100 Great Songs to Publish a Book to, #4: Genesis, Mad Man Moon

If the beauty of the most perfect sculpture ever made by human hand could be represented in music, it would sound like this.  Mad Man Moon is certainly Tony Banks’ most accomplished piece of composition whether in or out of Genesis.  If the opening bars of this piano intro do not speak at once to your soul, then I strongly recommend you visit your doctor to establish whether you are, in fact, alive.  The lyrics do not contain much by way of a story (they’re just too metaphysical for me, man), although later in the song there is a smart comparison of why each of us seems to think everyone else has got it better than us: “The grass will be greener, till the stems turn to brown/And thoughts will fly higher, till the Earth brings them down”.

To me, it is an easy thing indeed to imagine a future society, perhaps democracy or possibly dystopia, some of whose members strive to keep alive the memory of centuries-old music.  But whether 500 or 5,000 years from now, there will come a warm, well-attended summer’s Saturday evening of aural culture held in some exotic amphitheatre, and alongside the Bach and Haydn and Chopin and Grieg and Rachmaninoff, Banks too will have his deserved immortality.

Onslaught is out now at the special introductory price of $2.99 in the US here, in the UK here, in Canada here, and in Australia here.