Roxy Music

Roxy Music invented a genre of futuristic rock that relied on jazz-rock instrumentation, decadent vocals, melancholic melodies, and danceable rhythms, serving as an important bridge between progressive rock and punk rock.

An impressive sequence of masterpieces (Virginia Plain, Remake/Remodel, Ladytron, Bogus Man, Editions Of You, Do The Strand, Street Life) makes them one of the greatest British bands of all time.

Roxy Music was born in 1971 from the collaboration of five distinctive personalities from the second generation of British "progressive" musicians: futuristic scientist Brian Eno (keyboards), teddy-boy Phil Manzanera (guitar), decadent intellectual Brian Ferry (vocals), conservatory graduate Andy McCay (saxophone), and Paul Thompson (drums).

The band's sound was the result of the reactionary and avant-garde pushes that progressive music was receiving during its crisis: Roxy Music absorbed the first naive lessons of electronics while accepting a reasoned return to rock and roll and dance rhythms.

The final result was a genre of elegant song centered on dense and eccentric instrumentation, petulant keyboards, driving rhythms, aggressive brass, and mannered singing. Altogether, it was an attitude that could produce highly elaborate instrumental excursions, yet always with a "bodily" approach to music, closer to "rave-up" than to psychedelic suites. Conceptual rock, but very pragmatic.

They were established as the trailblazers with the masterpieces of their first album, Roxy Music (Island, 1972).
Their first masterpiece was the 45 RPM single Virginia Plain (originally not included in the album), the archetype of their delirious rhythm songs: the methodical pulsation, driven by the march of the synth and the frantic clarinet scans, adorned with fractures and small noises, electric guitar solos, honky-tonk piano, folk dances, and Ferry's catchy chorus, propelled it to the top of the charts. The tumult of the keyboards, absorbing avant-garde electronics, dadaist gags, and melodicism, essentially created a new style for the instrument, freeing it from the monumentalism of flash-rock.
Even more typical of their sound was the rhythmic storm of Remake/Remodel, an epileptic nursery rhyme that recycles on a frenzied cadence, pierced by the hypnotic sax riff, with the counterpoint of a threatening schizophrenic choir, and a syncopated instrumental outro woven with dissonant solos, abstract cacophonies, and space effects.

An electronic overture of cosmic signals, among which a faint saxophone melody emerges, opens onto the martial psychedelic flamenco of Ladytron, sung by Ferry’s resonant baritone and shattered by instrumental gallops of unheard violence, made of dreamy sax riffs and rhythmic cascades of synth and distorted guitar.

The tendency towards mutations and crossovers of genres is even more apparent in the tracks directly inspired by past genres. The honky-tonk of If There Is Something first transcends into a tragic serenade, then into a romantic jazz-rock jam, a passionate chamber piece with a poignant alto sax solo, to end in a neurotic lament with a sinister background choir that is launched into a celestial progression. No less chameleonic is the supposed wild rock and roll of Would You Believe, with pounding boogie piano, wild sax spins, and a Berry-style guitar solo.

The android serenade of 2 HB invents the "cocktail music" of the '70s, which would become one of Ferry's trademarks: a slender voice, broken by typical melodic progressions, the harmonic compactness of the instruments, with the sophisticated interlacing of brass and the discreet bubbling of the keyboards, cerebral lyrics, and a decadent cabaret atmosphere.

On the more avant-garde front are The Bob, an abstract mosaic of free noises, fragmented sounds, supersonic free-jazz jams, and music-hall gags, and the hallucinogenic distortions of Chance Meeting, which, against a chamber piano backdrop, compose an obsessive psychodrama, punctuated by Ferry’s psychotic, alienated, and hallucinated voice.

The journey into nightmare becomes darker. The disconnected delirium of Sea Breezes brushes against the tender despair of Buckley, soaring tense and trembling into a delicate filigree of classical chords; then it staggers along nervous syncopations, dotted with noises of all sorts (keyboards, sax arpeggios, guitar distortions), before folding back into even more poignant melancholy. The finale, Bitters End, is a final harmonic montage gag: to the rhythm of a bizarre flamenco and the counterpoint of a doo-wop choir, Ferry croons a languid chanson from a Parisian cabaret.

In conclusion, Roxy Music invented at least four new genres of rock song: the psychodrama of Chance Meeting and Sea Breezes, the futuristic dance of Virginia Plain and Remake/Remodel, the mutating ballad of Ladytron, If There Is Something, Would You Believe, and the decadent litany of 2 HB and Bitters End.

What made the band a revolutionary case was the dense mix of references, typical of English art-rock, and the relentless sonic assault, supported by the relentless beat of Thomas, the epileptic minimalism of Brian Eno, and the wild pyrotechnic runs of Mackay and Manzanera. Eno, Mackay, and Manzanera painted wonderful gags on their respective instruments, each inventing a new style of accompaniment.

Pink Floyd (surrealism), Soft Machine (dadaism), Traffic (chromaticism), Cream (virtuosity), Led Zeppelin (impetus), King Crimson (grandiosity) find an intriguing point of convergence in the dense and captivating sarabandes of the band. The ease with which they employ the most abstract cacophonies and accumulate sonic events upon sonic events, moreover, in a context of popular music that is by no means difficult to listen to, is prodigious.

