Gerald Bostock - Thick As A Brick 2

Thick As A Brick 2

In April 2012, Ian Anderson released a followup, solo concept album, Thick as a Brick 2: Whatever Happened to Gerald Bostock?, about whose premise Anderson states: "I wonder what the eight-year-old Gerald Bostock would be doing today. Would the fabled newspaper still exist?" In this followup album, Anderson presents five, distinct, "parallel possibilities" regarding Bostock's adulthood, now forty years after his childhood poetry scandal:

• Gerald the Banker is a ruthless, up-and-coming businessman and financier, who turns to white-collar crime and is subsequently imprisoned; after his release, he lives an ashamed but quiet, comfortable life at 9 Mulberry Gardens.
• "Gerald Goes Homeless" is a gay man whose sexual orientation blossoms in a paederastic relationship with his housemaster at school, but which is neglected and misunderstood by his parents; fleeing his family to live on the streets, Bostock's dignity dwindles through illicit and self-destructive activities until he is approached by a man with whom he enters into a joyous civil partnership, but whose eventual death leaves Bostock alone at 17 Mulberry Crescent.
• Gerald the Military Man is a gung-ho soldier who enlists to fight in the War on Terror; he is traumatized by his experience and disabled in combat, the only of his friends to survive, residing finally at 33 Mulberry Drive.
• Gerald the Chorister becomes fascinated with and starts to practice Christian evangelism, dramatically envisioning himself as a warrior in the service of the Lord and inflating himself with self-righteous piety; however, his money-grubbing leads him to embezzlement for which he is defrocked, landing him a life of sanctimonious solitude at 24 Mulberry Close.
• "Gerald: A Most Ordinary Man" goes straight from his schooling immediately into the running of a corner store and the hobby of rail transport modelling, living a childless adulthood with his sterile wife, Madge; he later sadly sells the shop and his trains, but takes up a new mindless hobby of stamp collecting in his suburban home at 54 Mulberry Lane.

In the style of the original Thick as a Brick's newspaper cover, Ian Anderson set up a parody of a newsletter on the Internet called StCleve.com, which has supposedly succeeded and replaced the now-defunct St. Cleve Chronicle. An article on the homepage mentions the adult Gerald Bostock as a long-time Labour activist who lost his political seat and has now retired from the political arena at age 50 (further claiming that he was, in fact, 10 years old in 1972 rather than 8: a lie his parents used to boost the media attention on him). The article describes that Bostock may now write his memoirs or a scandalous screenplay and that he has recently purchased, on the outskirts of the communities of St. Cleve, Linwell, and Little Cruddock, a 6-acre estate at Mulberry Lane (a possible reference to the hypothetical story of "Gerald: A Most Ordinary Man").