Thick as a Brick consists of one continuous piece of music split across two sides. Jethro Tull conceived the album, originally released in 1972, as a parody of the po-faced concept records of the day and credited the lyrics to an invented young poet, Gerald Bostock. The sleeve was a complete mock newspaper, the St. Cleve Chronicle, with village news and a review of the record itself. The music moves in the same spirit between acoustic folk, jazzy interludes and hard-driving passages, played by Ian Anderson, Martin Barre, John Evan, Jeffrey Hammond and Barriemore Barlow. In May 1972 the album spent two weeks at number one on the Billboard 200. This edition is an LP, cut as a half-speed master for the fiftieth-anniversary edition, with the newspaper packaging.