Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

When Selling England By The Pound was released in 1973, it confirmed what many already knew, that Genesis was to be heralded as one of the great Progressive Rock bands of all time. Following on from Foxtrot and especially side two which showed the intricate, fantastical and multi-layered nature of the group’s writing and musical talent. Selling England By The Pound was a trip into the English pastoral, the off-beat look at life in the country, swathed in lyrical expansion and would in time become the second of five classic albums on the trot, to be followed by the seminal Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, Foxtrot and Wind and Wuthering.

What these five albums had in common were Steve Hackett. Peter Gabriel certainly had the lyrical prose which gave the second incarnation of the band (after the departure of the superb Anthony Phillips) its grounding, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford’s musical ability is beyond reproach and Phil Collins performed as the natural beat and captain of the group after Peter’s departure but throughout the period between 1973 and 1977, Steve Hackett arguably gives the group their meaning.

The sense of the English pastoral is opened up before the listener even before they have chance to take in the lyrics and madrigal type hypnotic music on offer. Betty Swanwick’s The Dream, the beauty captured by the artist was a departure from the previous album covers and one that the band were able to manipulate with the addition of a lawnmower, the addition of the sense of playfulness and good natured mischief that strode through the band and made the album cover unforgettable.

Inside the cover, the album starts with the sound of Peter Gabriel’s voice, mournful, pleading and asking the listener the question, “Can you tell me where my country lies?” No other album by the band at the time kicks off in such a way and coupled with the album’s title gives the listener a sense of loss, a departure of both post-war innocence, sixties radicalism in the arts and in technology as well as in every-day life and a foreshadowing of what can be seen as having torn the country apart for the next forty years. Selling England By The Pound was named after a small publication by the Labour party and the question of Europe. Even today the question could be asked but not in some attempt to ask about Europe and their taking over the laws of the land but the real question of who runs the U.K., its people or the market forces which control what actually is a British company. The 1970s were a period riven by a question of what is a person worth, 40 years on when you have people having to choose between staying warm in their homes or eating because the state sold off to the highest bidders the fundamentals of life and which have seen gas and electric prices crippling most families; the state selling off the way the country communicates in the Royal Mail being floated in the stock exchange and even the way each person commutes to work, it seems that little by little,  bit by bit, England, the U.K. really has been sold off by the pound.  

Dancing with the Moonlit Knight is complex and has wonderful dark overtones attached to it. The imagery of the lines are bursting to the seams, as is the whole album, and it is more like a piece of disturbing but grandly painted art work, cerebral in its nature but with all the essence of whimsical thrown in for good measure. The second verse of the track sees the image of England, of the U.K., the town and country placed side by side and co-existing in a world that hasn’t moved on from the times of Ben Jonson, from the sixteenth century and in which Shakespeare wrote of this other Eden and the sceptered Isle. Gone though were the 1950s and 60s, gone was the posterity of Post-war Britain, now was the time of harsh reality, the country was in decline. However to the outside world the U.K. must still have seemed like some garden paradise and the imagery found in the opening track alluded to this mistake as a person speaks up from the crowd and claims that the paper is late, the man standing at the edge of the local underground selling The Evening Standard to people making their way home to the suburbs and to the counties of Kent, Hampshire, Sussex and Essex after working in the city all day hollering his wares, is nowhere to be found. The headline captured is that of a man who has drowned, the suicide note he leaves was signed Old Father Thames and he himself is the biggest contributor to England being sold down the river. If Old Father Thames committed suicide then, then his offspring must also be feeling the same pangs of regret as they too continually sell of the country’s assets, its people, down the river.

It is these comical but topical allusions, the small looks at life in the country, which make the album endlessly fascinating. It is also an album that draws once more on the literature in which to find inspiration. Whether through newspaper articles in which gangs in the East-End fought in Epping Forest, the use of the whimsical pun in Aisle of Plenty, in which now with time seems a regretful way of looking at the era or in the utterly compelling The Cinema Show which takes its lead from both The Wastelands and from The Ovid.

It is the figure of Tiresias that stands out through listening to the album and alongside the figure of Britannia, a complex look of what was Britain was going through and has continued to do since the start of the 70s. Tiresias was the legendary figure who appeared not only in The Ovid but in Dante’s Inferno, the only character to do so. The seer is remarkable in literature from the time of having been both male and female. After annoying the wife of Jupiter he is turned female for insisting that women in all matters get most of the pleasure. A metamorphosis that was inconceivable until the 1950s. As with Tiresias, the U.K. underwent its own cultural and physical change and the repugnant rise of inequality, of shameful scenes involving members of extreme political parties reared their ugly head. The head of the British Government, Edward Heath, at the time led the country into a near collapse and the sense of rolling hills, of manufacturing, of work hand in hand for the country’s benefit started its downhill journey.

Like Tiresias though something flourished inside and whilst he insisted, even when turned back into a man that women still had all the pleasure, the arts in the country exploded as more saw another way to communicate their ideas with each other. The huge impact of the 1970s saw some fantastic music genres emerge and evolve, the brief rise of punk, good Progressive Rock make a stand and groups such as The Jam, the Republic of Ireland’s The Boomtown Rats, Madness and The Stranglers all start shaking their lyrical angry fists at those at the helm.

Like The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, Selling England By The Pound may be a piece of lyrical wonderment, a licence to be poetic and to be scanned deeply into the meaning of every song, a perfect album in which the art of close reading comes into its own but it is the work of Steve Hackett’s guitar that gives the album it’s deep resonance, its almost sublime beauty throughout, especially on the instrumental track After The Ordeal which makes the album one to listen to over and over again.

If not for the epic nature of the album that was to follow in 1974, Selling England By The Pound might be considered the finest moment of the band which involved Peter Gabriel as the lead vocalist, however it still shines brightly as one of the finest examples of Progressive Rock ever laid down, its ability in which to tell a story and have listeners looking in greater depth at the tracks is astonishing and one in which is only surpassed by The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.

Ian D. Hall