Selling England By The Pound

In November 2019, at a sold-out show in London's Hammersmith Apollo, Steve Hackett performed the legendary Genesis album "Selling England by the Pound" in its entirety. Steve and his band also played tracks from "Spectral Mornings" (celebrating its 40th anniversary), "At the Edge of Light" and "A Trick of the Tail"…

5th studio album presents Genesis at their creative peak. Contains 'Firth of Fifth' with famous Hackett's guitar solo. The album cover is a painting by Betty Swanwick called 'The Dream'. The original artwork did not feature a lawn mower; the band had Swanwick add it later as an allusion to the song "I Know What I Like."

Selling England By The Pound & Spectral Mornings: Live At Hammersmith is from Steve Hackett s critically acclaimed 2019 UK tour. The concert was recorded at the Hammersmith Eventim Apollo, the final night of an emphatically successful tour.

Genesis proved that they could rock on Foxtrot but on its follow-up Selling England by the Pound they didn't follow this route, they returned to the English eccentricity of their first records, which wasn't so much a retreat as a consolidation of powers…

Essential: a masterpiece of progressive rock music
THE BEST OF THE BEST… "Cinema Show" reach the quintessence near the end.

Genesis proved that they could rock on Foxtrot but on its follow-up Selling England by the Pound they didn't follow this route, they returned to the English eccentricity of their first records, which wasn't so much a retreat as a consolidation of powers. For even if this eight-track album has no one song that hits as hard as "Watcher of the Skies," Genesis hasn't sacrificed the newfound immediacy of Foxtrot: they've married it to their eccentricity, finding ways to infuse it into the delicate whimsy that's been their calling card since the beginning. This, combined with many overt literary allusions - the Tolkeinisms of the title of "The Battle of Epping Forest" only being the most apparent - gives this album a storybook quality. It plays as a collection of short stories, fables, and fairy tales, and it is also a rock record, which naturally makes it quite extraordinary as a collection, but also as a set of individual songs…

Recorded and released in 1973, Selling England By the Pound is in my opinion Genesis's best album. It is certainly my favorite. It is a lament for a lost England that was becoming increasingly commercialized. Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett were still in the band. All the songs were co-written by the group. The musicians were still relatively young. Gabriel was 23 and Phil Collins was 22.