The LAMB Slides

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Comment by Ponkine on June 21, 2008 at 4:32pm

AWESOME STUFF PETER, thanks a lot!

Comment by Rael Matrix on June 21, 2008 at 2:58pm

Thankyou Peter for your appreciated support.
Missing (i've search for it with no lucky) the pic of the BANJO MAN. I remeber was a photo of National Geographic.

Comment by Peter on June 21, 2008 at 7:31am

Hello! This is a great group you guys got going here. I'm a Lamb nut, and am very interested in the slides used on the tour.

After seeing TMB do The Lamb several times, I dug up some old books containing photos from Time, Life, and National Geographic magazines, since it seemed to me that lots of the slides could be from these publications. I had great luck with a book called "The Best of Life", which contains images from Life magazine; some of which were used for slides in The Lamb show.

So I scanned the ones I recognized and posted them here with a short description of what the photo is. Enjoy!

Anyway (Ollie Johnston and his 16inch high model train)

<Back In NYC (Fire during the 1952 Watts riots)

Back In NYC (Marlene Dietrich from the film "Destry Rides Again")

Back In NYC (Harlem gang leader Red Johnson hides from a rival gang in a abandoned building)

Broadway Melody/Chamber of 32 Doors (3-D movie goers, 1952)

Broadway Melody/Grand Parade (ex-King Farouk of Egypt on the Isle of Capri)

Broadway Melody (Howard Hughes in front of his H-1 plane, 1935)

Broadway Melody (The Radio City Music Hall Rockettes)

Grand Parade (model wearing a dress by fashion designer Norman Norell)

Lillywhite Lilith (laser bean cutting through a razor blade)

Comment by Rael Matrix on May 29, 2008 at 12:27am

Thankyou Ponkine for posting the Duncan Philip's memories.

Comment by Ponkine on May 25, 2008 at 8:58am

The Story Of The Lamb Slides - by sbuk

Just to set the record straight about the Lamb slides... this has all been previously explained years ago, but it seems that parts of the story have been forgotten.. maybe some of you have never heard it... so, here goes...

The Strictly Banks CD was produced at The Farm and I had been there many times. Around that time Dale had been clearing out the barn and I saw a box of slides on the table. I picked out a few, held them up to the light and immediately recognised them from the pictures I had seen in Gallo's book 'From One Fan to Another'. In fact, if you look at that book in the Lamb pages, the page for December 1974 in the top sequence, the centre slide of the white car with the bashed in front was the first one I pulled out.. I looked at others and there was no doubt at all that these were the original Lamb slides.

They were in a terrible condition. They were professionally made aluminium edged glass mounted 35mm slides. The condition suggested that after the last ever Lamb show the roadies had literally just thrown them into the box and that was it. Many of them were broken. The box had been stored away and forgotten about, until Dale found them just before we did the Strictly Banks CD.

I had been over to the US and Canada on several occasions to see The Musical Box and knew that they would love to have the slides so that they could recreate the Lamb tour. Without the slides, the tour would be impossible.

After some discussion with Tony and Mike, I was allowed to take the slides and get them copied. I remember that day vividly. I picked them up and drove through the rush hour traffic to Primrose Hill in North London and took them to Wherefore Art?. This company had done the artwork and CDs for the recent Genesis albums and would be trusted with the job.

The box contained over 2000 slides. The show uses about 1280 slides and the box had part of a duplicate set. There were also some slides from the later Trick of the Tail tour that had been dumped on top.

Each slide was individually unmounted and copied. The slides were unnumbered, but used a sequence of colours and numbers for identification. This was later to prove a real challenge. The cost of doing this was paid for by The Musical Box.

As you can imagine, it was a huge task and took quite a while. When it was done, I returned to Wherefore Art? and picked up both sets - the original re-mounted and cleaned slides and the copies.

I then flew to Montreal with the copied slides in my hand luggage..!! Alan Hewitt was with me on the trip. TMB were rehearsing and we went to the rehearsal studio and from there to Serge's house. The evening was spent looking through the slides and thinking just how lucky we all were. It was an incredible experience.

Thereafter, Serge and myself spent the best part of three months trying to work out the sequence for the slides. Serge needs to take the credit for this. He is an exceptionally knowledgeable man on the visuals for those early Genesis shows. I had the original slides at my house layed out across two large tables, song by song, and Serge had the copies. Together, separated by Atlantic Ocean and several thousand miles, we went through the show in painstaking detail to find the sequence. This was then cross-referenced with photographic evidence mostly from Robert Ellis but with other fan based contributions. Every slide was digitally copied too and I can't bare to think how many hours we spent on it. I bought a special slide scanner specifically for the purpose.

The slide sequence was the key to the whole project. There are seven projectors in the show. Each screen has two projectors, mounted one above the other. The centre screen has an additional third projector which contains the actual 'Lamb' slide.

We worked out that the colour and number coding on the slides indicated which projector the slide should be mounted in and there was a sequence between odd and even numbers. The next stage was to work out the timing of the changes between the slides in relation to the progression of each song.

Serge worked tirelessly on this and I basically just assisted towards the latter stages. During this process, the manufacture of the stage and lighting was also being worked and it was built from the original ShowCo plans. Musical instruments were made or acquired. The Lamb double-neck used by TMB, for example, was made from measurements that I took from Mikes actual Lamb double-neck, but made in left-handed format for Sebastien. Absolutely everything had to correct.

I recall that Phil Collins was going to make a rare return to the Farm for a filming sequence that would later end up on the Songbook DVD. On that day, I took advantage of this by faxing them all with 8 pages of last-minute questions about things that we just couldn't work out. I got a hand-written fax back with the answers we needed. It was invaluable.

Once we had an entire show sequence worked out that could run in time with the music a video was made of the slide show with the CD soundtrack in the background. This was then sent to Peter Gabriel for appoval. We were then satisfied that even if it wasn't 100% perfect, it was very close to being 'right' and it was good enough to take the show back on the road.

So.. the first tour went on the road and was then followed by a second and much bigger tour - all under licence with Genesis and Peter Gabriel.

I returned the original slides to the Farm, together with a video of the sequence and a sheet of running 'times' so that someone could reproduce it again. The slides are still at the Farm now.

In the years since then, Serge has continued to perfect and tweak the sequence and it is probably now as good and as accurate as it ever will be. His work is amazing and he deserves a HUGE amount of thanks from Lamb fans everywhere for what he has done.

There was talk about using the slides on the forthcoming box set and I had a meeting with technical bods at EMI at Abbey Road studios about this some years ago. Nothing happened with that, but the subject was raised again last year and I think Serge may be assisting with that for them. We'll have to wait and see.

So.. that is the story behind the Lamb slides.

Comment by Hogweed on May 5, 2008 at 11:17am

Wow thanks Ponkine for alerting me to this group! I really must get more time on this Ning thing, work is taking too many hours of my life at present. These pictures are awesome! Thanks for sharing and keep them coming people!

Comment by Ponkine on May 1, 2008 at 9:14am

Once again, thanks Rael Matrix!

Comment by Rael Matrix on April 30, 2008 at 8:24am

Comment by Ponkine on April 30, 2008 at 7:50am

I think I have more slides, but I have to check them one by one with the amazing ones posted by our friend Rael.

Stick around

Comment by melodyof1974 on April 28, 2008 at 10:34am

I love you called that song Evil Jam (The Waiting Room).

Amazing slides and photos everyone of them.
Thank you

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