It’s a good job Genesis don’t need the money because — reunited for one afternoon only — they do a disarmingly patchy job of talking up the re-release of arguably their greatest album.
“I hadn’t heard it for years,” the bassist Mike Rutherford says of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, the band’s enduringly weird and wonderful 1974 double concept album. Still, he gave it a spin. “And the first two sides were mind-blowing. It’s just full of energy and madness. Over the years the story has been that it was a hard album to make, but I thought it was very strong.”
The 50th-anniversary edition includes a surround-sound remix overseen by Peter Gabriel (who left the band after the album was released) and the keyboardist Tony Banks — both of them Rutherford’s former schoolmates at Charterhouse. It’s telling that Rutherford praises only half the album and Banks has quibbles too. “I think there’s a great single album in there,” Banks says. “We just disagree about which tracks. It’s the iconic early Genesis album and I was particularly impressed by the vocals.”
He looks at Gabriel, sitting opposite him in a Soho sound studio, relaxed in his familiar uniform of collarless shirt and waistcoat. Banks says he enjoyed Gabriel’s noisy performance on the song Back in NYC, which was later covered by Jeff Buckley. “I mean, I’d like to hear you sing like that now.” This prompts laughs round the table. “Would you?” the grainy-voiced Gabriel says, raising an eyebrow.
To Gabriel’s left is the lead guitarist Steve Hackett, who left the band in 1977 just before it reached its commercial pomp with singles such as Follow You Follow Me, Mama and Invisible Touch. He is less veiled in his opinion of an album he struggled with at the time but now adores. Over the past decade Hackett’s live shows have concentrated on Seventies Genesis material, played with great love and skill (although his former bandmates haven’t been to see him).
“Things sound sweeter with the passage of time,” says Hackett, an alternately sincere and sardonic presence. Gabriel, meanwhile, seems to operate in his own wry yet authoritative groove. The singer wrote almost all the words for the album while the rest of the band worked up the music in another room. (Royalties on this album, as for all Gabriel-era Genesis albums, were split equally five ways.) Gabriel says he considers it, alongside their earlier 23-minute song Supper’s Ready, the band’s zenith.
Phil Collins was the drummer at the time, taking over as lead singer in 1975 before becoming one of the world’s biggest solo stars. The remaster reminds you how astonishingly propulsive and imaginative his drumming could be. If the album peters out a bit, Collins never does. His health has also, alas, petered out a bit. Today he is at home in Switzerland recovering from knee surgery. “He’s in good shape mentally,” Rutherford says.
Hackett, Banks, Gabriel and Rutherford today
WILL IRELAND
Rutherford and Collins on stage in 1975
ALAMY
In 1974, more than a decade before Genesis’s Invisible Touch took over from Gabriel’s Sledgehammer at the top of the American singles charts, the band were a cult success rather than a mainstream act. Looking for inspiration for his double album, Gabriel came up with the sprawling story of Rael, a young Puerto Rican New Yorker on a phantasmagorical odyssey. He even, at one point, loses his penis. Does he ever get reunited with it? “Does anybody?” Hackett quips.
Gabriel laughs heartily. “Well, I’ve just had my prostate removed, but that’s a different thing. ‘We hope so’ would be the correct answer.”
The Lamb doesn’t sound like anything the band did before or after, even if songs such as Carpet Crawlers stayed in its post-Gabriel live sets. “We needed to do something a bit different,” Gabriel says. “The romantic thing — its season was at an end. We needed to find something with more edge to it.”
He took inspiration from El Topo (1970), an experimental film by the Chilean-French director Alejandro Jodorowsky — “sort of a spiritual spaghetti western. A man has to murder each of his gurus to find enlightenment.” The others giggle and Gabriel joins in. “Well, yeah, exactly. But it’s about a kid who goes from not being able to do anything for anyone else to giving himself [up] for his brother.”
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Gabriel has tried to turn The Lamb into a film, including with Jodorowsky. Now he is trying again with the Argentine writer Nicolas Giacobone (who co-wrote Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film Birdman). “It’s exciting. When we have something it will be presented to these guys.”
As to whether said guys have the same idea of what the famously opaque story adds up to … well, no, they admit, they don’t. “Does it matter?” Gabriel says easily. Anticipating confusion, he wrote the story out in the gatefold of the original LP. “I look at it in horror now, but I was just trying to map out some of the ideas.”
Why did Gabriel leave? He felt, as he would later put it in his first solo hit single, Solsbury Hill, “part of the machinery”. They were all still only 24 when the album was released. Gabriel first quit the band while they were making the album to work on a film idea for William Friedkin, the director of The Exorcist. Then he was persuaded back. But Gabriel’s baby daughter Anna-Marie was ill at the time and he spent every spare hour driving up and down the M4 between her hospital in London and rural Wales where the band were recording.
