SAW IT ON TV…..

Well, there is only one item under scrutiny this time round but it is a rather special one. It seems that even 40 years after its release, The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway still exerts a fascination with the fans and with various tribute events celebrating the 40th anniversary being undertaken this year, perhaps the arrival of this item is rather timely.

Titled The Lamb Comes Alive On Broadway, this is an astonishing effort from the people responsible for putting it together. What we have here is a compilation of all the known Lamb… footage in circulation. This kind of thing has been attempted before with Chris West’s sterling effort a few years ago setting the benchmark extremely high indeed.

That project reached 77 minutes in length, the current offering extends that to 104 minutes almost the entire length of the show itself and indeed, you have representative footage for each and every track on the album and all lovingly synchronised to a soundtrack taken from the soundboard recordings of both the famous Shrine Auditorium gig and another excellent soundboard from the band’s third show at the Liverpool Empire. Even for someone not as enamoured of The Lamb… as I, the end result is an amazing piece of work. Here at last you get an idea of the sheer scale of the performance and realise just how far ahead of its time it was.

Obviously, with footage mainly comprising stuff filmed by the fans themselves although interspersed with the handful of professionally filmed clips available, the quality of the project will not win any technical awards. That really doesn’t matter. For fans, just getting this stuff in circulation is a major achievement in itself and I take my hat off to those brave souls who took the time and effort to put this remarkable project together.