Genesis
Despite going into the studio to make their fourth album “a bit stuck for ideas”, they emerged with what for many remains the band’s artistic peak: Selling England By The Pound.
“Some people see this as a difficult album to make. I don’t particularly remember it being that way.”
Phil Collins
Despite being “a bit stuck for ideas”, Genesis went into the studio and emerged with what may be their artistic peak: Selling England By The Pound. In our exclusive book extract, Gabriel, Hackett, Collins, Rutherford and Banks tell the tale of their fourth album.
In late spring 1973, with a second American tour behind them, Genesis stopped performing live in order to concentrate on writing their fifth studio album. They rehearsed in the same two places they had used for Foxtrot: Una Billings School Of Dance in London’s Shepherd’s Bush, and a doctor’s house in Chessington. By the time August rolled round, the band were in the studio to record the album with the help of John Burns, the sound engineer who had worked with them on previous album Foxtrot and who was now promoted to co-producer.
As with previous albums, Genesis made use of some pre-existing ideas, which developed into more definitive versions in the rehearsal room. The continuous creative growth of the whole band was accompanied by their ability to improvise freely and intuitively. From a writing point of view, with the exception of Firth Of Fifth (Tony Banks) and More Fool Me (Mike Rutherford), all the other songs came about as a result of collective interaction between the whole band or units made up of at least two or three members. Set against the early parts of Dancing With The Moonlit Knight, written entirely by Peter Gabriel, is the collective instrumental section written mainly by Steve Hackett, Phil Collins and Tony. Steve wrote the underlying riff for I Know What I Like, but this was only shaped into a song thanks to Peter’s verse and Tony’s chorus. The Battle Of Epping Forest is a juxtaposition of Tony’s music (written with the help of Mike in the intermediate sections) and Peter’s expressive singing. After The Ordeal is an instrumental track written by Steve incorporating a section written by Mike, while The Cinema Show is divided into two sections: the first acoustic part was written by Mike, while the second electric part came about from a jamming session between Mike, Phil and Tony.
In terms of lyrics, however, Gabriel definitely had the upper hand. Besides the mellifluous love song More Fool Me, Tony and Mike worked together (without much success) on the lyrics for Firth Of Fifth and The Cinema Show, leaving their lead singer to write the words to Dancing With The Moonlit Knight, I Know What I Like, The Battle Of Epping Forest and Aisle Of Plenty, authentic works of genius and verbal agility. Gabriel’s lyrical prowess was head and shoulders above many of his contemporaries (and not just from within the band). Drawing his inspiration from things such as newspaper articles (as he had done previously
with The Return Of The Giant Hogweed on Nursery Cryme), his writing comes across as both refined and sophisticated. On Selling England By The Pound, the usual references to mythology and literature are relegated to a marginal role (albeit still present) in favour of historical references and social comment. In an intertwining and exquisitely English play on words, the lyrics form the framework of the most ‘British’ album Genesis ever wrote, thanks to the fantastic descriptive identity of the characters who would later be brought to life on stage.
Paradoxically, when more or less individual compositions were being written (although, as always, the songs were credited to the whole group), Selling England By The Pound turns out to be the first Genesis record that could realistically be credited 20 per cent to each member. While the first two albums were created by the work of two songwriting pairs (Banks-Gabriel on the one side and Phillips-Rutherford on the other) and Nursery Cryme and Foxtrot essentially represented the primary compositional fusion between Banks and Rutherford with the support of Gabriel and contributions from the newcomers (just a little from Hackett and even less from Collins), Selling England is the album where Genesis achieved a perfect creative balance for the first time ever.
What’s more, during the recording sessions a special kind of synergy developed between Tony and the rhythm section of Phil and Mike – the trio that would later go on to constitute the second and more commercially successful phase in the band’s history. In a group where, apart from for the more instinctive Steve and Phil, the idea of improvising had been a totally foreign concept, the three developed an enviable level of understanding, with Tony acting as the driving force and inventor of original melodies driven by fantastic and creative rhythms. The most striking case, a precursor of which was seen in the Apocalypse In 9/8 section of Foxtrot’s epic track Supper’s Ready, is the long instrumental section in The Cinema Show.
