Artist:

Genesis

Title:

Frozen Pantomime

Date:

February 28th 1975

Venue:

Le Parc Des Expositions, Colmar, France

Tracklisting

Personnel

Peter: Several ideas for the album were presented in order for the band to exercise a democratic vote. I knew mine was the strongest and I knew it would win - or, I knew that I could get it to win. The only other idea that was seriously considered was 'The Little Prince' which Mike was in favour of - a kid's story. I thought that was too twee. This was 1974. It was pre-punk but I still thought we needed to base the story around a contemporary figure rather than a fantasy creation. We were beginning to get into the era of the big, fat super groups of the seventies and I thought, “I don't want to go down with this Titanic.” Once the story idea had been accepted, we had all these heavy arguments about writing the lyrics. My argument was that there aren't many novels which are written by a committee. I said, “I think this is something that only I'm going to be able to get into, in terms of understanding the characters and the situations.” I wrote indirectly about lots of my emotional experiences in 'The Lamb' and so I didn't want other people colouring it.

Tony: All the lyrics were written by Peter, apart from one or two tracks, because he'd thought up the storyline. He didn't really want anyone else to do it. This meant there was a division as Pete went off and wrote the lyrics, and everyone else wrote the music. By the time Pete had finished the lyrics, there were about two or three holes where there wasn't a song and we needed to write something. 'The Carpet Crawlers' was one and 'The Grand Parade Of Lifeless Packaging' was another.

Phil: We were living at Headley Grange, this house that Led Zeppelin, Bad Company and The Pretty Things had lived in. It was a bit of a shambles - in fact, they'd ripped the shit out of it. We were all living together and writing together and it went very well to start with. Pete had said he wanted to do all the words so Mike and Tony backed off and we were merrily churning out this music. Every time we sat down and played, something good came out.

Mike: We started writing and it just came out very easily. After the previous album, it was a big relief. We realised quite quickly that we had three good sides - not just two good sides and another side, but three good sides. So we had to go for a double. Pete started the lyrics and it finally became apparent that we hadn't got a chance in hell of getting it finished by the deadline.

Peter: I had this call from William Friedkin who'd seen the story I'd written on the back of the live album and he thought it indicated a weird, visual mind. He was trying to put together a sci-fi film and he wanted to get a writer who'd never been involved with Hollywood before.

Phil: Suddenly Peter came up and said, “Do you mind if we stop for a bit?” and we all said, “No, of course we don't want to stop.” So he said, “OK, I want to do the film so I'm leaving.” I remember we were sitting in the garden by the porch saying, “What are we going to do? We'll carry on. We'll have an instrumental group” which, for five minutes, was a serious idea because we had a lot of music written.

Peter: The others thought I was using the group as a springboard to jump off for my own personal success and wasn't even bringing them along with me. But Friedkin didn't want Genesis. He only wanted me for weird ideas, not for music. I just wanted a month to do this script outline. So I walked out.

Mike: If you push Pete into a corner, he will retreat still further. When we tried to tie him down, he just became more vague. He went off back home to Bath and that was it. We carried on writing and didn't really think very far ahead.

Tony: Peter kept saying if this William Friedkin offer came, he would do that in preference to working with us. And I thought, “This is absurd.” There came a point where he decided to write a screenplay, so he left for a bit. Anyhow, higher authorities stepped in - I think it was Strat (Tony Stratton-Smith, manager of Charisma Records) - to try and keep us together.

Mike: Eventually, I rang Pete one morning and said, “Well, this is silly. Come back and we'll sort it out.” So he came back and we picked up where we left off. Slowly, as the album progressed, William Friedkin's project became more and more vague. But once that sort of thing happens, the seeds of discontent are sown.

