“Dancing With The Moonlight Knight” by Genesis

"Dancing with the Moonlit Knight", from Selling England by the Pound, Genesis's 1973 album, is the band going looking for England on purpose, and it was nearly called "Disney". The music press had been griping that Genesis were working too hard to win over American audiences, so Peter Gabriel answered with lyrics steeped in Englishness, right down to Green Shield Stamps; Rolling Stone heard it as an epic commentary on the England of its day.

It grew out of several short piano pieces by Gabriel, stitched together with Steve Hackett's guitar figures, and it winds down on 12-string guitar that was once meant to flow straight into "The Cinema Show" for a piece of around 20 minutes. Its echo carried into the Phil Collins era, too: "Paperlate", from 1982, was born during a soundcheck run-through of this song and took its title from one of its lines.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.