Maybe due to this sense of unity (despite the initial difficulties), Selling England By The Pound, although preceded by three extraordinary albums, is often considered Genesis’s real coming of age. The band’s evolution continued to follow a logical and seemingly unstoppable thread. Their 1969 debut From Genesis To Revelation contained the first frail attempts at songwriting, while the following year’s Trespass revealed the band’s progressive side, despite it still being closely linked to folk influences thanks to Mike and original guitarist Anthony Phillips’s 12-string guitar parts. Where Nursery Cryme (’71) suffers from a lack of synergy within the new line-up, with the band having changed two of its five members (out went Phillips and John Mayhew, in came Hackett and Collins), Foxtrot (’72) turned out to be a successful album by what had by then become a consolidated and technically skillful band.
The artistic standing of Selling England By The Pound is all the more brilliant at a time when progressive rock seemed to have already reached its peak and was about to go into decline. In fact the new records released in 1973 by Genesis’s most reputable counterparts all showed a marked change in direction. Albums such as Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon or King Crimson’s Larks’ Tongues In Aspic, while undoubtedly representing milestones in the history of rock, both unequivocally show that those bands were already moving beyond their purely progressive phase. Floyd had barely touched upon it with Meddle, whereas the return of King Crimson, a couple of years after their first break-up, indicates a much harder direction with their romantic moments reduced to a mere flicker. And then there were the other prog giants: Emerson, Lake & Palmer (with their passable Brain Salad Surgery) and Yes (with their heavy-going Tales From Topographic Oceans), along with Rick Wakeman’s equally indigestible solo album The Six Wives Of Henry VIII, confirm that delusions of grandeur had hijacked the musical genre that seemed to be merely running its course and
“[Cover artist] Betty Swanwick seemed to have a good combination of Englishness while exposing the underbelly.”
Peter Gabriel
“We always felt that our strongest moments seemed to come out of us all improvising and jamming.”
Tony Banks
becoming increasingly unpalatable, while in the field of prog folk, Jethro Tull, with their pretentious A Passion Play, got slated by the critics.
The odd innovative spark did appear, albeit from unexpected sources. If Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells remains an isolated case, the fusion found in the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s Birds OF Fire represented, according to Collins and Hackett, a source of inspiration for Genesis in this era, while the electronic experimentation in Fripp & Eno’s No Pussyfooting would leave its mark on Genesis just a year later. In the meantime, glam rock (to which Gabriel’s theatricality has been unfairly likened) was still at its height, with David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure and Tanx by T.Rex.
In this artistic scenario, Selling England By The Pound became the perfect progressive rock album, the maximum level to which any band in this sector could aspire at that time.
Mike Rutherford: “Most of it was written near Chessington. Phil had a friend with an apartment in a big old country house there, and they had an area which bands could rent out.”
Steve Hackett: “It was a totally inappropriate place because it had no soundproofing, and quite naturally the neighbours started to complain. I remember one woman coming in and saying: ‘You’re just making banging noises, it’s not music at all!” Because it was a house that belonged to a family, it gave the music a sense of happy amateurishness. It made it fun because you felt you shouldn’t really be there doing that kind of thing. It was designed as a canteen or a cafeteria – there was even a machine that used to dispense bubble gum for kids. The atmosphere belonged to some other intention to the rehearsal of music, and I think that helped put a smile into the music. It did for me, anyway. And then there was Una Billings School Of Dance, which is where we wrote Foxtrot and Supper’s Ready, another very eccentric place. The sound of these girls dancing upstairs was like elephants dancing, believe me. Imagine what it’s like when you’ve got twenty of them all making this noise together. It was so funny, we used to look at each other… Whatever we were doing at that moment, no matter how serious it sounded, was crazy.”
While writing for Selling England By The Pound the band had some difficulties coming up with ideas for songs.
