Tony Banks Says ‘The Lamb Lies Down…’ Was His ‘Least Favorite Part of Being in Genesis’

‘The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway’ is widely regarded as a high point in Genesis’ career. But in a new interview, keyboardist Tony Banks expressed his dissatisfaction for the 1974 concept double-album.

‘I have to say that my least favorite part of being in Genesis was that time of doing ‘The Lamb,’” he told Prog. “I’m very proud of a lot of the music on there, but I think the two albums that came before [‘Foxtrot’ and ‘Selling England by the Pound’] work better as a totality.”

Banks lists several reasons why it ranks so low. For starters, he wasn’t particularly into the story. But the others had more to do with all the difficulty involved in presenting the piece on stage. As he continued, “Then we did the tour and it was fun to set all that stuff up. It never worked perfectly. It would’ve been great if it had, but it never did. So it was very frustrating every night. And in the middle of the tour, Peter [Gabriel] sort of left.”

Still, Banks does provide insight into the role played by Brian Eno, who was enigmatically credited with “enossification (treatments)” on the record. “He was there for one evening and fiddled around with the voice on ‘The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging’ and a bit on ‘In the Cage’. He did a couple of other twiddles that we didn’t really use, a little bit of a twiddle on my piano at the front…But I really liked what he did on 'The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging,' it’s one of my favorite songs on the record.”

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