Dancing With The Moonlit Knight

Also note that Peter Gabriel was the one who collected Green Sheild Stamps on the road during the early days with the band, to the band's amusement, I think.

A few words about the album as a whole:

Selling England by the Pound

The title was actually originally the slogan used in the Labour Party Manifesto for the General Election held before the album was released which itself was using wordplay on the idea of "pound".

The pound sterling is the world's oldest currency still in use. The origins of sterling lie in the reign of King Offa of Mercia, who introduced the silver penny. It copied the denarius of the new currency system of Charlemagne's Frankish Empire. As in the Carolingian system, 240 pennies weighed 1 pound (corresponding to Charlemagne's libra)

Labour Party's Harold Wilson was elected for a third time in February 1974, taking over from Conservative Edward Heath whose government was brought to its knees by oil shortages and a crippling coal miners' strike in 1973.

Heath's most lasting achievement was to lead the UK into the EEC (later the EU) in 1973. His tenure, however, was blighted by industrial unrest, including a devastating miners' strike. This resulted in the famous 'three-day-week', in which commercial consumption of electricity was limited to three days per week, with the exception of essential services.

However the 1970s proved to be a disastrous time for any party to be in government. Faced with a mishandled oil crisis, a consequent world-wide economic downturn, and a badly suffering British economy, Governments were forced to take an interventionist approach, and companies such as British Leyland were nationalised to prevent their collapse. Pressure on sterling compounded these problems, and by the middle of the decade 1½ million people were unemployed in the UK - a previously unthinkable figure.

The Labour Party itself had adopted a left-wing agenda, 'Labour's Programme 1973', a document which pledged to bring about a 'fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families.' This programme referred to a 'far reaching Social Contract between workers and the Government.' Wilson publicly accepted many of the left-wing implications of the Programme but the condition of the economy allowed little room for manouevre.

Gabriel insisted that the album be titled Selling England by the Pound, the reference to the Labour Party slogan at the time, in an effort to counter the impression that Genesis were becoming too US-oriented.