See 12 Incarnations of Genesis Perform ‘The Carpet Crawlers’ Across Five Decades

The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is the most beloved rock opera of the progressive era, even if the story is so trippy and convoluted that most members of Genesis still have little idea what it’s actually about. Written almost entirely be Peter Gabriel, it tells the tale of a half Puerto Rican gang member named Rael in New York City circa 1974, who gets sucked into an alternate universe, and has to find a way out. Along the way, he encounters strange creatures, including the dastardly “Doktor Dyper,” who castrates him, and places the removed appendage in a container around his neck. Before that traumatizing event, Rael enters a long corridor and sees a sea of people crawling toward a wooden door. These are, of course, the “Carpet Crawlers” from the title of the song. 

Genesis made the rather brave decision to play The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway in its entirety on every stop of their 1974/75 tour, leaving only room at the end for a couple of older songs. Despite a minimal budget, Peter Gabriel still put together a dazzling stage show with multiple costume changes. Tragically, he didn’t film even one of the 104 live performances. But several pristine recordings from the tour have emerged over the years. Check out a rendition of the song from a Jan. 11, 1975, concert at the Lakeland Civil Center in Lakeland, Florida. It’s packed with still photographs of the tour, giving you a decent idea of what the show looked like.

Many songs from The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway simply wouldn’t work in a concert setting if played separate from the rest of the album. That’s why they haven’t attempted “The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging,” “Riding yhe Scree,” or “Here Comes the Supernatural Anaesthetist” a single time since Gabriel quit the band in 1975. But they’ve done “The Carpet Crawlers” 411 times since, going all the way back to the first show with Phil Collins at the helm in 1976. The lyrics remain very esoteric (“A salamander scurries into flame to be destroyed/Imaginary creatures are trapped in birth on celluloid”), but there’s a majesty to the tune that inspires arenas full of people to sing along, even if they’re hearing it for the very first time.

When Phil Collins left Genesis in 1996, remaining members Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks didn’t feel like ending the band, so they recruited Scottish singer Ray Wilson, cut a new album, Calling All Stations, and attempted to tour. Ticket sales were so weak in America that they had to cancel a planned theater tour, just six years after they were able to fill football stadiums. But they were still popular enough in Europe to gig all across the continent in 1998. With the exception of a one-off in 1992, the band hadn’t touched “The Carpet Crawlers” since 1984. But it came back every night of the tour, and Wilson handled it with ease. “Phil’s voice is like a trumpet,” Wilson told Rolling Stone in 2022. “It’s very staccato. Peter’s voice is like a saxophone. It’s very round and smooth. And then, of course, my voice is a bit more like Peter.”

At the end of the Calling All Stations tour, Mike Rutherford decided to dissolve Genesis and focus his creative energy on his other band, Mike and the Mechanics. It was the end of Genesis as an ongoing creative unit. But just one month after the final show with Wilson, they began exploring their past with the release of the box set Genesis Archive 1967–75. It includes a complete live performance of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, though Peter Gabriel re-recorded many of his vocals in 1995, partially because his crazy costumes of the time made it hard to place a microphone near his face. The end result is an unintentionally surreal duet between 1975 Peter Gabriel and 1995 Peter Gabriel. His voice deepened considerably during that 20 year gap, so it’s not hard to hear the edits.

Genesis Archive 1967–75 was assembled solely for the hardcore fans. The following year, at the tail end of the CD era, the band made a play for the softcore fans with the release of Turn It On Again: The Hits. It’s a single disc that runs through most of their big hits, but it ends with a track called “The Carpet Crawlers 1999” that features new vocals parts by Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins. Originally, Ray Wilson was told he’d be involved too. “They told me I was singing and dropped it and didn’t tell me why,” Wilson told World of Genesis in 2001. “There’s been a few shitty things, but I didn’t blame Mike and Tony for that. It’s just the industry.” Amazingly, despite everything that followed in the 2000s, “Carpet Crawlers 99” is the last time Genesis created anything new in the studio. 

