70: GENESIS
I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)/ Twilight Alehouse
(Charisma, 1974)

I TOO know what I like, and generally speaking it doesn't include Genesis.

Even as a devotional prog hound, I never quite got their appeal. They weren't as dark and scary as Van Der Graaf or King Crimson, nor indeed were they as exhilaratingly adept, fiddly and hilariously conceptual as Yes and Gentle Giant.

Every now and then, however, they would produce a track which just hit the spot where my idiosyncratic needs were concerned: The Carpet Crawlers, for example, or Counting Out Time, or even some of those early Decca-era beauties (The Silent Sun, In The Beginning).

Perhaps best of all, in April 1974 - when all around were Wombles, Osmonds, members of The Glitter Band and Paper Lace - Genesis somehow crept into the lower reaches of the singles charts with I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe), a true anachronism however you want to call it.

Too fey and flimsy to be properly prog, and notably devoid of stomping glam tendencies, it sounded if anything as though it belonged in 1967, alongside the English "garden variety" psychedelic whimsy that was the stock-in-trade of the early Pink Floyd and Traffic.

Somehow, it genuinely is thick with the smell of freshly mown grass and the heavy drone of midsummer bees, and its indolent, drowsy bliss conjures forth the playful golden afternoons of the idle rich.

Mike Rutherford's simple, elegantly curling electric sitar part sounds as though it is being performed by a man lying on his back on a picnic rug beneath a shady tree with a jug of iced Pimms by his side, while the vocal melody is perfectly suited to Peter Gabriel's well-bred Charterhouse playing fields bark.

I Know What I Like made it all the way to number 21, then effectively vanished from sight. Little could we have suspected then the units that Genesis were destined to shift once Peter Gabriel lost interest and Phil Collins emerged from behind the traps to take his place, gawd help us all.