Genesis in 1974
COURTESY OF RICHARD HAINES
“Peter was the first to have children,” Rutherford says. “We were selfish.”
“Well, Phil actually beat me,” Gabriel says, referring to Collins’s adoptive daughter, Joely.
“Yeah, but he was the drummer,” Rutherford jokes.
“Drummers have kids!” Gabriel retorts.Before Gabriel left again he was persuaded to do a tour. “We got along fine,” Banks says, “but the tour petered out.”
Their last show in Toulouse sold so poorly it was cancelled. “It was a depressing way to end things,” Gabriel says.
The band have been mocked by non-believers as prog-rock dinosaurs and pop sell-outs. Banks is a Times reader, but won’t be reading this article because he never reads anything about the band (“a lot of it isn’t very complimentary”).
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Still, Hackett points out that they had at least one big cheerleader back in the day: “I’ve heard a tape from 1973 when John Lennon says that Genesis were the true sons of the Beatles.”
“I heard about that,” Banks says. “I thought it was incredible. So I looked it up and the only quote I could find was in an interview with you.” Cue laughter. Hackett looks a bit stung.
You could be forgiven for thinking the former bandmates often get together. Not so, they say. Banks and Gabriel, best friends at school, see each other sometimes. Three of them were at their former manager Tony Smith’s 80th birthday party in January (Rutherford was absent with a broken hip). Gabriel went backstage after the three-man Genesis played their final show in London in 2022. Beyond that, they are very much solo acts.
That said, they have played at each other’s weddings. Rutherford and Collins backed Gabriel on his song In Your Eyes at his second wedding, to Meabh Flynn, in 2002. Banks and Rutherford backed Collins on the Genesis song Throwing It All Away at his third wedding, to Orianne Cevey, in 1999. “Which I thought was the most unsuitable song,” Banks says (Collins and Cevey later split).
There was one proper reunion. In 1982 Gabriel got into debt with his first Womad world music festival. Genesis bailed him out by donating the proceeds from a reunion show they all played at Milton Keynes Bowl. “They were generous,” Gabriel says. “We should have done more rehearsal, but that was a pleasurable experience.”
Then in 2005, after coming together for a TV documentary, the five-man Genesis hatched a plan to tour The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Or thought they had. “We turned up for a meeting with Peter,” Banks says, “and the first thing he says is, ‘This is a meeting about the possibility of doing it.’”
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway double album was released in 1974
ALAMY
“Well, that’s what I thought it was,” Gabriel says, slightly defensively.
“So we did a tour, just the three of us,” Banks says.
“These things become more demanding than you ever think,” Gabriel explains. “I’m a slow learner and trying to relearn everything … it’s the old backwards or forwards thing.”
So Gabriel went forwards, Genesis went backwards and Hackett went sideways to a solo career. No version of Genesis will perform together again, they confirm, but might they go the way of Abba and put on a virtual concert?
“I think under current economic realities a show like Abba Voyage is beyond us,” Gabriel says. But the technology, he adds, will keep getting better. So who knows? I say I found the digital avatars a bit depressing, for all the show’s undeniable skill.
Gabriel shrugs. “Well, if you’re a woman and you have a glass of white wine it’s perfect because it does seem to be that Mamma Mia! crowd. But they’ve done it really well. Not everything works for me, but it’s a great first draft.”
He is the only one of the band who still owns his rights to Genesis songs. Three years ago Concord Music Group paid a sum, reportedly “upwards of $300 million”, for the other four’s rights, plus the rights to solo material — including, crucially, Collins’s.
“I’m the difficult one,” Gabriel says.
“Bastard,” Banks says. “He’s the only one earning any extra money for this.”
Rutherford points out that they all still care enough to be here today and anything new they do is theirs to own. “What new is going to happen?” Banks asks.
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Well, solo material. Rutherford tours a lot with Mike and the Mechanics. “I prefer to write music, but you just can’t sell records these days.” He is working on a musical, The Zimmers, about a band of elderly people who formed for a BBC documentary in 2007.
Banks hasn’t released a rock album this century, although he has released several classical albums. Hackett is back on the road next year. And Gabriel, who took a 21-year break between the 2002 album Up and the 2023 album i/o, suggests its follow-up, o/i, could arrive next year. “It’s going well,” he says.
“I get muddled with your titles,” Banks says.
“You’ve only got two letters to remember,” Gabriel counters.
“I know,” Banks says, “that’s the problem.”
More laughter. Genesis may be done, but its members aren’t. “If you do the thing you love,” Gabriel says, “you’re a) very lucky and b) why would you stop?”
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (50th anniversary edition) is out now