Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway gets the extravagant Super Deluxe Edition treatment

Comprising a new re-mastering, an Atmos mix by Bob Mackenzie, at Real World Studios, supervised by Peter Gabriel and Tony Banks on BluRay, along with a three-lp live recording from Los Angeles in January 1975, plus a sixty-page book and assorted reproduced ephemera (gig ticket, programme, poster) The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway goes Super Deluxe. The last album with Peter Gabriel as lead vocalist, The Lamb was considered by some as an overblown self-indulgence on the part of Gabriel, while others viewed the allusive, allegorical and at times surreal narrative of a young man’s challenging journey towards redemption as a boldly innovative composition.

This new issue is unlikely to change many minds on that point. Miles Showell’s 2025 re-mastering is from the original analogue tapes, and is unrelated to the Nick Davis 2008 mix that was presented in a half-speed-mastered version. Briefly comparing the 2025 offering with the original from five decades ago is instructive, though it is certainly worth recalling initially that the quality of vinyl in the early- to mid-seventies was not particularly good, owing to the oil crisis at that time. This new pressing is excellent, consistently clean and quiet; for instance, the shimmering opening of “The Carpet Crawlers” is especially convincing. The remastering work across the whole album is more subtle than might have been feared in that it does not draw attention to itself, but simply and effectively brings out more clearly than before the (positive) group dynamics and the sonic range. It’s not a radical revision of the original, but a sympathetic and slight yet noticeable enhancement.

For most of those with a possible interest in this package, it is the content and presentation of the L.A. gig that is likely to be of greater significance. It has long been available as a bootleg in various versions, with variable sound quality. However, even the official 1998 Genesis Archive release was not of the complete show. This new version takes the original King Biscuit Flower Hour radio broadcast recording, and has it remixed and re-mastered by the Davis-Showell partnership. The “Watcher in the Skies” / “Musical Box” encore missing from the Archive edition is present here, separately re-mixed.

Across the gig as a whole, the sound quality now is as good as we are likely to get, given the practical problems (that ought to have been foreseen at the time) brought on firstly by Gabriel’s voice not being in good shape at this point in the tour, and secondly the difficulties caused by some spectacular but extraordinarily cumbersome costume components that impeded his vocal delivery. These factors led to Gabriel controversially, over twenty years later, deciding to overdub on more than a few of the tracks for the Archive release, additions which are present here. The soundstage on tracks such as the instrumental “Hairless Heart” is especially well defined. Throughout, Collins’ cymbals are crisp, with the intricacies of Banks’s keyboards and Hackett’s guitar work clear. Indeed, there has been some useful attention to appropriate instrument balance and separation across the six sides. The three records are in an attractive tri-fold sleeve, though it would have been good, for such a lavish and correspondingly expensive product, to have the paper inner sleeves for both the studio album and the live one poly-lined.

A download code on the back of the ticket gives access to three demos from tryouts at Headley Grange, a crumbling country pile, rodent-ridden, that were previously unavailable (officially, that is; they are on YouTube as a small part of almost seven hours of work-throughs from mid-1974). The book has a good range of contemporaneous photographs, and an intelligent account by Alex Petridis of the original album-writing process as well as of wider social and musical contexts such as the embryonic punk sounds emanating from New York while The Lamb was being constructed.

Gabriel suggests that the oft-told story of his focusing on writing lyrics while the others worked on the music is not entirely accurate, though Petridis’s text notes (with perhaps some understatement) “the complex and occasionally strained relationships”, while various family commitments brought further difficulties, alongside uncertainties around the singer’s possible involvement with film director William Friedkin’s (The French Connection, The Exorcist) intended cinema projects. Steve Hackett sums up the situation, leaving little doubt: “We were now built on a fault line.” Frustrations arising out of the imminence of the U.S. tour brought Brian Eno in to focus attention, in an attempt, as Gabriel puts it, “to reposition the band… He was a positive force.”

The ultimate result was, intentionally or not, an album of fragments reflecting firstly the record’s theme of a disjointed journey, and secondly a similarly uncertain moving towards the most significant staging post hitherto in terms of the personnel of the band. Critical opinion on The Lamb remains divided fifty years on, but this extravagant box does enable a more informed view of the group’s and of Gabriel’s contradictory directions. And then there were four…