By Paul Robicheau

One of the best things about the 40-minute selection from The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway that stood at the center of guitarist Steve Hackett’s near-three-hour show was its focus on the music without visual bolstering.

Steve Hackett at the Cabot. Photo: Paul Robicheau

The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway — Genesis’s swan song with founding front man Peter Gabriel — stands as a pinnacle for both the group and the progressive rock genre. Yet the conceptual 1974 double album was also controversial for its edgier, experimental punch and Gabriel’s surreal, sprawling narrative, which the singer acted out with fantastical costumes during his final tour with Genesis.

Perhaps given those mixed opinions — even within the band — and the project’s pigeonholing focus on visuals difficult to render live, neither Genesis nor Gabriel revisited that material at length in future concerts. The same went for most Genesis tribute bands, though the Montreal outfit the Musical Box gave it a full try with one show that featured original Genesis-authorized visuals.

But with a new box set of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway that includes the remastered album and a revered 1975 live recording from L.A.’s Shrine Auditorium (alas, the tour was never filmed), the timing is perfect for Steve Hackett — the only member of Genesis still airing the band’s catalog on tour — to bite into the Lamb.

Nad Sylvan with Steve Hackett at the Cabot.  Photo: Paul Robicheau

One of the best things about the 40-minute selection of Lamb highlights that stood at the center of guitarist Hackett’s near-three-hour show at the Cabot in Beverly on Saturday was its focus on the music without visual bolstering. His longtime lead-vocal associate Nad Sylvan artfully straddles the line between evoking the sound of both Gabriel and Genesis successor Phil Collins and bringing his own touch to the repertoire without masks or costumes. The Lamb segment was no different than the treatment of other Genesis fare, augmented merely by judicious, tasteful stage lighting.

Of course, Hackett not only performs the music of his old band. Since leaving Genesis in 1977, he has maintained a solid career. Hackett began Saturday’s show with a 55-minute set of solo material, starting with three songs from 2024’s The Circus and the Nightwhale: “People of the Smoke” (inserting a drier lead vocal by Hackett), “Circo Inferno” (weaving in a Middle Eastern rock flavor), and the atmospheric “These Passing Clouds,” cut by Rob Townsend’s soprano sax. The dark tones of “The Devil’s Cathedral” and “A Tower Struck Down” surrounded the brightness of four-part vocal harmonies in “Every Day.” Bassist Jonas Reingold inserted a nimble solo that engaged the audience with a “Voodoo Chile” quote, and the set closed with the moody build of “Shadow of the Hierophant” (boosted by bass pedals) from Hackett’s 1975 solo debut.

But the main event for Genesis fans arrived when the second set opened with Sylvan shifting from the Lamb’s keyboard-wound title track to the foreboding “Fly on the Windshield,” which broke into Hackett’s levitating string bends over drummer Nick D’Virgilio’s beefy fills. That segued into “Broadway Melody of 1974,” where Sylvan dug into Gabriel’s playful wordplay with a slightly altered cadence, singing “There’s Howard Hughes in blue suede shoes, smiling at the majorettes smoking Winston cigarettes” as he mimed two fingers to his lips.

Hackett clearly relished showcasing the album’s ghostly melodies; the nine tracks he choose were weighted toward the Lamb’s mesmerizing first half. They also included the short instrumental “Hairless Heart” (laced with his eerie sustains on electric guitar rather than acoustic), the soft march “The Carpet Crawlers,” and a dramatic “The Chamber of 32 Doors,” which showcased not only Sylvan but keyboardist Roger King’s lush synth accents and Reingold’s punctuating bass notes.

Nonetheless, Lamb favorites “In the Cage” and “Back in N.Y.C.” were skipped to balance entries from the album’s weaker back half. Cue the riff-pulsing “Lillywhite Lilith” (Sylvan parsing the line “Darkness closing in on me” in a falsetto cry), the ominous sirens tale “The Lamia,” and the record’s briskly rocking wrap-up “It.”

Rob Townsend, Steve Hackett, and Jonas Reingold at the Cabot. Photo: Paul Robicheau

Still, no complaints were heard when Hackett and company rounded out that second set with a 26-minute rendition of the epic Genesis suite “Supper’s Ready” from 1972’s Foxtrot. The ride began with Hackett’s subtly fingerpicked filigrees, hit a whimsical peak when fans echoed Sylvan’s outburst “A flower?” and surged with the tricky drums and keys of “Apocalypse in 9/8.” Yet the true climax came when Hackett surprised with a fierce four-minute outro solo that drew from his full bag of tricks, from whistling sustains to two-handed finger taps up the guitar neck (he was a pioneer of one of Eddie Van Halen’s signatures) and karate-chopped vibrato.

For an encore, King (sadly on his last tour after decades of working with Hackett) surged into Genesis keyboardist Tony Banks’s stately, classically influenced piano intro to “Firth of Fifth,” a standout selection from 1973’s Selling England by the Pound, which was a favorite album for Hackett. Then the band rolled through the drum-sparked composed jam “Los Endos,” Sylvan lending the vocal tag “Free to get back home.” By that point, however, the piece was an anticlimax to what came before, a call for Genesis fans to return to treasured memories, given a fresh delivery.

Paul Robicheau served more than 20 years as contributing editor for music at the Improper Bostonian in addition to writing and photography for The Boston Globe, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. He was also the founding arts editor of Boston Metro.