2. GenesisSelling England By The Pound
Another album I owned on 8-track, and prog rock and 8-track do not mix. You know that clunk click you get? I remember listening to it in the back of my dad’s Volvo at the garage at Crieff Hydro, a hotel my parents used to take me to.
Selling… is the definitive Genesis album. I had the luxury of speaking to Steve Hackett about it last year and we were talking about the construction of it, about how you go about handling something like Selling…. Nowadays you can use computers and drum tracks and you can cut, copy and paste. Back in those days it was a case of you played it. He said it came from jams. And it’s sublime. It works from ‘Dancing With The Moonlit Knight’ – such a poignant opener – all the way through to ‘Firth Of Fifth’. It’s another emotive album and it captured me at the time.
Lyrically it’s very strange. The wordplay was one of the things that became quite an influence on me – the games within the lyrics. Selling… took a whole jump forward and was the album that really got me into Genesis. I didn’t see them till The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway tour which was actually my second ever gig. I saw Yes on the Sunday night and then on the Tuesday night I saw – at the same venue, the Usher Hall – Genesis doing The Lamb…. I was prog right away.
