It’s Genesis month! Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, Mike + the Mechanics – all must pass through the meat grinder, but to what dark end? I don’t exactly know, though I’m interested in the trajectory from early-70s upper-class lapsed hippie prog-rock clownery, into the stimulant-fueled Thatcherite dance-rock of the 80s, finally culminating in the self-satisfied suburban paunch-rock of the 90s. Genesis’ Typhon and Echidna-like family tree allows for a unique exploration of these disparate musical and cultural trajectories, so let’s take Jon Bovi’s advice, live while we’re alive, and commence our journey with Selling England by the Pound, post-Charter House Gabriel-era Genesis at their insufferable peak.
Let me cut to the chase immediately – I was determined to hate this album before I even listened to it. I hate prog rock; I hate big haired 70s guitar wankery; I hate Led Zeppelin, perhaps more than any other band with the exception of M People; I hate songs about dungeons and dragons, warlocks, and battles in the snow between men in tights; I hate thirteen-minute “esoteric epics” with “multiple chord changes”; I don’t give a shit about someone’s “guitar wizardry”, much less about Merlin’s wizardry channeled into sexless rock lyrics; and above all, I hate the self-serious BSc Engineering students who spent much of their misbegotten youths slumped on sofas in university towns, smoking pot, listening to tripe like this, and feeling exceptionally pleased with themselves about it.
So admittedly, I was not best-placed to appreciate Selling England by the Pound, though I hasten to add that I am not undiscriminating in my volcanic rejection of the music made by the autistic middle-class British males of the mid-70s. I like Bowie. I accept that Dark Side of the Moon is one of the greatest albums ever made, as much as it pains me to admit it, and I acknowledge that Radiohead, the insufferably self-serious heirs to this unmistakeably bourgeois and Estuary English tradition, are responsible for three of the twenty best records in the history of rock. And to top it off, Peter Gabriel’s So is also among those 20 records, so it’s surely nothing personal either. But Selling England by the Pound is merely grist to the mill of my considerable enmity for prog rock and the demographic it appeals to. Ultimately, I want pop, and I want it catchy, meaningful, concise, and riddled with amphetamines, not slumped over a bucket kit in a flat in Exeter with an M.C. Escher print on the wall.
I certainly don’t want 12 minute “soundscapes” about “the changing face of England” in the 1960s, much less unfunny Monty Python-esque “rock operas” about Clockwork Orange-style gangland warfare in Epping Forest. The “critique” of commercialisation and Americanisation advanced by “Dancing with the Moonlight” is so opaque as to be barely perceptible – though I admit that it’s better than that godawful fucking Toploader song, who come to think of it, are a band I hate more than Led Zeppelin, though not more than M People. The “meditation on the passing of time” essayed by the equally interminable “Fourth of Fifth” is similarly tiresome, and by the time “Cinema Show” kicks in, with its Greensleevian twang and tales of teenage lust refracted through the Medievalist imagery of a classically educated and unspoiled sixth former, you can almost hear the other members of Genesis willing Peter Gabriel to just write something normal, for fuck’s sakes.
Sadly, when Collins intercedes and tries to do precisely that, he fails miserably, serving up the mealy mouthed sub-Simon and Garfunkel drivel of “More Fool Me.” Phil would have to wait a few more years for the advent of synth music and cocaine, so that he could become the unsightly Reaganite popstar that he was born to be. But on that particular topic, the only moment on Selling England by the Pound that lands is “I Know What I Like,” in which Genesis point toward the glorious fast-paced pop with halfway coherent lyrics that Collins and even Gabriel, despite himself, would later deploy to devastating effect on their magnificent solo albums.
For the time being, however, there’s nothing more to say about Selling England By The Pound, except that it’s boring, that it’s aged terribly, that it cannot be detached from its insidious historical milieu of the postwar British public school system, and that I’m utterly flabbergasted that Gabriel went from this to the unimpeachably flawless pop-rock of So. Probably bills had to be paid and “The Battle of Epping Forest” wasn’t delivering on that particular front, so thank god for the free market, is all I can say to that.
Rating: *
Standout track: “I Know What I Like”