The Genesis album Peter Gabriel never understood: “Who the fuck knows?”
The entire point of progressive rock is to challenge the listener and make them question whether the boundaries of what they know about music are being pushed enough. The point is not to make the artists themselves question what the hell they’re doing.
Under the guidance of Peter Gabriel, Genesis were perhaps one of the foremost prog bands who challenged their listeners, whether it was through complex song structures, elaborate use of music theory, or convoluted concepts behind their songs’ themes. The very nature of their appeal was all down to their highfalutin way of expressing themselves, and had they opted to keep things simpler, their audience would ultimately have been different, and could potentially have never worked out for them.
In their early years, this complexity didn’t necessarily translate into success, but with the release of their third studio album, Nursery Cryme, you could argue that they truly hit their stride after developing their sound across From Genesis to Revelation and its improved follow-up, Trespass. The further this went, the more celebrated Genesis became in the progressive rock sphere, having them often compared with the likes of Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer as being the most challenging groups on the circuit.
This was partially down to the musicians in the band getting a greater grasp on how to work with one another, but it was also due to the ambitiousness of what Gabriel wanted to do. Given how he was the one pushing the band to work on even more high-concept ideas as they moved through the early half of the 1970s, Genesis’ appeal may not have reached the levels it did had he not been there striving for a more convoluted artistic approach.
However, there came a point in the band’s career where they perhaps got a little too big for their own boots, and the ambitiousness made the band question their own moves and whether they were doing the right thing. There was only so far things could be pushed before they ended up flirting with reaching the tipping point, and their sixth studio album, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, may well have been the fall into the precipice that Gabriel was always worried about.
Speaking at a Q&A as part of the album’s 50th anniversary event in 2025, Gabriel proclaimed that the band were never entirely sure what was going on with the concept of the record, and that they overcooked things significantly. “Who the fuck knows?” Gabriel laughed when asked about what the concept was.
“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.”
While they may have always wanted to create something more ambitious, they ended up taking things a step too far and making their own lives miserable in the process. “There were some arguments about what direction it would take and who would get to write the story or the lyrics and stuff,” Gabriel continued, “but we got there in the end. It was a difficult time for all of us.”
It may have been the most ambitious album of their career, and one that is looked back upon as a career high-point, but it proved to be the final straw for Gabriel, who stepped away from the band after its release.
