Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway is an album that surely stands as a testament to the power of Progressive Rock, to the music of Genesis, and to the persuasive power of Peter Gabriel’s writing that seems to straddle an unearthly brilliance that not only recognised the zeitgeist that the genre and America were witnessing, but inhabiting it, prising open the cracks on a generation of New Yorkers that were finding the time they were born into devoid of the promises guaranteed by failures of politicians, of the scourge of unemployment, drugs, abuse, gender and social politics that were not designed to liberate but confine, to jail, to imprison the freedoms won after World War Two.
It was a long time coming, pushed back twice, but the final result of the 50th anniversary boxset released by the band is a force and instrument of Progressive passion, it is the desired realisation that arguably one of the finest albums ever conceived and produced still has the rawness of thought to be likened to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, the drama of On The Road by Kerouac, even alluding perhaps to Dante’s Inferno as a discussion on mid 1970s repression, the counter culture effect and the damnation of the free spirit so convincingly attained by various political figures of the time, not least those at the very heart of the movement to new monetarism and the flagship of consumer debt wrapped up in the guise of freedom.
Much has been said of the album over the last five decades, many theories, philosophies and speculations to the overall meanings of the piece, and they all have their place, as a whole it is one of enormous wealth and construct, it breaks boundaries, it hurls metaphorical bombs of derision at the notion that the group were nothing more than painters of the musical English pastoral. The epics had already been written, but this was one completely off the scale, The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway is cinematic in a way that no other album could be viewed as, and with its companion works in the boxset, the two part live recording taken from The Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, and the Dolby Atmos mix overseen by Peter Gabriel and Tony Banks, that epic encounter reaches the heights of blockbuster, of the grand and ambitious, the insanely brilliant.
To have listened to the album back when originally released must have been a reveal of secrets, of images and words conjured that were magical, expressive, mystical, hard-bitten cynical pleasure, 50 years on the recording has lost none of its power, its irritation with control, its bleak costume drama appeal, this is an album covered in truth, a soul conceived in anger and frightening dedication, one that ultimately would rip the classic line up apart, and one of unspeakable illumination. This boxset reignites the fires, it sprays from a can the disillusionment of a generation, and one that is still utterly profound.
Ian D. Hall