Peter was getting difficult, and suddenly he had a different attitude. “90 per cent of the record was there, so we just carried on the idea of the album. “We had written a lot of stuff,” Tony Banks said in 2013. Gabriel’s insistence that he held onto all the lyrics and the artistic flow-through of the story created further divisions. The main thing was to get the album finished.” I’d seen bands break up and get back together again. I was aware there was something going on with Peter, but quite honestly, I had my hands full. “Peter was pretty absent at the farm,” Burns remembers. Without Gabriel’s full-time presence, Banks, Rutherford, Collins and Hackett worked on the musical ideas. Meanwhile Gabriel to-ed and fro-ed with both Friedkin’s storyline and the weighty, portentous plot for The Lamb, between the hospital in London, his family and Wales. It was a nice atmosphere there were mattresses on the floor – the girls would cook, and sometimes Tony would chip in.” “Phil’s then-wife and my then-girlfriend were there. It was an album that was created in a number of derelict houses.” However, it was far from being all doom and gloom: “We had lovely weather,” Burns recalls. “It wasn’t really finished, so it just felt like camping out,” Hackett adds. “I had to send out hardboard to nail up around the drums.” “It was basically a cowshed with a pitched roof,” Burns says. Using the Basing Street Mobile, the recording took place in the farm’s barn with Burns and engineer Dave Hutchins outside, looking at the proceedings through a small closed-circuit television in the mobile studio. “I’d been to public school and been through that crap, so on that level, I got on incredibly well with Peter and Tony,” he laughs. John Burns was returning for his fourth album with them. With rehearsals completed and a concept in place, the band decamped to Glaspant Farm, Newcastle Emlyn, Wales to record. There was a tremendous amount of guilt I just wanted to get on with the music, but modern life just kept crashing in all the time.” With all of this happening, it was a wonder an album was made at all. My first marriage broke up and I had a son. Steve Hackett was very aware of what was happening as he was in a similar boat: “Pete was going through his version of hell, and I was going through mine. That was a big part of the problem really.” “Pete’s came very early on and we were not good at change. “When Angie and I had a baby and Tony and Margaret had theirs later, we realised it was life-changing.” Mike Rutherford said in 2013. There were life-changing events happening around him. More importantly than the band or Friedkin, Gabriel’s wife Jill was having severe difficulties at this time with her pregnancy, and problems continued after the birth of their child, Anna-Marie on July 26. In the kitchen at Headley Grange (Image credit: Richard-Haines/Photographs Forever) Rutherford has said it was “a strange feeling when one of the guys you are working with is a little less keen than you.
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“We were working at Headley Grange… I would go bicycle to the phone box down the hill and dial Friedkin in California with pockets stuffed full of 10p pieces.” “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,” Gabriel said in 1984. Friedkin had read Gabriel’s essay on the sleeve of Genesis Live and wanted Gabriel to come up with concepts for a new film. Gabriel, however, had more on his mind: he was distracted by a request from The Exorcist film director William Friedkin. Gabriel was vocal in sidelining Rutherford’s plan: “Too twee,” was his assessment of the idea. Alongside Gabriel’s concept of Rael, there was another idea – principally supported by Mike Rutherford, to write an album based around The Little Prince, the 1943 novella by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Influenced by Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1970 Mexican cult movie, El Topo, Gabriel came up with the character of Rael, a Puerto-Rican street punk who embarks upon a form of Pilgrim’s Progress in New York, to be known as The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. Two ideas had been suggested for the theme of the album. Phil Collins (Image credit: Richard-Haines/Photographs Forever)
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