THE LAMB LIES DOWN ON BROADWAY

"The number of times our names were mentioned in reviews, apart from Peter, you could count them with the fingers of one hand. The reviews only focused on Peter, the lights, the stage, the show, and Peter" -Tony Banks (In a 1982 interview, more or less as I remember).

I listened to this album for the first time in December 1980 (four days after Lennon`s death). I liked it, I recorded it on 2 cassettes, and I bought it six months later. Now, nearly 24 years later, I consider it as a good album, but I can`t understand why so many people considers it as GENESIS`best album. The story of this concept album is sometimes confusing, and the end of the story leads to nowhere. For me, the best thing in this album is the music. Gabriel`s vocals also sound more mature, more like his voice sounded in his solo career. Gabriel reached a point where the next step was to be himself and to leave the band and being a soloist. There were still conflicts in the band. In the same 1982 interview, Banks/Collins/Rutherford said that Hackett was "left out a bit in this album, with the 3 of us mainly writing the music, and Peter wrote almost all the lyrics alone, a think we didn`t like". Gabriel also had personal problems which forced him to chose to leave the band, apart from some frictions with the band. There are some very good songs in this album: "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway", "In the Cage" (I prefer the live versions sung by Collins), "Back in N.Y.C.", "Counting Out Time" (an humorous song), "The Carpet Crawl" (again, I prefer the live versions sung by Collins), "The Lamia", "Silent Sorrow in Empty Boats", "The Colony of Slippermen", "Riding the Scree" and "it". It`s a shame that there are not full videos of this tour as the story could be better understood aided by images (like Pink Floyd `s "The Wall" with the movie of the same name).

Brian Eno`s contribution for this album was only some distorted vocal effects for "The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging". There is a credit for Graham Bell for "choral contribution". Graham Bell was the singer of a band called "Bell and Arc" in which YES`s drummerAlan White also played briefly in the early 70s (but I never have listened to this band, which also recorded albums for Charisma).