Tony: It made all of us feel that he was getting fed up and it was only a matter of time before he left. But Peter made a definite commitment to finish the album before he did anything else, so we finished the album and I really enjoyed it. We used lots of moods - at times things were little more than improvisations on an idea. For instance, Mike would say, “Pharaohs going down the Nile” and he would just play two chords and instantly the rest of us would conjure up that particular mood. That one ended up on the album as 'Fly On A Windshield'. We did that with lots of the other tracks. The best jam we had in the rehearsal room ended up being called 'The Waiting Room', which we called 'The Evil Jam'. We switched off all the lights and just made noises. And the first time it was really frightening.

Phil: 'The Evil Jam' started with Steve inventing noises and Tony messing around on a couple of synthesizers. We were just mucking about with some really nasty sounds. We were all getting very intense - Peter was blowing his oboe reeds into the microphone and playing his flute with the echoplex on when suddenly there was this great clap of thunder and it started raining. We all thought, “We've got in contact with something heavy here.” It was about five or six in the evening and we were making all these weird noises when the thunderstorm started and it began to pour down. And then we all shifted gear and got into a really melodic mood. At moments like that it really was a five-piece thing. We worked well together on 'The Lamb'. The two albums gave us room to do it.

Steve: I was an innocent bystander on 'The Lamb'. It happened despite me, not with me. All the things that I'd managed to hold back on 'Selling England By The Pound' seemed to come back in full force here…the nightmarishly long sides, everything linked to everything else. I really felt it was very indulgent. I couldn't quite get to grips with it or contribute something great in a guitar sense.

Phil: After we had prepared all our material, we went to another house in Wales to record. We put down the backing tracks in two weeks, and a month later we were still waiting for the words. Peter was well behind. Then he started saying' “I need another piece of music to link these two songs.” We got bored with it in the end and nobody could help him because he was determined to do it on his own.

Steve: We ran out of time at Headley Grange so we didn't get to record there. And that was a shame because we all liked the drum sound on the Zeppelin album (Physical Graffiti), in particular 'Kashmir' which I gather was recorded using the stairwell. The place had a haunted house vibe. I used to hear weird scratching sounds at night.

Peter: I was pretty good at manipulating but I think by 'The Lamb' the resentment towards me was so big that I had very little space. And I felt he only way I could work was to go into a corner and function on my own. A lot of the melodies were written after the event - after the backing tracks had been put down.

Phil: We ended up back in London doing the vocals and mixing the album in shifts. I'd be mixing and overdubbing all night and then Tony and Mike would come in and remix what I'd done because I'd lost all semblance of normality by that point. Finally it seemed as if we'd been through hell and high water just to get it out. It certainly wasn't one of my favourite albums at the time but I can see now that it's one of our better recordings. We were still suffering from bad production up to that point, I think.

Steve: I felt at the time there were a lot of things on 'The Lamb' which didn't particularly meet with my approval, and there was a very claustrophobic kind of sound to it…and a haphazard thing. We had a lot of jam sessions which turned into numbers and, in a way, it kind of lacked the discipline and accuracy which I was after in music. I don't think Tony's ever done a finer album. But I did feel the amount of stuff I was managing to put across was painfully small. My marriage at this point was also on the rocks.

Mike: 'The Lamb' is one of our best albums - one of our most different, anyway. I think a lot of people were put off by the idea of a concept, this idea of it all hanging together. When it came out, it was a commercial failure. People talk about it now as a Genesis classic, but at the time it died a death.

Phil: The trouble was that it was a double. That album should have been a single and our next could have been a double. At one point, the band even toyed with the idea of releasing 'The Lamb' as two single LPs, a few months apart. That would have given us more time to finish it and would probably have made the whole thing a little easier to digest.

Peter: I would like best to see 'The Lamb' as a film because that would clarify the imagery further than a performance or the record. A film is the easiest medium by which to build another reality. The point of Rael being earthy and aggressive is that he provides an accessible response to these fantasy situations. Rael seemed a good starting point because he's surrounded by all this speed and aggression which New York has more than any other city.