Peter Gabriel on his Genesis swansong: “It was a journey into the soul”

“We wanted to do something ambitious”

Peter Gabriel joined former Genesis bandmates Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford and Steve Hackett to celebrate the 50^th anniversary reissue of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway at an exclusive listening party and Q&A in London’s Soho yesterday (September 19), discussing the classic double album’s “difficult” making and inscrutable plot.

“Who the fuck knows?” Gabriel joked when asked by host Alexis Petredis what the album – receiving a deluxe 4CD/5LP box set re-release next week, featuring demos, a live show and Dolby Atmos remix – was all about. “I can say what I think I was trying to get to. It was a journey into the soul. In life, key experiences that happen to us, and often not the ones we choose, give us a little more of an education and hopefully a bit of wisdom and a bit more knowledge of ourselves. So in a way it was trying to accelerate a set of experiences that would allow this character to learn a lot more about himself.”

In easy and jocular mood, the band spoke about the origins of the 1975 opus concept. “We wanted to do something that was a bit more ambitious and bigger and we thought that was our opportunity,” said Gabriel, who remixed the record at his Real World studio with Banks. “There were some arguments about what direction it would take and who would get to write the story or the lyrics and stuff, but we got there in the end. It was a difficult time for all of us.”

“It wasn’t the easiest of Genesis albums to make”

“When you’re in the thick of it, the cut and thrust of it from day to day, it was quite difficult in all sorts of ways because we were all going through different personal difficulties,” Hackett added. “So it wasn’t the easiest of Genesis albums to make, but I think it sounds pretty damn wonderful.”

The New York setting of the story of Puerto Rican street kid Rael and his surreal journey through a bizarre underworld was, they explained, an attempt to distance Gabriel’s metaphor for personal introspection from the very English landscape of earlier albums such as Foxtrot and Selling England By The Pound. “When you first go to New York it is one of the most exciting cities in the world,” he said. “I felt it would be easier for me and easier for the story to be accepted if there was some distance there. I was a huge fan of West Side Story so there’s some of that there and then there are various other things like [Alejandro] Jodorowsky’s films which were an influence. It was in a sense a search into the self but through this persona of this Puerto Rican kid.”

Hackett himself asked Gabriel if he’d invented punk rock with the concept. “We were a little ahead of England,” Gabriel admitted. “There was probably something emerging in New York.”

“Jimmy Page says it was haunted”

The band recalled the writing of the album in the rat-infested Headley Grange. “It was the rats you could hear running up and down the air ducts,” said Hackett. “Either that or it was haunted. Jimmy Page says it was haunted.” Certainly something supernatural struck; Banks explained how some of the record’s finest moments came about at the last minute, to fill musical holes in the story. “The first of those ended up being ‘The Grand Parade Of Lifeless Packaging’, which started off as a little doodle of a thing which developed into quite a quirky song, and the other one was ‘The Carpet Crawlers’,” he said.

Touring the 94-minute album in full, they claimed, was also a tricky endeavour. “No sane group would ever do it,” Banks said. “It was quite difficult those first few shows. We weren’t playing it quite as well as maybe we later did and I felt we were going uphill all the time.”

“It was very difficult to remember everything consecutively,” Hackett added. “I’d think, ‘I hope my fingers go in the right place, what song’s coming next?’ But it seemed to work.”

“We were fascist perfectionists!”

Looking back at the sprawling work, the band felt it included some of their best work – “Peter and I… both agreed that the probably the best moment in early Genesis is the moment when it goes loud in ‘Fly On A Windshield’,” Banks said – as well as some perfect flaws. “We were fascist perfectionists at the time, obsessing about every little detail and often not getting it to where we wanted,” said Gabriel. “But those imperfections that irritated you hugely at the time, sometimes they give it a bit of charm.”

“We felt we’d gone about as far as we could with The Lamb…,” Banks said of the album’s status as the culmination of the Gabriel-fronted era of the band. “Some people might say we went too far. That degree of intensity…we came away from it and a lot of people thought it would make a fantastic single album, but no-one would agree on the tracks.”

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