209. The Musical Box
Hammersmith Apollo
11 February 2023
There are tribute bands, and then there’s The Musical Box, the Canadian prog obsessives who don’t so much cover Genesis as reincarnate them. Their mission: to recreate, note for note and light cue for light cue, the original 1974 tour of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, the crown jewel of the Peter Gabriel era.
So, on a damp February evening, two prog devotees, made their way to Hammersmith for an evening of myth, madness and Mellotrons. We started, as all sensible middle-aged prog fans should, with a bite to eat and a whisky or two at a nearby hotel famed for its collection. The kind of place where the menu reads like a single malt rollcall and every bottle feels like it ought to be served with a small gong. It was, in short, the perfect prelude to two hours of surrealist rock theatre about split personalities, existential crises and New York sewer angels.
The Apollo was heaving, a sea of reverent fifty-somethings in vintage tour shirts, clutching plastic pints and whispering phrases like “authentic guitar tone.” We found our row, and inexplicably it was completely empty. The rows in front and behind were packed, but ours was a ghost row, an oasis of space in a sold-out show. Whether this was down to some glitch of the ticketing gods or a busload of Genesis pilgrims were currently stranded on the M4, we never did discover. A small part of me toyed with the idea that this was a boss-move by my pal, a multi-millionaire, so he didn’t have to sit next to the unwashed masses, but I dismissed that quickly; he is from humble beginnings, famously frugal, and this ran too far against the grain.
We arrive just as the lights dimmed and the opening arpeggio of “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway” rippled through the hall. And suddenly, it was 1974 again. The detail was genuinely astonishing. Every costume, every lighting cue, every projected image painstakingly recreated from the original tour, the notorious one that even Genesis themselves couldn’t quite pull off at the time, mostly due to the ingestion of quite a lot of narcotics. The frontman, in full Gabriel regalia didn’t just imitate Gabriel, he was him. The voice, the phrasing, the strange blend of theatre and alien detachment, it was uncanny.
The band themselves were immaculate. The playing was so tight, so faithful, it was like hearing a remastered version. The instrumental passages: “Fly on a Windshield,” “In the Cage,” “The Lamia”, were sublime: all 12-string shimmer with the rhythm section ticking like clockwork. By “The Carpet Crawlers,” I had stopped marvelling and making mental comparisons and simply gave myself over to it.
There’s something deeply moving about hearing The Lamb live; this gloriously overambitious concept album about transformation, guilt, and rebirth, rendered with such care and precision by a band who clearly worship every second of it. And for me and Paul, both lifelong fans of its peculiar genius, it felt like something approaching pilgrimage. Two middle-aged men sitting in an empty row, watching a Canadian tribute band resurrect a British prog masterpiece from half a century ago. Ridiculous? Possibly. Fun? Absolutely.
As the final chords of “It” faded and the lights came up, I realised that for all the knowing irony surrounding prog, there’s still something awe-inspiring about this kind of commitment, the sheer audacity of trying to recreate the un-recreatable. The Musical Box didn’t just play Genesis; they revived the strange, visionary grandeur of a time when rock still dealt in Greek myths and complicated time signatures.