In the first of an occasional series revisiting classic albums, Terry Grimley renews acquaintaince with Genesis's Selling England by the Pound (1973)

Although I'm old enough to remember when "progressive" was not necessarily a term of abuse in pop music, I was never a big Genesis fan.

I caught up with them when their career was already in full flight, when a devotee was kind enough to lend me several of their albums. But though I was quite interested in the dark English surrealism in which Nursery Cryme and Foxtrot were rooted, the music itself struck me as hamfisted.

But the successor to these albums, Selling England by the Pound, was another matter - a virtuosic and original mix of adventurous music and English whimsy. I was sufficiently impressed to buy Genesis's next album, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, when it came out.

Until this week I hadn't heard Selling England by the Pound for 20 years, but I've occasionally wondered how it would stand up after all this time.

Seeing it on offer at a knockdown price the other day, I decided to find out. Of course, old blokes should never do this. Fondly-remembered lost records mature with you in your head, but unfortunately the originals remain perfectly preserved in plastic, with all the shortcomings posterity is just waiting to uncover.

So it may seem na've to say I was initially surprised by how dated Selling England by the Pound now sounds. How limited keyboard sounds were in 1973 - and that style of guitar playing, all sustain and no attack, now sounds decidedly peculiar.

But you have to admit, it was an ambitious album. At 53 minutes it is exceptionally long by the standards of the LP era, and with only eight tracks it is mostly a collection of epic excursions with extended instrumental stretches, far removed from the traditional structures of pop.

The odd track out is More Fool Me, the only conventional love song and the only one on which Phil Collins, then the band's drummer, sings. It's a sore-thumb calling card for his future career as a middle-of-the-road pop star: a shame, as he was obviously a much better than average rock drummer.

If there is a concept that links the rest of the album's tracks, together with its Stanley Spencerish cover painting by Royal Academy artist Betty Swanwick, it is the decline of England from glorious past to mundane, uniform modernity. In keeping with this theme, the brief concluding track, Aisle of Plenty, is a collection of excruciating puns to do with supermarkets.

Ironically, such then-everyday references as Fine Fare and Green Shield Stamps now themselves sound as nostalgic as the one to "the fool" and "hobbyhorse".

The whole aesthetic of the record, utterly alien to today's pop, proceeds seamlessly out of 1960s Britain (the "progressive" decade actually ran from 1966 to 1976, announced by the Beatles Revolver and compulsorily closed down by the advent of punk).

The middle-English types in I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe), like the young couple in Cinema Show, are stock characters from the Beatles repertory company. With hindsight, Firth of Fifth sounds exactly like Procul Harum, while the comedy number The Battle of Epping Forest, inspired by a newspaper story about an East End gangsters' turf war, poaches on Viv Stanshall's territory.

The band appears to have been so delighted with this particular jape, with its posh and cockney "funny" voices, that it spins it out for a wearying 11 minutes, 44 seconds.

So quickly had the expressive range of pop been opened up by the Beatles and their contemporaries from the mid-60s that by the early 70s pop musicians were lifting some of the characteristics of classical music - in particular, its timescale and dynamic range, though not its harmonic complexity - effectively in a bid to supplant it.

This may have had significant long-term cultural effects (see the current debate within the classical music world about its future sustainability), but what is apparent from Selling England by the Pound and many other records of the period is that these bands were biting off more than they could chew.

The sense of hubris which would soon meet its nemesis in punk undercuts a great deal of melodic invention and good musicianship on this album. The charm of the whole package would be greater if it were less knowing.

But you do still have to acknowledge its ambition and imagination. It's not too difficult to see why many people probably still love this record, whether or not they acknowledge its faults.