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Help is at hand though in “Lilywhite Lilith”, which opens disc two and introduces us to the strange blind woman who asks for help, is aided by Rael and who guides him by feeling the breeze and determining which is the correct door. It's a big powerful rocker, driven on guitar and pounding drums, with Lilith leaving Rael in a cold stone chamber with the chilling remark ”They're coming for you/ Now don't be afraid”. The piece slows down as something approaches, light floods the room and we're into “The Waiting Room”, where strange, eerie sounds (Eno again) fill the air --- tinkling, crashing, ringing, very expressionist, with what may be violins making a kind of dark laughter, creaking doors, thumps and steps and many other weird and alien sounds, all serving to unnerve the listener and put them on their guard, wondering what is going to happen. This strange passage of sound goes on for over five minutes, nodding to effects from Floyd's “On the Run” and “Welcome to the Machine”, leading into “Anyway”, a beautiful piano run from Banks against which Rael, believing he is dying or dead, reflects on the nature of life, God and Heaven and Hell, asking ”Does Earth plug a hole in Heaven/ Or Heaven plug a hole in Earth?” and then in “Here Comes the Supernatural Anaesthetist” Rael meets Death.

On a strummed guitar, it's pretty much an instrumental, with barely four lines of lyric and evidence of melodies Hackett would use on the next album. It then leads to yet another standout track, as we reach the second ballad and Rael meets “The Lamia”. These are strange, exotic, erotic snakelike females who seduce him, tasting of his blood but then dying as they do so. It's driven on beautiful classical piano and flute which softly undulates like the very snake-creatures who give it its title. A tale of beauty never lasting, it's a beautiful tragedy, so well written, and when Gabriel sings ”With the first drops of my blood in their veins/ Their faces are convulsed in mortal pain/ The fairest cries “We all have loved you, Rael” you really feel the tragedy unfolding. The hero is suffused by a dreadful sorrow as the corpses of the Lamia now float on the water beside him, love changed so quickly and so horribly to death. Aghast, horrified, lost, Rael consumes the flesh of the Lamia (why?) and leaves the pool, the saddest instrumental Genesis have I think ever written following him as “Silent Sorrow in Empty Boats” brings this chapter to a shuddering, heart-rending close. It's again mostly Banks, making sounds with his synth like the honking of ships, sad sounds of sorrow and grief, and it fades in like a slow classical concerto on trombone, with attendant choral voices from the Pro Soloist, rising to a pitch of sorrow that brings tears, and then slowly fading back out, the two songs (which originally ended side three of the four-side double vinyl album) making this one of the most moving sections on the entire record.

Everything changes then for “The Colony of Slippermen”, which is divided into three sections, the first, “Arrival”, opening on a weird little instrumental that would not be out of place on a Tom Waits album, then bouncing into the song itself, wherein Rael meets the grotesque Slippermen, who are all deformed, and is informed that they too have tasted the flesh of the Lamia, and this fate awaits him also. In addition, he is reunited with his brother, John, who has undergone the same transformation. On a crazy, trippy, madcap beat the song rides along, almost like some children's nursery rhyme or game, Bank's bubbling mellotron pulling everything along, some great vocal harmonies and typically odd vocalisations from Gabriel as he takes on the persona of a Slipperman. Rael and John are advised that the only cure for what they have is to have their penises removed (yeah) and to this end they go to visit Doktor Dyper, in “A Visit to the Doktor”, as the same basic tune, increasing in urgency and coming quite close, if I'm honest, to elements that would surface six years later on the Duke album, carrying the song.

However, once the deed has been performed, a raven swoops down and grabs the tube into which Rael's pride and joy has been put, and flies off with it. The romping keyboard run that forms most of “Raven” has become ever since enshrined in the medley Genesis play onstage and so is very recognisable to concert-goers. Rael asks John to help him chase the raven, but just as he did from outside of the cage, his brother refuses and walks away. Rael pursues the bird until it finally drops the tube into a stream, and Rael watches in despair as it floats away. Again, eerie sounds on the synth create the ambience here in “Ravine” and then we come almost full circle with “The Light Dies Down On Broadway”: as Rael walks disconsolately along the riverbank he suddenly sees a screen in front of him in the air (the same cloud that brought him here?) showing images of New York and his past life, and he feels homesick.

