I KNOW WHAT I LIKE (IN YOUR WARDROBE)

As a single, this was Genesis’s first moderate success in the charts. It starts with a fixed synthesiser drone and bongos. Peter’s spoken intro leads into the rather elementary structure of the song: a verse sung by two voices, over an insistent riff played on electric guitar (Hackett) and sitar (Rutherford), and a very catchy chorus characterised by a lovely bass guitar sequence.

Hackett: “A very simple song. It’s based on a guitar riff of mine. We were practising this riff round about the time of Foxtrot. Phil and I used to play it all the time, but the rest of the guys in the band said it sounded a bit too much like The Beatles, so we didn’t use it. When it came to the following album, Phil and I were still playing it together, only this time the rest of the band joined in and the song was written from a jam.”

Rutherford: “We grew up with The Beatles. The best band in the world. This word ‘pop’ has come to mean something different now, but a great song is a great song. Although our writing wasn’t bad at all, there were different pieces in our songs. I suppose I Know What

I Like was one of the first songs where we actually managed to take a short, simple idea and develop it, rather than having, as we often did, too many small bits in a song.”

Gabriel: “Although it may have looked as if there was more of a pop sensibility on this record, I think I Know What I Like was in part an accident. Often when we tried to chase things, we’d fail miserably. I think we’d got to a point where we’d learnt that when we were ourselves and allowed things to happen, we seemed to have more success and resonance with audiences than if we tried to write something which none of us really felt was true to the core of the band.”