Dancing with the Moonlit Knight

Dancing with the Moonlit Knight

Genesis

The first track of the band’s 1973 album ‘Selling England by the Pound’, ‘Dancing with the Moonlit Knight’ is a blend of early 70’s progressive rock and English folk music which characterised a number of Gabriel’s songs in this period.

Lyrically, the song is often interpreted as an elegy for a lost England. Gabriel addresses the ‘Citizens of Hope and Glory’, a reference to one of England’s monikers as the ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, exposing their life in England as one based on a fixation on the immediate and material, with ‘Wimpey Dreams’ name-dropping a popular English fast food restaurant in which the ‘Citizens of Hope and Glory’ mindlessly let their country be digested by their apathy to its existence (others have suggested ‘Wimpey’ is a reference to Wimpey Homes, a property development company which built many of England’s housing estates, with Gabriel mocking the false idyll that was post-war English suburban life).

In the concerts, Peter Gabriel used to say this before playing the song:

Hi, I’m in the English Channel. It is cold, exceedingly wet.
I am the voice of Britain before Daily Express. My name is Britannia. This is my song. It is called: Dancing With The Moonlit Knight“.