Tony Banks: “We used to have writing sessions; we didn’t necessarily write the album all in one go, but I remember that on this particular record we were a bit stuck for ideas. There were two or three things we already had. For example there was this riff Steve had been playing on stage and all over the place. We developed that into the song I Know What I Like; it was quite a simple thing for us, really, but it had a very strong atmosphere. I had three bits I’d written which I originally assumed would go into different songs. As it is, they all ended up in the
“We were all working together as a group trying to write as much as possible face to face in the studio.”
Steve Hackett
song which became Firth Of Fifth. Basically we just strung the three bits together in a way that made sense of them. Then there was the riff that became the first part of The Battle Of Epping Forest. Other than that we didn’t have much. We were struggling a bit to find things, so we ended up playing these three things every day for a long time and kind of overworked them. Particularly Epping Forest, we got way too many ideas into that.”
Phil Collins, speaking in 2007: “Some people see this as a difficult album to make. I don’t particularly remember it being that way. I do remember the Chessington sessions when we came up with Cinema Show and Dancing With The Moonlit Knight. Some of the instrumental stuff is me and Steve. I was starting to listen to the Mahavishnu Orchestra, so I was trying to put my weird time signatures into anything that would move. I Know What I Like, which we wrote at Una Billings, was us doing our Beatles thing, really. We didn’t see any harm in that because we had yet to have a hit single. I know Tony has said he could have done without Aisle Of Plenty. Firth Of Fifth was a big tour de force, while Cinema Show was a huge tour de force. It’s got a lot of things in it that we still play. It became a huge stage classic, and I particularly like it. I think the first half is great. We were definitely starting to sound a little bit better in the studio”
Peter Gabriel: “Very often people would come in with ideas that were starting points, and then they would sort of get to be the captain of that song. Some things, on the other hand, emerged during band rehearsals. So it was a sort of dual approach.”
Banks: “We always felt that our strongest moments seemed to come out of us all improvising and jamming, with things just coalescing. We always liked that very much, it’s what gives you the thrill.”
Hackett: “I think we were given six weeks to write an album and six weeks to record it at this point. We used to think anything else was excessive. With this album we were all working together as a group, trying to write as much as possible face-to-face in the studio. Obviously Tony brought in Firth Of Fifth as a finished song himself. The first part of Dancing With The Moonlit Knight was Pete’s and then it became everybody’s. I Know What I Like started as a guitar riff of mine. The rest we all did together.”
For the guitarist, these writing sessions became a place of refuge.
Hackett: “At the time, my first marriage was in bad shape. When I was at home I was finding it very hard to write because the atmosphere was tense. I just turned up for the rehearsals of this album with lots of guitar riffs, so it turned into a very guitary album. I was talking to [original Genesis guitarist] Anthony Phillips about this recently. He liked the album a lot. He was very generous about it, considering he was my predecessor. He said to me: ‘You did exactly the right thing bringing in all these riffs, because if you
tried to bring complete songs into Genesis it didn’t always work.’ Unless you were Tony Banks, that is! Tony basically got his way more than anybody else. It’s a fact. That said, he came up with wonderful things, and it was both wonderful and terrible working with him.”
When the time came to decide which tracks were to go on the album, there came a series of arguments within the band. Banks detested After The Ordeal; Hackett and Gabriel thought the keyboard solo in The Cinema Show was too long. In the end, to avoid upsetting anyone, they came to a compromise and decided to keep everything, which might explain why Selling England is a particularly long album.
Hackett: “The Battle Of Epping Forest is very long, and took that side of the album up to around twenty-nine minutes. People didn’t do that in those days because it meant you could get less bass response [on vinyl records]. We had arguments about what should and what shouldn’t be included, but I’m very glad we left everything in.”
After three albums characterised by the wonderful paintings of Paul Whitehead on their covers, the band decided on a change for Selling England. They were not drawn to the idea of featuring photographs of the band for the cover image. Instead they were attracted to the work of an English artist, Betty Swanwick.
Gabriel: “We were quite obsessive about that. Me in particular, I think, about trying to have images do the talking rather than mug shots of the band.”