In 2004, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, Steve Hackett, Tony Banks, and Mike Rutherford sat down in a room to see if a reunion tour was possible. When Gabriel realized it would require a substantive time commitment, he balked. But Collins wasn’t unwilling to give up so easily, so he proposed the three-man lineup do their own tour. (Hackett would have been game, but he left before they scored any of their pop hits. It just wouldn’t have made sense.) It took three years to pull off, but Genesis brought their Turn It On Again tour to arenas and stadiums all across North America and Europe in 2007. Every night ended with “The Carpet Crawlers.” At the time, Collins truly had no reason to think they’d ever play again, and he turned down very lucrative offers to bring the tour to more international markets in 2008. It made the Oct. 13, 2007, show very emotional. And even though they did play again many years later, this was drummer Chester Thompson’s last gig with Genesis. 

It’s a slight stretch to call Nick D’Virgilio a former member of Genesis. The one-time Spock’s Beard member never toured with the band, and his studio work is limited to just three-and-a-half songs on Calling All Stations, the most maligned album in their catalog. But those are three-and-a-half genuine Genesis songs on a genuine Genesis album. That’s enough to get his name onto the Genesis Wikipedia page. It was also enough for the producers of the 1998 tribute album Rewiring Genesis: A Tribute to The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway Project. They let D’Virgilio and singer Mark Hornsby contribute their own spin on “The Carpet Crawlers” to the album.

Genesis may have disinvited Ray Wilson from participating in their new version of “The Carpet Crawlers” in 1999. But Steve Hackett righted that wrong in 2013 when he created Genesis Revisited II — the sequel to his 1996 LP Genesis Revisited — and asked Wilson to sing “The Carpet Crawlers.” He was part of a large group of guest singers on the album that also included Nik Kershaw, Steven Wilson, and Simon Collins, Phil’s eldest son.

The versions of “The Carpet Crawlers” on this list were all recorded by various members of Genesis, even if Nick D’Virgilio is as tertiary as it gets. But we’d be greatly remiss if we didn’t spotlight the tremendous work of The Musical Box, who have spent the past 35 years painstakingly recreating vintage Genesis concerts down to the tiniest possible details. To call them the world’s best Genesis tribute band is an insane understatement. That’s like calling Mount Rushmore the best monument to great American presidents on a mountain in South Dakota. There is nothing that comes even remotely close. They are on a very rare tribute tour to the 1976-80 Phil Collins era right now, but will surely be back to the land of Gabriel very soon.

Steve Hackett not only recorded two albums of re-recorded Genesis songs, but he’s spent the past 13 years playing them at theaters all across the globe. It’s been a tremendous gift to the Genesis fan community since the four other classic-era members have zero interest in playing any of the old songs. (Gabriel hasn’t played more than a snippet of a Genesis song in public since 1983 when he guested at a Hackett show and was coaxed into a completely impromptu “I Know What I Like.” He last sang “The Carpet Crawlers” in 1982 at the “Six of the Best” Genesis reunion concert, a show he played very reluctantly since he was deep in debt following the financially disastrous WOMAD concert.) Hackett has used Swedish vocalist Nad Sylvan at his solo shows, and he does a stellar job with the Gabriel vocal parts. In 2025, they did a Lamb Lies Down on Broadway 50th anniversary tour. They didn’t do the entire double album, but of course “The Carpet Crawlers” was in the set.

For many years following the 2007 Turn It On Again tour, it seemed like Genesis were destined to stay forever in the off position. Phil Collins was retired and living largely off the pop-culture grid, battling alcoholism, severe nerve damage that made it impossible for him to play the drums, and some rather messy family drama. But he started playing solo shows again in 2017, even though he had to sit on a chair all night, and it seemed like only a matter of time before Genesis came back for a victory lap. The pandemic delayed things a bit, but Genesis finally returned in late 2021. Collins still wasn’t able to play drums, but his very talented son Nic took his spot behind the kit. Like in 2007, they closed out every show with “The Carpet Crawlers,” though this time they sprinkled a bit of “Dancing With Tte Moonlit Knight” at the beginning. The tour ended March 26, 2022, at the 02 Arena in London, and Gabriel himself showed up to say goodbye to the band he started with his high school buddies 55 years earlier. If real life were a movie, he would have gotten onstage and duetted with Collins on “The Carpet Crawlers.” But he remained in the audience. Fans continue to fantasize about a Genesis tour with Gabriel, Hackett, Banks, Rutherford, and Nic Collins, with Phil Collins perhaps on background vocals. But it’s unlikely to ever happen. The group almost certainly ended at the 02 Arena as Collins sang “The Carpet Crawlers,” and Gabriel watched with the fans.