Progressive rock bands in 1973 were not supposed to chase the singles chart. Genesis, by then famous for twenty-minute suites, Mellotron washes and a singer who performed in a fox’s head, largely agreed — which makes it all the sweeter that their breakthrough hit was a four-minute singalong about a young man who is perfectly happy pushing a lawnmower. “I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)”, lifted from Selling England by the Pound, became the first Genesis single ever to chart, reaching No. 21 in Britain in April 1974. It did so with a sitar lick, a chorus anybody could shout, and a hero whose entire philosophy is that he has no ambition whatsoever.
An Album Written Against the Clock
The song arrived at a turning point. Genesis had finished their first full-scale North American tour in May 1973 on the back of Foxtrot, and their label, Charisma, was keen to capitalise — even releasing a budget live album, Genesis Live, as a stopgap against the band’s wishes; it became their highest-charting UK album to that point, at No. 9. The band themselves were given just two to three months to write a new record, a deadline Rutherford later called “the kiss of death”. Rehearsals began in a rambling house in Chessington belonging to a doctor, where the neighbours complained about the noise and imposed a curfew, before moving to the Shepherd’s Bush dance school. Hackett, going through the breakdown of his first marriage, found songwriting difficult and contributed riffs and licks rather than whole pieces — one of which, fortunately, turned out to be this one. Gabriel, by contrast, raced through his work, later saying he wrote all his lyrical contributions to the album in two days. Even the album’s title was his: Selling England by the Pound borrowed a slogan from a Labour Party manifesto, a pre-emptive strike against any British critic tempted to accuse the band of selling out to America — Rutherford later rated it among the best titles they ever had. In the studio, Foxtrot engineer John Burns was promoted to co-producer, and his command of the room lifted the performances; the band had also expanded their sonic palette with an Echoplex and Banks’s new ARP Pro Soloist, the synthesiser that drones the mower note under this very song.
A Hero Painted Before He Was Written
The song’s central character, Jacob, is a groundsman who mows lawns, listens to the disapproving whispers of his suburban neighbours, and declines every invitation to grow up and do great things. He knows what he likes, and what he likes is exactly the life he already has. Peter Gabriel’s lyric was not invented from thin air: it was inspired by The Dream, a painting by the artist Betty Swanwick, which was later adapted for the Selling England by the Pound album cover. When the band settled on the painting for the sleeve, Swanwick added a lawnmower to the original image at their request — and the mower, and the dreamy figure resting beside the garden, fed straight back into the song. Jacob is less a character study than a quiet manifesto: in an album preoccupied with the decay of English folk culture and creeping Americanisation, he is the one figure entirely at peace with England as it is.
The Riff That Sounded Too Much Like the Beatles
Musically, the song grew out of the unlikeliest of places for a progressive rock epic — a casual jam. Guitarist Steve Hackett had a simple riff he would play on stage, and he and drummer Phil Collins had been knocking it around since around the time of Foxtrot. The other three members initially held back, complaining that it sounded too much like the Beatles. That, of course, was rather the point. By the time the band were rehearsing beneath the Una Billings School of Dance in Shepherd’s Bush, London — the room where much of Selling England by the Pound took shape — the riff had become a song, and the Beatles influence was embraced as a virtue: the track was openly inspired by the Fab Four’s psychedelic period.
The details are pure Genesis, though. Tony Banks wrote the vocal melody for the chorus, and at the beginning and end of the record he plays a low note on his ARP synthesiser to imitate the sound of a lawnmower starting up. Mike Rutherford plays electric sitar as well as bass, giving the track its nagging, woozy lick. Gabriel opens the song playing a talking drum that engineer and co-producer John Burns had bought from Nigeria, and most of the lead vocal is doubled — Gabriel and Collins singing the same lines together to give the sound more body. The track runs just over four minutes, is credited to all five members, and sits second on the album, straight after the eight-minute “Dancing with the Moonlit Knight”. Gabriel also plays flute on it, adding a solo steeped in the same pastoral psychedelia as the sitar. Writing in The Guardian in 2014, Stevie Chick described the result as rising “with a heat-haze shimmer, before locking into a groove akin to Traffic’s ‘Hole in My Shoe'” — “a hippy reverie that fits the song’s slacker vibe like a pair of tailored bell-bottoms”, soundtracking “a drop-out happy with his lawnmowing life, despite the disapproving whispers of his suburban neighbours”, and noted that its flute solo was interpreted through dance by Pan’s People when the song reached Top of the Pops. Chick’s key observation was that Jacob is “a misfit, like all the others in the Gabriel-era songbook” — except that this misfit is the only one of them who is entirely content.
A Single, Against the Odds
Selling England by the Pound was recorded at Island Studios in London in August 1973 and released that October, reaching No. 3 in the UK and No. 70 in the United States. Charisma Records released “I Know What I Like” as a single in February 1974, and in April it climbed to No. 21 — the band’s only pop hit of their early years. Remarkably, Genesis were never as hostile to the pop single as their peers: the band were openly fond of the format and had even written songs such as “Happy the Man” specifically as non-album singles.
The B-side has a story of its own. “Twilight Alehouse”, a lonely drinker’s lament, had been in the Genesis live set since 1970 and was recorded during the Foxtrot sessions in 1972, only to be left off that album because the band felt it did not hold up against their newer material. It finally reached the public on the back of their first hit, and later appeared on the Genesis Archive 1967–75 box set, credited in part to Anthony Phillips, the band’s original guitarist.
Helmets, Wheat and a Tambourine Dance
On the Selling England tour of 1973–74, Gabriel turned the song into theatre. Famous for introducing songs with surreal spoken stories, he would tell the audience about a man who watches everyone else wasting time on insignificant things while entertaining himself mowing the grass — then put on a helmet, stuff two leaves of wheat into his mouth, and mime pushing a lawnmower at the start and finish of the song. A performance from London’s Rainbow Theatre survives on Genesis Archive 1967–75.
The song never left the stage show, but it changed shape. On Seconds Out (1977), the first live album of the Collins era, it carries an extended instrumental section stitched together from snippets of other Genesis songs — “Visions of Angels”, “Blood on the Rooftops”, “Dancing with the Moonlit Knight” and “Stagnation” among them. During that instrumental stretch, Collins performed a frantic dance, striking a tambourine against his hands, elbows, knees, feet, buttocks and head; in his memoir Not Dead Yet he described it as “a cross between morris dancing and John Cleese’s The Ministry of Silly Walks.” By The Way We Walk era the medley had absorbed later hits including “Follow You Follow Me” and “That’s All”, and on the Turn It On Again tour images from the band’s history cycled behind them as they played it — Jacob’s modest anthem repurposed as a scrapbook of the whole career.
The Afterlife of a Slacker Anthem
In 1993, Fish, the former Marillion singer dogged throughout his career by comparisons to Gabriel, covered the song on his album Songs from the Mirror — explicitly, he said, to prove to his critics that he could interpret a song differently from Gabriel. A decade later the song found a stranger second career as a running gag on Top Gear: Jeremy Clarkson, a devoted Genesis fan, tormented his co-presenter Richard Hammond, a professed Genesis hater, by rigging Hammond’s car stereo in the “Middle East Special” to play the track on a loop, then weaponising it again via megaphone in the India and Africa specials.
That a song about refusing to do anything much should prove so hard-working is the final joke. The Gabriel-era Genesis are remembered for apocalypses, watchers of the skies and musical boxes — but the first time British singles buyers took them home, it was on the back of a smiling groundsman, a borrowed painting, and a chorus built to be sung by absolutely anyone.