The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is Genesis’s most ambitious and most divisive record — a sprawling double concept album about a New York street kid’s descent into a surreal underworld, and the last they would make with Peter Gabriel. Released in 1974, it swapped English pastoral for urban strangeness, and remains a cornerstone of the concept-album canon.

The short version

The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974) is the sixth studio album by Genesis, their only double album and their only full rock opera. Written by the classic five-man line-up, with Peter Gabriel supplying the story and all but one of the lyrics, it follows Rael, a Puerto Rican youth in New York, on a bewildering journey of self-discovery. Brian Eno added electronic treatments to two tracks. Reviewed coolly at the time, it is now regarded as a masterpiece — and it was Gabriel’s farewell.

Divided in the writing

Genesis spent three months at Headley Grange, the crumbling Hampshire house where Led Zeppelin had recorded, working up the album. Gabriel insisted on writing the entire story and all the lyrics himself, and did so alone in a separate room while Banks, Rutherford, Hackett and Collins built the music from jams next door. He was also away at times, drawn by a film project with the director William Friedkin and by family commitments. The others resented it; Rutherford later admitted that he and Banks were unsupportive. Only one lyric, ‘The Light Dies Down on Broadway,’ was written by anyone else. The seeds of Gabriel’s departure were sown here.

The sound

This is Genesis stripped of their fairy-tale robes. Recorded in a Welsh manor house on a mobile studio, the music is harder, more angular and far more improvisational than anything before it: driving rock on the first disc, murky and abstract on the second, where free-form passages recall King Crimson at their most unsettling. Gabriel’s voice is strained and urgent, Hackett’s guitar snarls, Banks’s keyboards sketch nightmares. While mixing in London, Brian Eno — working next door — ran vocals through a synthesizer for two tracks, credited on the sleeve, wonderfully, as ‘Enossification.’

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The songs

The title track opens on Tony Banks’s tumbling piano and a sly nod to the old Drifters standard, introducing Rael before ‘Fly on a Windshield’ crashes over him. ‘In the Cage’ is the album’s furious centrepiece, ‘Counting Out Time’ a comic interlude, and ‘The Carpet Crawlers’ its most beloved moment, all swirling keyboards and hushed yearning. The second disc grows stranger: ‘The Lamia,’ drawn from Keats, is gorgeous; ‘The Waiting Room’ began as an improvisation the band played in the dark to frighten themselves. On ‘The Colony of Slippermen,’ Rael’s brother sings a single line — voiced, tellingly, by Phil Collins.

Reception and legacy

Reviews were mixed and both singles missed the chart; a story about a Puerto Rican street kid, told by a group of English public schoolboys, puzzled many. Genesis toured it anyway, performing the album whole across 102 shows, with Gabriel disappearing into increasingly elaborate costumes. He left the band in 1975. Since then the album’s reputation has soared: it sits alongside Tommy, Quadrophenia and The Wall in the concept-album canon, and its shadow falls across Marillion, Rush, Iron Maiden and countless others. When ‘The Carpet Crawlers’ was recut in 1999, it marked the last time all five musicians played together.

The verdict

The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is not the easiest Genesis album, and probably not the first one to hear — Foxtrot and Selling England by the Pound are warmer welcomes. But it is their boldest, and for many their greatest: ninety minutes of invention, menace and beauty, and the definitive statement of Peter Gabriel’s years with the band. Come for the thrilling first disc and ‘The Carpet Crawlers,’ then let the second disc pull you somewhere stranger. Few rock records have ever reached this far.

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