Their second album, For Your Pleasure (1973), fully revealed the potential of each individual musician, each more mature and enterprising, with Manzanera and Mackay being the true masters of the harmonies. Similarly, Ferry's cold and nervous singing established a new cliché in the history of rock vocalism. While reducing the experimentalism, the album continues in the same vein as the previous one.

The masterpiece of the album, and perhaps of the entire band's work, is Bogus Man, a nine-minute hypnotic psycho-dance that consecrated them in the upper echelons of absurdist rock. The rolling rhythm, the whispered vocals on the more psychotic tones of falsetto with its hallucinatory reverberations, the obsessive bubbling of the synth, gusts of electronics, the nonsensical nursery rhymes of the sax, the long and demonic choruses, the funky stabs of the guitar, jungle sounds, and minimal pulses compose a swirling magma that swallows everything, crumbles, and remixes endlessly, until disorientation, bringing the dance to the most occult and savage tribalism. A long, exhausting journey into the subconscious of corporeal music.

The relentless epic of Do The Strand, their second futuristic anthem, projects the sax's high notes at a frantic speed, with an interlude of hyper-banding, dense to the point of cacophony, that recovers on the notes of the anthem in the most overwhelming way, in a last frenzied ride of excess.

Following the same dizzying song format, with Eno’s hammering electronics and piano driving the metronomic rhythm crazy, speeds through the breathless rock and roll of Editions Of You, one of their most grotesque epilepsies, where the most clownish cabaret marries the ballroom evolutions (with spectacular sax and synth numbers) and the most absurd anguish of urban alienation, a model for a futuristic dance without brakes, and Grey Lagoons, which, though starting in the most vile kitsch, soon stretches into a supersonic boogie (hammering piano, stellar sax), interrupted only by a spectacular blues harmonica solo.

Ferry’s emphatic crooning spreads uncontrollably, now varying across the entire spectrum of registers, from the melodramatic of opera to the psychotic of expressionism, from the jovial of the music hall to the colloquial of the "cocktail lounge", from the dreamlike of psychedelia to the solemn of the sentimental song, from the grotesque of kitsch to the languid of decadence. The free-form carpets the instrumentalists construct for his soliloquies are increasingly closer to chamber music, intangible nebulae of sonic fragments that, unlike the first album, no longer coalesce into recognizable musical forms, riffs, rhythms, or stereotyped melodies. Thus, the delicate Strictly Confidential, vibrating to the sound of a classical oboe and psychedelic guitar, and In Every Dream Home approach the model of desperation and anguish of Pete Hammill. And the paranoid nightmare of For Your Pleasure crowns the album with a cosmic and lysergic epic worthy of VDG, though softened by the usual mix of kitsch and psychotic tones from Ferry’s repertoire, an existential delirium that wraps itself in a long echo game until transcending into a minimalist mantra.

The style evolves towards more mature solutions. The "mutant ballad" has disappeared, absorbed into the eclectic arrangements of all the songs, while the psychodrama and the decadent litany tend to merge into a compromise of psychotic song. The futuristic dance, for its part, sublimates in the delirium of Bogus Man.

Although until this point it had always been Ferry composing, each of the other members had contributed to the ensemble sound with their own personalities. On the second album, the leader's retro passion for atmospheric crooning, for classy song, though mitigated by avant-garde arrangements, began to take the upper hand. With the third, Stranded (UK, 1973), the first without Brian Eno (replaced by Eddie Jobson from Curved Air), Ferry became the absolute master. Avant-garde arrangements and long instrumental passages disappeared in favor of a more streamlined and synthetic song form, and decadent poses.

The album still contains at least three legendary ballads, detached, existential, lush, and even apocalyptic: Street Life, Mother Of Pearl, A Song For Europe. The first is a chaotic revision of rock and roll, a piercing rhythm that recycles endlessly, the futuristic dance reduced to the essentials. The second is a typical mischievous, hypnotic crooning by Ferry. The third is one of the greatest atmospheric songs ever, a whirlpool of nostalgia and decadence that soars in an epic and poignant song of despair, sung, partly in English and partly in French, in the slow, insistent progression of the music, especially the piano (Eddie Jobson), which mimics the wind, or time, in its cruel assault on the dead things.

Country Life (1974), with Thrill Of It All, is the last album worth mentioning and represents the peak of sophisticated arrangements. Commercial temptations, retro-chic trends, and Ferry's pathetic emphasis were clearly taking over the group’s sound, which had now settled into a smooth, sophisticated rhythm and blues suited to the disco.

