WHERE TRIBUTE ACTS MEET HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTIONS

It's not so much that anyone would go to the trouble of doing panstaking, historically accurate reconstructions of Peter Gabriel era Genesis gigs, more that The Music Box has sold out four nights in Toronto with their rebuild of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway.

Denis Gagne - who takes the Gabriel role - has problems with the outfits:

But those which Gabriel donned for the "Lamb" concerts were the most outrageous and bizarre of all; it took Gagne a good deal of time and effort just to get the monstrously surreal "Slipperman" outfit right.

"I spent two months working with people who do special effects for (that) costume," says Gagne. "That's full-time, 40 hours a week." Making the work difficult, he adds, was the lack of available footage of Genesis performing the material live.

"They refused to film those shows. They felt they weren't stable," he explains. "Every night, there was something going wrong. So they felt it wasn't worth filming the shows."

Incidentally, while Gagne's costumes are copies conjured from still photos, the 1,100 slides that accompany the songs TMB plays are directly from Genesis' own archives.

The band have been working through the Genesis catalogue in order, which presents an interesting challenge: Gabriel quit the band. The Music Box haven't ruled out getting their drummer, Martin Levac, to come to the front and start doing Invisible Touch.

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