Rutherford: “I just like seeing stuff. You know, when you see an image and say: ‘That’s the cover!’ or ‘Let’s develop that.’ I prefer seeing things and saying: ‘That’s it!’, rather than commissioning things, because you spend a long time waiting for a drawing or painting, and then maybe you get it and you don’t like it.
“Betty Swanwick was a great artist. She was a great old lady, and it was nice having someone who wasn’t from the music world but from the art world. This was the first time without Paul Whitehead. I think the Foxtrot album cover was a bit weak, so it was time to change and move on.”
Collins: “For me, it was a great cover. It showed that there had been a change of sorts, you know, from that kind of almost schoolboy graphics we had on Foxtrot and Nursery Cryme to something with Betty’s characters, which was kind of elegant.”
Banks: “Peter said: ‘Why don’t we get a real artist?” So we went to the Royal Academy and looked around, and we saw this picture which we thought was great. So we went and had tea with this fantastic lady. We had tea in her garden, but what was great was that she just put the table on the lawn, and when she put the tea on it everything was sort of sliding down the thing. And the whole time we were there, there was this parrot sat on Peter’s shoulder, sort of nibbling his collar. It was a somewhat surreal moment. Anyhow, she was a reasonably old lady and she said she’d loved to do it [the album cover], but that she couldn’t do
anything from scratch in just a month, which is what we needed. So we asked if she could modify the picture she already had. And that is what she did. She just took the picture she had and she added a lawn mower to it, so that it fitted with the lyrics of I Know What I Like, and some people in the background. It worked really well, and in many ways it’s the best piece of art we’ve ever had on a front cover. Whether it’s the best cover or not, I don’t know, but it’s the best piece of art on a cover. I’ve got the original at home. It’s a lovely piece.”
Gabriel: “I’d seen this artist, Betty Swanwick, at a Royal Academy Show. She seemed to have a good combination of Englishness while exposing the underbelly. I went down to see her with Tony and Margaret [Tony Banks’s wife]. She had a parrot, and she kept on talking to the parrot in the middle of the conversation, so you weren’t quite sure if you were being addressed or the parrot! And then she’d say: ‘Right, let’s swap chairs,’ so you’d swap over. When she heard some of the things I was thinking about with the lyrics, she wanted to add a leather glove to the painting or sketch that she’d already done. I can’t remember now if it was a drawing or a painting originally. She was a wonderful woman, a little bit like Miss Marple or an Agatha Christie character. Full of life, very smart and mischievous. She added the lawn mower because I had this line in a song: ‘Me, I’m just a lawn mower, you can tell me by the way I walk.’ Again, I think it was the sense of the actor mowing the lawn, a way for people to clear some of the angst. I don’t want to upset anyone, but this album cover was better than some that had gone before.”
“I think the good bits are good and the bad bits are a bit dodgy. But I think there are definitely some strong bits.”
Mike Rutherford
Hackett: “Betty said she would work on this black-and-white thing we had seen over and over again and do it in colour. So we had this great artist doing this cover, and I think it was perfect for the type of music: it was English, it was eccentric, it was gardens, it was dreamlike and it’s a great work of art in its own right. She’s sadly no longer with us. I believe she employed a dry brush technique, but then I’m no expert so it may have been pencil and crayon. It was just beautiful, and I felt the whole package worked.”
Selling England By The Pound was released in October 1973. In the US it never went higher than Number 70 in the charts, but for the first time ever Genesis managed to make it into the UK Top 10 albums chart, with an impressive
No.3 spot, making this the band’s first major commercial success. Also, the single I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe) spent seven weeks in the UK chart, reaching No.21.
Collins: “It was another stage towards getting more confidence. There was a feeling that we’d finally gone somewhere, you know. We were still very much a road band, but we were learning the ropes in the studio.”
Gabriel: “I think people were growing into themselves and getting to know their quirks and eccentricities, so the personalities were easier to feel. There was a sense of, you know, ‘Look, I can do this.’ And Steve definitely felt more of his own power in this record.”
