The Lamb Lies Down, Genesis (50th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition box set)
(5LP + 1 Blueray, Rhino Editions)
I have never understood the confusion that Genesis’ The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, their final album with Peter Gabriel, caused amongst listeners and reviewers. Progrock fans seemed able to cope with science fiction stories, sword and sorcery epics, mystical scriptures, religious enlightenment, flying teapots, and neoliberal philosophy but the tale of New York resident Rael and his journey to the Underworld was regarded as confusing and overblown when the album was first released.
Genesis had previous with epics, mostly rooted in a very English mix of peculiarity, awkwardness, mysticism and stiff upper lips. Lewis Carroll, William Blake, Britannia and 1970s shopping habits, gang fights and rip-off landlords had all been subject matter on previous albums, many featuring a number of episodes, characters and surreal flights of fancy strung together in long tracks driven along by keyboard and guitar towards lyrical and musical epiphanies.
Perhaps it was the move to New York as the starting point for The Lamb… that confused listeners? The previous album, Selling England by the Pound – one of the band’s finest – featured songs exploring folk culture and the modernisation and perhaps Americanization of British culture. ‘The Battle of Epping Forest’ was a kind of cartoon battle which could have been called Carry on Gang Warfare, ‘Firth of Fifth’ was a gorgeous riverine hymn, whilst the title track mixed heraldic creatures with King Arthur, Wimpey, Old Father Thames, ‘Citizens of Hope & Glory’ and the ‘Knights of the Green Shield stamp’, a glorious mash-up that is reprised at the end of the album in the form of a list of discounted goods following some dreadful puns on supermarket names.
In between those was a wonderful instrumental, ‘After the Ordeal’, a rather ponderous story of a Romeo and Juliet date night, a brief mournful song of regret (sung by drummer Phil Collins, who would later become the band’s lead vocalist) and the surprise hit single ‘I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)’, an absurd and catchy tune inspired by the Betty Swanwick painting used on the cover.
If not its American location, then maybe there was something unsettling about the new band logo and the harsh Hipgnosis treated photographs on the album? Leather jackets, dark tunnels and corridors, broken glass and a mouthless face hemmed in by others seemingly in torment seemed a world away from where Genesis normally lived, and the meandering and long-winded story across the inner gatefold, which Gabriel now describes as rushed and badly written, did not help first impressions. Remember we are talking about the days gone by when concept albums were to be carefully listened to and discussed, lyric sheets and sleeve art pored over and deconstructed.
In fact, things haven’t changed that much. The surprise arrival of an actual physical copy of this reissue for review, rather than the expected MP3s and PDFs, saw me simply stroking the shrinkwrapped box for a while in reverie before carefully slitting the plastic open later that evening. Inside is a beautiful mint version of the original double album, a triple album of a live concert originally recorded for King Biscuit Hour (and, apart from the encore, previously released in the Genesis – Archive 1967-1975 box) and now sporting a fantastic sleeve design, a folder containing a reproduction poster, programme and ticket, and a 60 page paperback book about the making of the album. Surprisingly, this is by Alexis Petridis, music critic of The Guardian, revealing a previously hidden interest in progrock.
So, what is The Lamb… about? It depends who you believe. A quick Google search reveals that it might be the ‘complex and surrealistic story of Rael, a Puerto Rican, and his adventure on the way to some kind of enlightenment or self-discovery’, the story of a ‘Puerto Rican thug who lives in New York and who uses his gang’s exploits to earn his life’, the ‘horrific visions’ of a hood dying in a hospital, an exploration of split personality, an ‘ambitious and ambiguous, psycho-sexual fantasy’ or – the most ridiculous and possibly my favourite – ‘the story of a man having sex with a woman and the journey of the successful sperm’. Peter Gabriel, who wrote most of the lyrics and all of the story was more succinct: back in 1974 he ‘summarised the concept as “overcoming fear”’, whilst the longer ‘identity, transformation, and the struggle between the spiritual and the material worlds’, found online, probably sums it up best.
