilations, part of a catalog strategy that kept older material in circulation while the band continued to record new work.
Glory Row eventually found its way back to its intended home. When War Child was remastered, the track appeared as a bonus cut, closing the loop that began when it was recorded for that album in 1974. But for listeners in 1977, Repeat was the first chance to hear a song that had existed only as a rumor or an import curiosity. The album's title asked for repetition; its contents quietly insisted that even a best-of could hide something new. The piano accordion, the flute, the edited epics, and one rescued song all sit inside a package that looks, at first glance, like a simple greatest-hits record.