The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway

The definitive double album progressive rock saga from which I cannot escape… Peter Gabriel once introduced a live set of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway as “a lump of songs and music”, and earlier I took advantage of a slow Tuesday morning at work to listen to the album in its entirety, something I rarely have the time to do these days. And what a brilliant, beguiling and occasionally maddening lump is it. Listening to the album from beginning to end certainly makes the second, more fractured record much more coherent and satisfactory. One of the many remarkable things about the album is the sense of Genesis re-inventing itself, abandoning the English pastoralism of the previous albums, for something more dark and visceral, and urban - the story set in a phantasmagorical NYC with a razor wielding drug-taking Puerto Rican gang member as its protagonist. It’s a shame that no definitive audio recording of the Lamb live shows has yet emerged but I wonder if these concerts are best left to mythology ? Listening to the audience recordings in circulation, it’s clear the album which is drenched in effects and multi-tracked instruments was complex to reproduce, and for all extraordinary photographs of Gabriel dressed in Rael’s proto-punk uniform, and the outrageous bulbous Slipperman costume, the band admitted that the concerts, which also employed an arsenal of projectors, backdrop slides and lasers, had more than their fair share of Spinal Tap malfunctions.

It's a shame too that a complete visual recording has not surfaced at the time of writing. The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is the great lost 35mm 70’s rock film epic, and there is something inherently cinematic about it, the album so rich in film imagery and allusions, real and imagined to film – several times throughout the album I was reminded of the film music of Goblin and at least one of the instrumental passages, "Silent Sorrow In Empty Boats" could have easily strayed from a Popol Vuh album. And I like that the album’s closing track, "it" sounds like it was composed as a play-out song for the album’s end credits. The question I’m left to ponder over now is whether The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway eclipses Dark Side of the Moon…