THE BATTLE OF EPPING FOREST

Acomplex song (and at close to 12 minutes the longest track on the album), driven by the incessant organ and bass. Banks uses the synthesiser in some passages, and the falsetto vocals in the choruses are by Collins.

Hackett: “I don’t think it’s a totally successful song. I think maybe other people in the band might regard it as a total failure. I think Phil would because there are so many sections and it’s so complicated. Yet it’s a very simple idea. Perhaps it should have been done much more simply to reflect the lyrical content. But then again you’ve got a rhythm section trying to be very clever with rhythms, so it means you’ve got more punctuation than statement. It’s a criticism that I would level at most progressive rock. In progressive rock, especially among the new purveyors of the genre, there is a tendency to think that it should sound like this; you shouldn’t be able to tap your foot to it. This was a style that Phil was using at the time: rhythmically the drums are working in counterpoint to the main stream of the music.

Collins: “We were writing it and we had some really good counter-polyrhythmic bits happening, and then Peter took the song and wrote the lyrics. Then he came in to sing the lyrics and there were like three hundred words a line. There was no space, it was like all the air had been sucked out of it. I’m not saying that he was in the wrong or we were in the wrong, it’s just that if we’d known we could have thinned it out a bit. In those days we didn’t go back and re-record things. It was a classic example of when stuff got a little bit out of hand.”

Gabriel: “I’d spent a lot of time building up the story with all these characters and setting scenes, and I was quite reluctant to edit as severely as I should have done. So I think it did end up too wordy. The groove didn’t really work on that particular take. If I were to do it now I’d maybe slow it down a little and speed it up at the end; try and get a punchier undercarriage.”