Banks: “The line-up was stable and it felt stable too. Phil and Steve had both very much found their feet in the group, particularly as players, with Steve even starting to write a little bit, although it was still quite early days for him really. It was a more integrated sort of thing, even though, in all honesty, it was probably still a case of three senior and two junior members, but that was changing as time went by.”
Hackett: “I think of this album as quintessentially English. It’s like English fusion before the term was invented. Or even English collusion, you could say, because it’s too many different styles of music put side by side. I don’t think Genesis or any modern band would be capable of making this now, because they would be too frightened of failure. A modern band won’t take a chance of making an album like Sgt. Pepper’s. Even The Beatles were terrified that Sgt. Pepper’s was going to be above people’s heads. When we played this album to [manager] Tony Stratton-Smith, he said: ‘I don’t like it, but we’ll put it out anyway.’ He didn’t think it was as strong as Foxtrot. But then again I thought it was an album with lots of great, wacky ideas and lots of guitar moments that work.”
On the title track, Gabriel’s lyrics contrast the
“It doesn’t sound
like any other album. Not even Genesis did another that sounded like this.”
Steve Hackett
decadence of Old England and its progressive Americanisation, as highlighted by the reference to the Wimpy Bar burger chain. It’s packed with historical and social references exploiting very clever wordplay, like the union of ‘uniform’ and ‘faun’ to create ‘unifaun’, the Queen of Maybe or the ‘citizens of hope and glory’ to mimic the patriotic song Land Of Hope And Glory.
Gabriel: “The lyrics were, in a sense, about the commercialisation of English culture. Even we were selling ourselves to foreign audiences, including the Americas. One of the aims of the record was to look at Englishness in a different way, and therefore the title Selling England By The Pound seemed like a good title for the album. So that was my recommendation.”
Rutherford: “I think it’s one of our best album titles, actually. ‘Selling England By The Pound’ is a great phrase. On stage, with that sort of headgear thing, Peter looked like [the depiction of] Britannia on the back of a coin; it was a great setting for the song. I’ve always likened Selling England By The Pound to Nursery Cryme; they are sort of similar feeling albums in my mind. I think the good bits are good and the bad bits are a bit dodgy. But I think there are definitely some strong bits in there. And, of course, our first semi-hit single.”
Hackett: “I think albums like this provided a bridge over the chasm between what rock music was and what pop music was. The whole thing was a huge experiment. I think it’s very English and not always an act of genius. It’s very much a bunch of guys all forcing their ideas through and sticking to their guns, and that’s why there are times when it’s an uncomfortable mix. Everyone was being strong on it, and that’s what I like about it. I think everyone plays, sings and writes with conviction, saying: ‘No, my idea is as important as anyone else’s.’ I still maintain that it’s my favourite Genesis album because I felt most at home there. It was the life raft that I clung to at a time when I was operating in a stormy sea in my own private life. When I was working with them, I really felt that I was playing in the world’s best band. When we were playing in America, particularly in Los Angeles at The Roxy – where we couldn’t get a gig anywhere else – I felt that those shows in front of a small audience were some of the finest we ever did and I felt completely at home. When I was on stage playing this material, I felt as though I had the world of music in my hands. I felt that we were head and shoulders above everybody else at that time. There wasn’t a band on the face of the earth that could do jazz moments like that and improvisation and cohesive arrangements and humour and little bits from classical music and
“Cinema Show was a huge tour de force.
It’s got a lot of things in it that we still play. It became a huge stage classic.”
Phil Collins
hymns side by side, with this kind of clever mathematical punctuated drumming.”
Banks: “On this album I think we came together much more as players. It was the first one where we sound really convincing; there’s a bit more technique in there. However, I always like to think that technique is just another sort of paint brush, something you can use and it can be very effective at times, but it should never take over. I think with some groups it sort of takes over; you get a guitarist who can play so fast that he can’t stop
doing it and everything, whereas we’re very happy to sort of sit down… I’m very happy to sit down and hold chords, which I do a lot of the time. Then other times you can go mad and the contrast works, it illustrates something you are trying to create with the piece of music you’re writing.”
