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Uncut NOVEMBER 2025 - by John Lewis

GENESIS: THE LAMB LIES DOWN ON BROADWAY - 50TH ANNIVERSARY SUPER DELUXE EDITION

Prog's most glorious absurdity.

A Puerto Rican gang member from New York called Rael emerges from a subway station, sees a vision of a lamb lying on Times Square and tumbles into some kind of nightmarish phantasmogorical realm. Locked in a supernatural dungeon, Rael realises he must save the life of his brother (who may or may not be a figment of his imagination). There is an orgy where Rael has sex with, and then eats, three mythical snakes; there is a dream in which his heart is ripped out, and an operation where his genitals are removed by a medic called Doktor Dyper. Tolkien-ish characters such as the Slippermen, the Slubberdegullions and the Lamia sit alongside Evel Knievel, Howard Hughes and Bing Crosby. Across 90 minutes and 25 tracks, there are nods to Marx, Jung and Freud, and allusions to West Side Story, Pilgrim's Progress and Jodorowsky's "acid western" El Topo Unsurprisingly perhaps, just what The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway is actually about has long been a topic of discussion for prog fans.

Peter Gabriel has always wanted to adapt his story for stage and screen, but you can't imagine Cameron Mackintosh investing in something quite this insane. The story is so scattershot that the synopsis - hastily written by Gabriel as the album went to press, and printed on the inside of the gatefold sleeve - seems as desperately cobbled together as Ben Elton's plot for We Will Rock You. Even the band had little idea what was going on. When the journalist Barbara Charone interrogated a weary Phil Collins about the meaning of the album in 1975, he replied: "Don't ask me, I'm just the drummer. Ask Peter."

The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway also had a famously difficult gestation. Gabriel, on the verge of leaving Genesis, was barely present for most of the writing sessions: attending to his wife and her troubled pregnancy, he was also spending time with William Friedkin, Oscar-winning director of The French Connection and The Exorcist (and a huge fan of Gabriel's lyrics) to help write a new project. The rest of the band - Collins, pianist Tony Banks, bassist Mike Rutherford and guitarist Steve Hackett - spent three months writing in Headley Grange, a decrepit, rat-infested, Regency-era workhouse in Hampshire that had recently been vacated by Led Zeppelin, before moving to an even more desolate house in rural Wales to record.

Delays in completing the album meant the band were scheduled to tour it to audiences who hadn't had the chance to hear the LP. French and Italian dates were cancelled, and UK dates were delayed after Hackett sustained a serious hand injury. The band finished the tour more than £220,000 in debt, close to £2 million in today's money.

For all its setbacks, why then does this fractured rock opera work? Partly it's because the New York setting took Genesis away from the slightly suffocating Englishness that had defined their previous releases. Prog was always about creating fantasy universes for the listeners to inhabit, but The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway is a piece of magical realism rooted in the contemporary world: a recognisable urban America of celluloid, spraycans, drugstores and Winston cigarettes rather than Arthurian knights and medieval castles.

It also helps that the album contains some of the band's most memorable songs, and some of Banks' finest keyboard soundscapes. The opening title track, a mix of Philip Glass-like synthesised arpeggios and fuzz bass, is a wonderful scene-setter; Fly On A Windshield switches register from pastoral hymn to punky sludge rock; Cuckoo Cocoon is a rather lovely tangle of chords played, clawhammer-style, on a heavily chorused guitar, oddly reminiscent of early Everything But The Girl. The slow-burning, episodic In The Cage and the quirky military tattoo of The Grand Parade Of Lifeless Packaging both feature post-production electronic effects by Brian Eno.

Best of all is Side Two. Back In NYC (famously covered by Jeff Buckley and a live favourite of ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead), is a weirdly heavy piece of proto-punk in the spiky time signature of 7/4. Hairless Heart, based around a delicate Steve Hackett guitar melody which is slowly orchestrated by Banks, is a rather lovely instrumental ballad. The chirpy, Beatles-ish Counting Out Time - the LP's only UK single - might have been written largely by Gabriel alone, but it almost sounds like a guilty pleasure from Collins' Face Value. Indeed, the similar vocal timbres of Collins and Gabriel still seem remarkable, and are particularly evident on The Carpet Crawlers, a song Collins would sing in the post-Gabriel band's touring setlist right up to their final gigs in 2022.

The quality drops a notch as we race towards the end of the LP. The mood becomes more introspective and the need to tell an ever more convoluted story starts to take precedence. Two standouts - Phil Collins' garage rocker Lilywhite Lilith and Tony Banks' piano-led Anyway - apparently date back to the earlier 1970s. There's an abundance of atmospheric mood tracks - the Revolution 9-style musique concrète ramblings of The Waiting Room, the Eno-esque Silent Sorrow In Empty Boats, the whistling white noise drones of Ravine. Others, like The Colony Of Slippermen and Riding The Scree, become more bitty and episodic, but the closer It is a cracker, evocative of The Flaming Lips at their most epic.

This 50th-anniversary boxset is quite a lavish package. It includes some very rough demos from Headley Grange, with Banks' tumbling arpeggios mixed high on a crude early take of the title track. There's a slow and scrappy version of The Chamber Of 32 Doors, dominated by Banks' organ drones, which seems to go into a slow reggae skank at points before ending abruptly; and a similarly slow, organ-dominated reading of The Lamia.

A handsome 60-page book features new interviews with all five band members, along with period photos and full lyrics, while there is also a reproduction of a 1975 tour programme. Gabriel has always regretted that his obsessive perfectionism prevented him from commissioning a decent live concert film, leaving us with just crude, single-camera videos that can be found on YouTube. But this package features a high- quality mixing-board audio recording of a show from LA's Shrine Auditorium on January 24, 1975, the thirty-fifth date on their mammoth world tour that ran from November 1974 to May 1975. Hackett's guitar is noticeably more prominent than on record; Collins' drumming is more florid and jazzier in places (particularly on a twelve-minute version of Watcher Of The Skies, played as an encore), but otherwise these live renditions are quite faithful to the album arrangements.

You don't get to see Gabriel's stage costumes or the huge photographs that were projected behind the band (though many appear in the accompanying booklet), but you do get to hear Gabriel - sounding oddly like Keir Starmer - reciting his stage directions after every few songs ("Our hero, named Rael, crawls out of the subways of New York and is sucked into the wall to regain consciousness underground..."). These wordy, over-literal announcements often bring to mind Ronald Reagan's classic debating dictum, "If you're explaining, you're losing", but they do keep the narrative on the rails. Which, with a story as convoluted as this, is always handy. But that is one of the defining paradoxes of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway: it is both the high-water mark of the prog concept album, and the most potent example of the genre's glorious, boundless absurdity. With Gabriel departing and Collins in the ascension, Genesis would never be quite the same again.

SLEEVE NOTES

Produced by: Genesis and John Burns
Recorded at: Island Studios Mobile at Glaspant Manor, Capellwan, Carmarthenshire; mixed at Island, London
Personnel: Peter Gabriel (vocals, flute), Steve Hackett (guitars), Mike Rutherford (bass guitar, 12-string guitar), Tony Banks (keyboards, guitar), Phil Collins (drums, vibraphone, vocals, Brian Eno (electronic effects)