Genesis are celebrating the 50th anniversary of their 1974 opus, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, with a Super Deluxe Edition featuring a remastered version of the double LP, a new Dolby ATMOS mix, a complete 1975 concert from the Lamb tour, three unheard demos, and a 60-page coffee table book with liner notes by Alexis Petridis. It will hit shelves on March 28, 2025.
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway was the last album that Genesis recorded before Peter Gabriel quit the band to launch a solo career. It's a concept record about a young Puerto Rican named Rael who gets transported from the streets of New York City into a surreal world where he encounters mythical creatures, a castrating doctor, and numerous moral dilemmas. Gabriel wrote nearly all of the lyrics himself, while his bandmates handled the music.
The album didn't wow many rock critics at the time. "The songs neither shine by themselves nor suggest any thematic insight I'm eager to pursue," Robert Christgau wrote in his Consumers Guide. "For art-rock, though, it's listenable." But it found a large cult audience of prog enthusiasts that has only grown over the decades. And even when Genesis left their art rock days behind, Lamb songs like "In The Cage" and "The Carpet Crawlers" remained pivotal parts of their live set. ("The Carpet Crawlers" was the final song Collins sang at the last Genesis concert in 2022. Gabriel watched from the audience.)
When Genesis toured The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway in 1974 and 1975, they played the album straight through at all 98 shows. In a move they lived to regret, they didn't film any of them. "I think it's largely my fault, Gabriel told Rolling Stone in 2011. "I was a major film obsessive, and I had dreams of trying to do things properly, so I wouldn't allow it. There's footage of us on an earlier tour at Shepperton Studios. I was promised at the time that it wouldn't get seen anywhere if I didn't like it. And I didn't like it, and it still got used."
They did, however, record several of the shows. Their 1998 box set Genesis Archive 1967-75 included the vast majority of their show at L.A.'s Shrine Auditorium on January 24, 1974, though it didn't contain Lamb closer "It" or the encore of "Watcher of the Skies" and the "The Musical Box." This new edition of The Lamb contains a remastered version of the complete show. (Gabriel re-sang some vocals for the 1998 box since the elaborate costumes from the tour sometimes made it difficult to get a microphone near this mouth. It's unclear if any of those Nineties vocals will be on this set.)
Previously-unreleased demos of "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway," "The Chamber of 32 Doors/The Lamia" and "In The Cage" will be included in the package as a download card. (They represent a tiny fraction of the Lamb demos that have leaked out as bootlegs over the years.) And the book features new interviews with all five members of Genesis and images by Armando Gallo, Richard Haines, and other photographers.
Former Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett is the only member of the band keeping their music alive on the road. He's staged a series of Genesis Revisited tours throughout the past decade, performing albums like Seconds Out, Foxtrot, and Selling England By The Pound. He's in the middle of a tour now that celebrates the 50th anniversary of The Lamb and spotlights nine songs from the album.
In 2019, he told Rolling Stone that he couldn't imagine playing the entire thing. "Believe me, it's been suggested to me by fans, by musicians, by promoters and they're all prepared to put it on," he said. "But I tend to think that it's very much Peter Gabriel's baby. When I say that, the story is his, but the music is all of us. It's probably legitimate for me to do it, but I tend to think of it as an album very densely packed with dense keyboard lines and very dense lyrics. And so I'd be in competition with what's going on there. It's hugely embellished from the word go, and there's not as much room to move on guitar."
Gabriel hasn't performed with Genesis since a one-off reunion show in 1982. Phil Collins is no longer able to play drums due to a variety of health problems. Genesis fans continue to dream about a reunion tour featuring Gabriel, Hackett, guitarist Mike Rutherford, keyboardist Tony Banks, and Nic Collins taking over for his father Phil. And even though Nic played with Genesis on their 2021/22 reunion tour with his father on lead vocals, he's largely ruled it out.
"From where I am at the moment, I don't think that would happen," Nic Collins told Rolling Stone in 2022. "I haven't heard anything about it. I know it was mentioned by fans, especially at the early stages of the reunion. But I think, ultimately, the band has grown, and people have gone and done their separate things. I don't think, at the moment, that it's a possibility."