Siren (1975), with the disco hits Love Is The Drug, the peak of this period, and Sentimental Fool, is the terminal point, the commercial peak, but also the exhaustion of inspiration. Ferry, Manzanera, and Mackay parted ways but reunited a few years later to resume the Roxy Music adventure, which concluded with two best-selling albums: Manifesto (Polydor, 1980), with Over You, and the romantic, lush Avalon (1982), from which the hit More Than This was taken but also featuring The Space Between, India, Tara, and True to Life. In the meantime, a terrible Flesh + Blood (1980) was released, more akin to Ferry's solo albums (with the happy exception of Same Old Scene and the single My Only Love). Ferry had changed: instead of the psychotic baritone of old, he was now a dandy, as exquisite as he was icy, a smooth-talker alien to the search for hedonistic pleasures on the forbidden planet. The band accompanied him with dignity but without flights of fancy: every song was crafted to the minimum, without solos or sharp excesses. Formal elegance didn’t always redeem the lack of good material.

Street Life (EG, 1986) is a double anthology of their career.

In the subsequent career, the South American-born Phil Manzanera revealed himself as a typical intellectual of rock who reflects on himself, or rather on his more kitsch appendages. First, Manzanera reformed his old band, Quiet Sun, with Charles Hayward, future This Heat, and recorded with them Mainstream (Antilles, 1975), in the jazz-rock style of the Canterbury school (the long tracks Sol Caliente, Rongwrong, and Mummy Was an Asteroid).
Recommended by two minds of the caliber of Robert Wyatt and Brian Eno, who alternated on vocals, Manzanera released his first solo album, Diamond Head (Atlantic, 1975 - EG, 1990), revealing himself to be an excellent manipulator of absurdity, with a "primitive" guitar style, somewhat psychedelic and somewhat kitsch. It results in a crazy Brazilian funk (Frontera), a minimalist jazz-rock jam (East Of Echo), an ambient and Morricone hybrid instrumental (Diamond Head), even an exotic gypsy duo for oboe and guitar (Lagrima), and above all, the possessed vaudeville nursery rhyme of Miss Shapiro.
Manzanera returned to the Canterbury sound in albums with 801, Live (EG, 1976) and Listen Now (Polydor, 1977), a group opened with Brian Eno and others. The neutral danceable tracks of K-Scope (EG, 1978), aside from the rhythm and blues of the title track, indulged in a giddy dandyism with the instrument, revealing the limitations of his baroque rock.
A guitar-only album, Primitive Guitars (EG, 1982), a sort of experimental diary that starts with Latin folk and expands to Brian Eno's ambient music, and a grand essay in "impossible guitar," clarified that his greatest strength lies in the fusion of South American rhythms: Criollo and Caracas are among the surreal masterpieces of guitar instrumentals.
Manzanera and Mackay also formed the Explorers (Virgin, 1985), who played the same music as Roxy Music without Ferry, and then recorded together Crack The Whip (Relativity, 1988) and Up In Smoke (Relativity, 1989), which mostly recycled material from the Explorers and assorted leftovers.
Manzanera was an undeniable talent, although his solo albums didn’t do him justice. It worsened with the album Wetton Manzanera (Geffen, 1987), in collaboration with former Asia bassist. His Latin American sound took over on the equally mediocre Southern Cross (Expression, 1990).

Meanwhile, Brian Ferry became increasingly the gray matter behind the futurist/decadent rock movement, one of the main architects of the theatrical and sophisticated poses of the new British rock auteurs. His solo album These Foolish Things (Island, 1973) is a exquisite sacrilege of pop and rock music’s past, revealing him as a parodist capable of transforming even the classics of the '60s into kitsch. Ferry continued in this vein, releasing a couple more collections of remakes, Another Time Another Place (Atlantic, 1974) and Let's Stick Together (Atlantic, 1976), always marked by theatrical crooning and romantic obsessions. In Your Mind (Atlantic, 1977) is his first album with original material and demonstrates the low artistic level of the persona. The Bride Stripped Bare (Atlantic, 1978) was thus half originals and half covers. Then, Ferry devoted himself to Roxy Music for a few years. When they broke up, Ferry continued to make the exact same music from the final Roxy Music period on his new solo albums: Boys And Girls (Warner, 1985) and Bete Noire (EG, 1987), elevated only by his voice. Ultimate Collection (Virgin, 1988) is an anthology of his ambiguous and mediocre career. It would take seven years before Ferry returned with an album that wasn’t simply a collection of covers: Mamouna (Virgin, 1994), a collection of refined, dreamy, sensual, and noir songs, always in the style of the later Roxy Music. Unfortunately, the business rules would always make him prefer cover albums, as Ferry had found the ideal format for the distracted yuppie audience: Taxi (Reprise, 1993), As Time Goes By (Virgin, 1999), Frantic (Virgin, 2002), and Dylanesque (Virgin, 2007) are unlistenable for everyone else.

Keyboardist Eddie Jobson recorded electronic music albums in the emphatic style of Larry Fast such as Zinc: The Green Album (Capitol, 1983) and Theme Of Secrets (Private, 1985). On Piano One (Private, 1985), he perhaps delivered his most atmospheric work (The Dark Room, Disturbance In Vienna, and Ballooning Over Texas).

Phil Manzanera's Vozero (Expression, 1999) is a quintessential post-modern survey of the musical times.

Bryan Ferry resurfaced with Olympia (2010), a model of discreet elegance in an age in which "elegance" mainly meant "overproduction", The Jazz Age (2012), an instrumental jazz album, and Avonmore (BMG, 2014).