For Genesis, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway was a change in artistic direction and could be described as a music soundtrack to an unmade film; not really an opera but similar in scope. It concerns the strange journey of Rael, a New York City punk who goes through a series of metamorphoses and meets up with various strange characters along the way.

The band accompanied this change in musical direction with a change of visual direction, bringing Hipgnosis the opportunity to create their first Genesis cover.

Storm explains to Hypergallery how they responded to this challenge:

"We conceived of a story board or comic strip, but made of photographs.....A major part of this involved the character stepping outside the comic strip and taking a detached view, looking back at this life, a step considered necessary in the process of self-realisation. Thus the main character is seen literally stepping out of the picture, leaving a man-shaped white hole in his wake."

All the imagery is photographed in black and white negative, and the resulting prints are reassembled, adjusted in size, comped together and recopied to provide a single flat artwork. This is a monstrously difficult and painstaking process before the era of computers, but no less worth it.