Whatever it is about, whether it is a rock opera or a concept album or makes any narrative sense at all (or not), it contains several great songs as well as some of the most experimental music Genesis ever recorded, perhaps due to the jazz-rock influences of Phil Collins’ side project Brand X and the presence of Brian Eno, who is credited with ‘Enossification’. Although the story starts in Manhattan (and later revisits there in the angular and surprisingly punk ‘Back in N.Y.C.’) it soon moves to another world where Rael has time to reflect on the nature of time and sexuality: ‘Counting Out Time’ is a hilarious riff on the idea of foolproof sex manuals:
I’m counting out time
Hoping it goes like I planned it, ‘cos I understand it
Look! I’ve found the hotspots, figures one and nine
Still, counting out time
I got my finger on the button
“Don’t say nothing, just lie there still
And I’ll get you turned on just fine”
although of course Rael admits that he ‘got unexpected distress from my mistress’ and wants his money back after his failed attempt at seduction and sexual conquest.
After this comic interlude is when things start to get weird, as our hero (or anti-hero) encounters ‘The Carpet Crawlers’, gets a bit lost and directionless in ‘The Chamber of 32 Doors’ before, having chosen his exit route, meeting Lillywhite Lilith, ‘The Supernatural Anaesthetist’ (who seems to be a version of Death), being seduced by the Lamia, a sexy succubus from Greek mythology, and then entering ‘The Colony of Slippermen’. Inbetween these character-driven episodes there are some simpler songs such as the beautiful and often overlooked ‘Anyway’ and instrumental wigouts such as ‘The Waiting Room’, full of odd noises and strange sounds, echoes and angst.
Eventually, Rael is made whole or resurrected or healed or pulls himself together, meets his brother (who turns out to also be Rael) and jumps into the river (of life?), before the album ends with a Rolling Stones pastiche, full of dreadful puns, asides and pseudo-intellectual comments, all undercut by Gabriel’s self-awareness. Although ‘It is Real. It is Rael’, we are informed that ‘If you think that its pretentious, you’ve been taken for a ride’, before the song fades out, after the final declamation that ‘it’s only knock and know all, but I like it…’
I like it too, especially in this pristine newly remastered form. Step away from concerns about the concept and it has always been a great rock album, with loads of standalone songs that don’t need narrative or pretentious context to support them. It mostly seems to be the received notion of incomprehensibility that has tarnished the album’s reputation, along with the fact that Gabriel resigned from the band during the tour that followed, not to mention the tour itself.
Ah yes, the tour. The slideshows, the costumes, the conceit of going to America and playing the whole double album through to audiences who hadn’t had a chance to hear the album as it hadn’t been released yet. The arrogance! The technical errors! The muffled voice from inside the inflatable Slipperman costume or the whirling curtain of the Lamia. The total lack of greatest hits or popular songs, acknowledgements of past achievements. Who did this band think they were? What on earth was going on?
Personally, I wish I’d gone to Wembley to see them, as does my friend Tim, who failed to persuade me to go and has never forgiven me since. (Sorry Tim.) Genesis used some of the Lamb slides on their Trick of the Tail tour and that along with some dodgy Youtube and grey area videos shows just how magical and innovative the concerts were. I also managed to miss one of the tribute bands touring the album, who were given access to the original visuals and costumes…
The Shrine Auditorium concert from Los Angeles, January 1974 has also been remastered. Long available as a bootleg and then later gaining an official release in 1998, it is unclear if the remaster is simply from the original radio tapes, or if it retains the new vocals that Peter Gabriel added because of said problems with singing. Either way it shows how energetic and imaginative the band were at interpreting the album live, and the triple album now contains the complete concert, as it adds the encore tracks, ‘Watcher of the Skies’ and ‘The Musical Box’ as side 6 of the album. There are also three studio demo tracks to download, which is great if you haven’t heard them already as they are works-in-progress, in very different musical forms. I suspect I am not alone, however, in having them already on bootlegs of studio outtakes…
I’m still knocked out by this box set. Finally, it seems, the album, the band, Peter Gabriel, Uncle Tom Cobley and all, are getting the recognition it/they/he deserves. The book contains lots of photos and trivia along with some new quotes from the musicians, carefully curated and contextualised by Petridis. If it’s not quite the promised ‘coffee table style’ tome promised in the publicity, it’s a well-produced glossy paperback, and the facsimile tour products are fun. Rhino are, once again, to be congratulated on their taste, design sense and manufacturing. I might see if I can get it shrinkwrapped again and try to recreate that sense expectation. I think the neighbours might be pleased after a couple of days of ‘knock and know all’ played at full volume.
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Rupert Loydell
NB This is also available as a 4CD box set
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