It starts with a frenetic piano solo, played hand over hand, two notes at a time, sounding like the first fast drops of a downpour soon to come. A panorama of Manhattan appears, parcelled out on three screens above the stage: the southern view of the island in the mid-1970s, smaller and lonelier than today’s cityscape. The light over New York shifts from dusk to night to dawn to day as the pianist plays nineteen bars, slowing down to make way for a single crash of cymbals. A picture of a curled-up and forlorn-looking baby sheep fades in across the skyscrapers on the middle screen, and a raspy voice sings the first line of the first song of the nearly-two-hour saga ahead: “And the lamb / lies down / on Broadway.”
I feel the hair on my skin spring to a stand. I enter an alternate life: it is 1975, and I am at a Genesis concert. The band is performing its new double LP, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, which tells the story of Rael, a young part–Puerto Rican graffiti artist who is pulled into a shadowy world full of peril, where he is seduced by a siren and turned into a pustular beast. Peter Gabriel, the band’s lead singer, plays both Rael and his grotesque “Slipperman” alter ego, leaping from a riser and darting across the stage in jeans and a leather jacket or lurching around in a bile-coloured, boil-covered leotard and giant round head. Behind him, guitar players Mike Rutherford and Steve Hackett, keyboardist Tony Banks, and drummer Phil Collins play intricate passages of which each note is inextricable from the story.
