The Lamia

In the Lamb's story, Rael escapes a cave and finds a pool where three Lamia, snake-like creatures with women's faces, seduce him; they die after drinking his blood, and he eats their bodies before moving on to the Slippermen. Banks wrote most of the music, Gabriel the lyric, and Banks then wrote the vocal melody at home. Lamias come from classical myth and appear in a famous Keats poem.

On the 1974 and 1975 tour Gabriel performed it inside a revolving cone decorated with snakes that collapsed in the last verse to reveal him in a lit body suit. The band played it a hundred times on that tour and never again after Gabriel left. Steve Hackett recorded it with Nik Kershaw singing for Genesis Revisited II.