Collins: “Speaking frankly, my problem at that time was that we weren’t a groove-oriented band. I was desperately trying to bring in my roots of Motown and Atlantic and sort of soul music into this thing that was very, very English. Sometimes it just didn’t happen, but at this point we were still struggling to sort of stay in time.”
Gabriel: “There were things I was less happy with than others, and obviously I think everyone was trying to follow their own bits and pieces further through than anyone else’s. Some things could have been a bit sharper. For example the chorus of I Know What I Like, which for me didn’t last as a pleasurable experience, even though it got us a hit. Most of our stuff took a few plays for a listener to open up to it, but once they got it, it would stick around for quite a long time. The old school allegiances had broken down quite a long time before, really, and I think Phil and Steve were on an equal footing in terms of power broking.”
Banks: “This album was sort of commercially a success. I think that the odd light bit did help. Suddenly it started getting played on the radio a bit. I think what happened was that with the live shows we were picking up new fans all the time, so when the album came out, suddenly there were a lot of people going out and buying it all at the same time. That gave us a bit of chart presence. It came in at number three or something and stayed there for the second week, and then suddenly it was down at twenty-five, but it still made us feel that we had got somewhere.”
Gabriel: “I think I started to have some frustration about not being part of the keyboard side of things. I have very strong ideas on how things should sound and how you mix things together, so I think there may have been some frustrations in that department. There was a little riff on I Know What I Like which I played, and there was a big battle to persuade Tony to let me play that bit [in the end, the keyboard part recorded by Gabriel was never used]. He was very possessive, and I think a little afraid it would be the thin end of the wedge. But, you know, I was never interested in trying to take over keyboards. It was just that I think sometimes when other people play things they bring different personalities into it. It was just a question of getting these new colours. When we were out gigging, quite often there’d be a piano in one of the dressing rooms, and it was always Phil and I who would be there, busy playing keyboards and singing our stuff, but then there wouldn’t be any of that within the Genesis performance. So there was this mild frustration. It wasn’t burning at me or pissing me off, because we were getting a lot of other stuff achieved and there was plenty to do.”
Hackett: “It’s only over time that you have the ability to focus on this and analyse why it worked. It’s an album that’s full of nuances and digressions and side alleys, little side streets that sometimes lead off and go nowhere; nonetheless, it doesn’t sound like any other album anyone else has ever done. Not even Genesis did another album that sounded like this. If I were to speak for Mike, Tony and probably Pete, I don’t think they would feel it’s the strongest album, because they would be thinking in terms of songs rather than atmospheres. I think this album is largely atmosphere-driven, because they weren’t the greatest songs around. Although it sounds nothing like them, this record is in some ways closer in spirit to a Pink Floyd album. There were fewer ideas, but there are more moments of allowing the music to run. I think the idea of ‘Why don’t we just have a drone for a bit or just hit and knock bottles…’ was influenced by Eno talking about music that was drone-driven. Drone music is ancient. It’s Gregorian chant, it’s hurdy-gurdy men doing their stuff, it’s Greek Orthodox music and the music from the southern plains of Hungary; improvisations that have no fixed notes, no fixed point, it’s very early use of two-note harmony. All I know is that the band went up a notch and fans liked it better each time, so it seems.
“This was not an album that disappointed fans who enjoyed Nursery Cryme or Foxtrot. And don’t forget we were still working with the twelve-string style at this time, which was hugely influenced by the genius of the young Anthony Phillips. I don’t think he’s given enough credit for architecting the sound of Genesis, and he was very important, almost like Matthew Fisher was for Procol Harum. I believe Anthony Phillips was for Genesis someone who cracked the whip, made them work harder and gave them a run for their money.”
“We came together much more as players. It was the first album where we sound really convincing.”
Tony Banks
This extract is taken from Genesis: 1967 To 1975 – The Peter Gabriel Years, by Mario Giammetti, published by Kingmaker and available now from www.burningshed.com
“It was English, it was eccentric, it was gardens, it was dreamlike and it’s a great work of art in
its own right.”
Peter Gabriel on the Selling England cover