“The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway” by Genesis

The curtain goes up on Genesis's 1974 concept album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway with its title song, and Peter Gabriel wastes no time planting you on the street beside Rael, the story's angry, defiant hero. Tony Banks, Phil Collins, Steve Hackett and Mike Rutherford share the music credit, the band produced it with John Burns, and Rutherford's bass shoves the whole thing forward with a real aggressive charge. It signs off with a sly tip of the hat to the Drifters' "On Broadway".

Issued as a single in the US, it never charted, but American FM stations played it plenty anyway. The song outlasted Gabriel's time in the band: the Collins-fronted lineup kept it in the set, often sliding it into the tail end of "The Musical Box", and Gabriel himself brought it back for encores on his first solo tours.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.