SELLING ENGLAND BY THE POUND

I confess this has been for over thirty years my top prog rock album even if other great albums from the best bands of the seventies could reach the same rating. But I guess in this ocasion it has to do with something that is added to the quality of the music in Selling England by the Pound, and that could be the quality of both the lyrics and the writing as a whole.

To start with, there is a sensation of loss that this piece of art exudes in almost every composition. You had that feeling we were not able to realize at the time -being only twenty-year-olds- that something was disappearing or changing for the worse in any case. We are aware of that now, once the show has ended, but we could not be aware of it when we were listening to Dancing to the Moonlit Knight or The Cinema Show. We use to think the songs dealt with something past, but it was present. We were just flooded with the avalanche of wonderful music that made us dream of different worlds, different lives, a would-be feeling that some call the nostalgia of the future.

But let's not get too deep if we can help it. Selling England by the Pound is a masterpiece that flows from the beginning to the end without significant flaws, even if there's a pardonable one in the likes of More Fool Me, a piece which coul have perfectly stayed out of this disc without dismembering it. But it doesn't bother, either. The rest of the songs compensate abundantly for it.

I find the balance of arrangenments is perfect in this record. It is difficullt to find a more perfect equilibrium of instruments in the albums of the era. Not only the perfect interplay of those five talented musicians but the apllication of the right dose in the right tone, tempo and rhythm make the music hardly beatable.

And yet, sometimes it's more what it is not said than what it is. The way the first piece (Dancing...) ends give you time and space to think about it. The instrumental parts of Firth of Fifth and The Cinema Show are some of the best music ever written, no matter the style or time it was written. The magnificence that a presumible commercial piece as I Know What I Like presents tells you that the band is not to make things cheap or easy and whatever the purpose is, they are going to make it great and endurable.

And that could be a good adjective for an all-time masterpiece. An endurable work of art. One in which time does not want to pass but to stay

Thank you, Genesis, for that infinite source of pleasure and enjoyment. Ibnacio