“It was the rats you could hear running up and down the air ducts. Either that or it was haunted. Jimmy Page says it was haunted”: Peter Gabriel and Genesis dissect their bonkers but brilliant prog swan song

Genesis’s magnum opus, The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, is getting the 50^th anniversary deluxe boxset treatment and at a Soho listening party for the reissued album last Friday (September 19), the band spoke about the album’s difficult birth and even more inscrutable plot.

Four fifths of the band’s then-line up – Peter Gabriel, Steve Hackett, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford – were there and early on Gabriel was confronted by the question many listeners then, as now, have asked about Lamb: just what the hell is it all about?

“Who the fuck knows?” the singer joked, before refining his answer a little: “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.”

The album, released in November 1974, was the peak of the Gabriel-era band and perhaps even the prog era as a whole. “We wanted to do something that was a bit more ambitious and bigger and we thought that was our opportunity,” said Gabriel.

“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.”

Meanwhile, guitarist Steve Hackett remembers writing the album in Headley Grange, a rat-infested ex-workhouse in Hampshire which had recently been vacated by Led Zeppelin. “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.”

Touring the 94 minute double album in full was difficult too, as Tony Banks recalls: “No sane group would ever do it. 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.”

Nevertheless for all that, all four members agreed that The Lamb represented a pinnacle for the band. “Peter and I… both agreed that probably the best moment in early Genesis is the moment when it goes loud in Fly On A Windshield,” Banks said. “We felt we’d gone about as far as we could with The Lamb... 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.”