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Album
Selling England by the Pound
Genesis →299,806 listeners5,204,466 plays
progressive rockrock70sclassic rock1973
about this album
Selling England by the Pound is the fifth studio album by Genesis and was recorded and released in 1973. It followed Foxtrot and was the band's commercial peak with Peter Gabriel, hitting #3 in the UK. The album went gold in the US in 1990. The album cover is a painting by Betty Swanwick called The Dream. The original painting did not feature a lawn mower; the band had Swanwick add it later as an allusion to the song I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe). Theme Retaining the pastoral yearning for ancient or medieval England as its primary thematic material, the album focuses on traces of this past in the present. Songs about England's mythological past (Dancing With the Moonlit Knight) co-exist with sketches of contemporary lawnmowers (I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)), and the centrepiece of the second side, the epic The Cinema Show, has two lovers serve as reincarnations of ancient Greek figures in a way which is almost directly out of the "Fire Sermon" scene in T. S. Eliot's long poem The Waste Land. The musical performances are much more polished and tight than on the preceding LPs. Musical diversions are more often unified into the general song structure. In particular, Steve Hackett's guitar solos in Firth of Fifth show his unique voice on guitar at its best, while the song opens with a highly structured classically inspired piano-instrumental by Tony Banks. As with previous efforts, unusual time signatures and shifts in key and pace continue as key structural