Reprising the melody from the title track as well as “The Lamia”, it's a clever reminder of what has gone before and serves to link the two halves of the album, but before he can move towards the cloud, Rael hears shouting and sees that his brother is struggling in the rapids, and has to make the decision: does he go forward and find his way home, abandoning the brother who twice left him to fend for himself, or does he turn his back on his escape route and save John? With a despairing look as the window begins to close, he turns away and goes to help his ungrateful brother. “Riding the Scree” has a real funk about it, peppered all over with Banks's keyboard parts from “Supper's ready” and a sonorous organ. To be perfectly honest, it doesn't conjure up an image of the title to me, and I hear elements again that would be used in Duke, years later, but it ends on a big powerful synth run and soft keys into “In the Rapids”, in which Rael manages to rescue his brother, holding on tight but seeing his face change to ... his own?

There's quite a lonely melody attending this, which is unexpected, as you would expect a big, frenetic, exciting denoument, but it's very low key. Some really nice guitar work, soft percussion and piano, almost a ballad in effect, then at the end it ramps up as it rises into the final track, the enigmatic “It”. Bouncing along on a fast rocky beat, it's supposed to be I guess the explanation of what has happened, and in essence it seems John and Rael have merged, or were the same person all along, perhaps each being aspects of the one personality, which has now become one. There's a lot of wordplay in the lyric, and even time for Gabriel to tip a sly wink to his listeners when he claims ”If you think that it's pretentious/ You've been taken for a ride!” This closing section also survived into Genesis's live set, usually merged with a truncated “Watcher of the Skies”. At the end, Gabriel even paraphrases Jagger as he fades out on ”It's only knock and knowall/ But I like it.” He could be saying here that those who think they know it all (music critics?) love to knock Genesis's music, or even that he's the know-it-all, knocking on the doors of consciousness and perception, carrying on Jim Morrison's stated aim with the Doors. Or it could be just gibberish, who knows?

TRACK LISTING

DISC ONE

The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway
Fly On a Windshield
Broadway Melody of 1974
Cuckoo Cocoon
In the Cage
The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging
Back in NYC
Hairless Heart
Counting Out Time
The Carpet Crawl
The Chamber of 32 Doors

DISC TWO

Lilywhite Lilith
The Waiting Room
Anyway
Here Comes the Supernatural Anaesthetist
The Lamia
Silent Sorrow in Empty Boats
[COLOR="Green"]The Colony of Slippermen
(i) Arrival
(ii) A Visit to the Doktor
(iii) Raven
Ravine
The Light Dies Down On Broadway
Riding the Scree
In the Rapids
It

I'm happy to take the explanation of the plot provided by Wiki guy, and drawn, it would seem, from the book The Annotated Lamb Lies down on Broadway by Jason Finegan, Scott MacMahan and members of Paperlate. It does a good job of deciphering the plot, and makes some conclusions I would agree with or that shed new light on something I had always found difficult to understand. However, as they say themselves, it's a mistake to think this album is “about something,” and is more “something that every listener must decide a personal meaning that satisfies as an explanation.” That's probably true about this album, but it does beg the question, what did Gabriel mean when he wrote this? He did not just sit down and string ideas, concepts, lyrics and meanings together without any overall cohesive vision. He knows what it's about, but like most artistes, he preferred to keep it shrouded in mystery, and still does. It's the age old answer to the question: “Well, what do you think it's about?”

Even if its meaning can't ever be comprehensively and definitively understood, even if it's a code that is so well written that it will never be broken, unless when he passes away Gabriel leaves an actual, clear and unambiguous explanation in his papers (which I believe is very unlikely; the mystery of The Lamb should outlive its creator), The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway remains one of the deepest, most intricate, well thought out and comprehensive works of not only Gabriel or Genesis's careers, but of progressive rock music, and more, of music itself. There are few concept albums that refuse to give up their secrets, but The Lamb is one that jealously guards its mystery, retaining the shroud over its meaning like the very cloud that descended on Times Square and spirited Rael away to this weird underground world.

But you can enjoy it for what it is, a collection of mostly pretty damn fine songs, some gorgeous linking instrumentals, a rollercoaster ride through either one man's descent into, and ascent from insanity, a drug-fuelled trip or dream, or an actual occurrence that can never be explained. It divides Genesis fans, with some thinking it was the pinnacle of their creativity while others believe this was the point were Genesis began eating its own tail, like the serpent of myth, and that had events not unfolded as they had, this could have spelled the end of the band. It's no secret that the tensions evident when making the album, Gabriel's insistence on almost total control and then his unlikely disappearance during its creation to work on a movie that never saw the light of day, all served to place undue strain on a band who were already beginning to fragment as that old chestnut, “musical differences”, hovered on the horizon.

To place him in the actual position of Rael in the real world, Gabriel, staring at the many doors he could walk through, was about to make a decision which would, for many Genesis adherents, lead indeed to silent sorrow in empty boats, and for the first time since they had played their tentative tunes on their debut album under the watchful eye of Jonathan King, the light was beginning to die down on Broadway.

Rating: 8.9/10

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018