Wind & Wuthering - Titles

Titles

The album's title derives from two pieces: The "Wind" comes from "The House of the Four Winds" (a Chinese restaurant in Manhattan), the title given by Hackett to a piece that later became the quiet bridge for "Eleventh Earl of Mar"; the "Wuthering" alludes to the novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. The titles of tracks 7 and 8 are derived from the novel's closing sentence: "I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."

"Eleventh Earl of Mar" refers to the historical figure of John Erskine, 11th Earl of Mar by one reckoning. The first line of the song ('The sun had been up for a couple of hours, covered the ground with a layer of gold') is the first line of the novel The Flight of the Heron by D. K. Broster.

"Afterglow" was composed by Tony Banks, who described it as a spontaneous piece that was written in about the same amount of time as it takes to play it and somewhat resembles "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas"; it became a staple on Genesis tours for over 10 years, from the 1977 Wind & Wuthering Tour until the 1986/7 Invisible Touch Tour. It was played as part of the 2007 Turn It On Again: The Tour, as part of a medley that also included "In The Cage", "The Cinema Show", and "Duke's Travels." A Moog Taurus bass pedal is used to create a drone effect on which much of the song is structured.