It wasn't as if Genesis hadn't already been involved with the idea of conceptual rock art before 1974. After all, the band had previously released "Supper's Ready", an epic that spanned an entire LP page, and in 1973 presented songs on "Selling England By The Pound" that were held together by a certain idea of Britishness. However, Genesis had not yet dared to produce a record that would tell a coherent story from beginning to end.
In fact, the genesis of the project was overshadowed by the smouldering conflicts within the group. After lengthy discussions, the quintet had agreed to bundle their creativity in a concept album. To this end, Tony Banks, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, Steve Hackett and Mike Rutherford had thrown ideas together, which were then voted on, as was customary with them. They finally agreed on Gabriel's proposed story of Rael, a tough Puerto Rican street kid in New York who involuntarily embarks on a surreal journey. This starts with an invisible wall suddenly rising on Times Square and Rael finds himself on the wrong side and is trapped there.
According to the readings of some of the band-external interpreters, he is led into his own subconscious, which begins to lead a vividly depicted life of its own full of sexual desires, castration fantasies and the like. "The fact that the character is a tough young New Yorker was very important to me, because it makes him real and tangible," Gabriel said shortly after the publication. "The city radiates a certain hecticness and aggression, which is also characteristic of Rael. The idea was to show how such a character behaves when put into a fantasy environment." To make the complex story easier to understand, Gabriel had a short story summarizing the plot printed on the record sleeve.
The band goes new ways
On the "Selling England By The Pound" tour Gabriel's exalted performance and his extravagant masquerades had put the frontman in the centre of media attention. This flattered his ego, but annoyed the other band members more and more. With "The Lamb" the singer insisted on writing all the lyrics on his own and left the writing of the music to his colleagues. A small revolution - until then it had been customary for Genesis for all members to be involved in songwriting. "Peter increasingly had problems singing other people's lyrics," recalls Tony Banks, who also wrote the lyrics.
So this ego trip didn't bring any joy to the rest of the band. Banks and Rutherford, in particular, were piqued because their role as copywriters was important to them, even though Banks later admitted with a grudging grind: "If you wanted a certain continuity in the texts for a concept album, it was simply better if only one person wrote it, and that was Peter In a conversation with Bandintimus Armando Gallo, however, the keyboarder also said: "In a way the lyrics were quite similar, because Peter has a certain way of dealing with words, he plays with them, while Mike and I write more realistically
