Fly On A Windshield - Live Performance

Live Performance

The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway reached number 10 in the UK, while nearly cracking the U.S. Top 40, reaching number 41 and eventually going Gold, although it met with mixed reviews. Upon its release, Genesis went on a world tour, performing the album in its entirety 102 times. The Lamb Tour was slated to begin on 29 October 1974, but due to an injury to Steve Hackett's hand, the tour was postponed until 12 November. Opening night for the tour commenced at the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago, Illinois on 20 November 1974. The final show on The Lamb tour was 22 May 1975 at the Palais des Sports in Besançon, France. (The final show of the tour had been scheduled for 27 May 1975 at the Palais des Sports in Paris, but was cancelled due to poor ticket sales, as was the penultimate date of 24 May 1975 at the Parc des Expositions in Toulouse.) Early into the tour, Gabriel decided he would leave Genesis, and made the decision clear to his band mates, although he finished the tour amicably with the band and did not announce his severance in public until August 1975.

The tour became the high point of Peter Gabriel's interest in theatrical presentation, masks and costumes, which had initially been introduced into the stage act to hide his shy person behind and to give the band a distinctive stage feature. In addition to Gabriel's theatrics, three screens above the band showed slides to accompany the story.

For the first half of the show, Gabriel dressed as Rael in a leather jacket, T-shirt and jeans, while relying on lighting and dramatic expression without the use of props or costumes. In the second half, the costumes and other visuals became much more elaborate. During "The Lamia", for instance, Gabriel was surrounded by a spinning cone-like structure decorated with images of snakes. For the last verse of the song, the cone would collapse to reveal Gabriel wearing a body suit that glowed under the stage's dark lights. However, the most notorious of Gabriel's costumes was the Slipperman, a naked monster with inflatable genitalia and covered in lumps, who emerged onto the stage by crawling out of a phallus-shaped tube. At the intro to the final song "It", a huge explosion set off twin strobes, and the audience was faced with both Gabriel and a dummy dressed identically, clueless as to which was real. "It" also featured an alternate ending with Gabriel vanishing from the stage in a flash of light and a puff of smoke.

Although these visuals were, as in past concerts, meant to enhance the experience, the rest of the band became frustrated with the press focusing only on the theatrical side of the show and not the musicianship. Another problem for the band was that many fans reacted as if Gabriel was the star and the rest of the group merely his backing band. Collins stated in Hugh Fielder's 1984 book, The Book Of Genesis, that backstage after a Lamb concert, "people would steam straight past Tony, Mike, Steve and I, go straight up to Peter and say, 'You're fantastic, we really enjoyed the show.' It was becoming a one-man show to the audience."

The show would feature some of the band's most famous instruments, including Mike Rutherford's double neck that consisted of a MicroFret six string bass and a Rickenbacker 12 string guitar, and Phil Collins' largest drum kit with Genesis featuring four timbales, a red seven-piece Ludwig kit (and later a natural finish Premier kit in same configuration,) a Fibes Crystallite snare, a set of five red temple blocks, a vibraphone, a set of orchestral bells, tubular bells, and a set of tuned tambourines (which can be heard on "In the Cage.")

The tour was fraught with other difficulties. According to Tony Banks, the slides which accompanied the music never worked well and only came close to working perfectly on four or five occasions. Gabriel often had difficulty getting a microphone near enough to his mouth to be heard in some of his costumes, especially the Slipperman. And, during a performance of "It" in one concert in Oslo, a stage manager's error resulted in an explosion so intense that it caused the band to stop playing, fearing for their safety.

At the final Lamb concert in Besançon, roadie Geoff Banks, just for a joke and without telling the band beforehand, put on the dummy's leather jacket and – wearing nothing else – replaced the Gabriel dummy on stage for the intro to "It."

Genesis never had any of their Lamb concerts filmed in their entirety, although several pieces from the show were filmed, including some bootleg footage taken by audience members. The 5.1 DVD edition of The Lamb, released in November 2008, features a visual "reconstruction" of the concert, utilising all of the band's original slides from the show, some bootleg footage, and photographs. There is also a nearly-complete audio recording of the performance from 24 January 1975 at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles that is available on the box set, Genesis Archive 1967–75, although it has some re-recorded vocals and guitar parts by Gabriel and Hackett, as both men were dissatisfied with their performances on the original concert recording (as well as technical flaws; e.g. Gabriel's vocals at one point being muffled by the Slipperman costume). In addition, for reasons never properly explained, the band used a re-mixed studio version of "It", also with re-recorded vocals by Gabriel, instead of the live version of the song. Contrary to Tony Banks' assertion in the accompanying booklet to the Genesis Archive, the tape did not run out; the live version of "it" exists on the King Biscuit Flower Hour broadcast of the Shrine concert.

In 2004, Genesis considered reuniting for a brief reunion tour of "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway." All five former band members met in November 2004 to discuss the possible tour, but ultimately Gabriel bowed out due to his solo commitments. In 2007, Banks, Collins, and Rutherford went ahead with the Genesis reunion tour without Gabriel and Hackett, playing only a couple of "Lamb" songs during the show, the standard live numbers "In the Cage" and "Carpet Crawlers." The trio all stated that they still hoped a reunion tour of "The Lamb" with Gabriel and Hackett would still happen at some point. In March 2011, Collins announced his retirement from the music industry, closing off any possibility of a "Lamb" reunion tour.