Kulikowski Roxy Music

Every Album Every Song
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78952-198-6
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 128 Seiten

In ten short years, Roxy Music made two of the most experimental albums in popular music history and one of the most smoothly romantic. Conceived by Bryan Ferry at the turn of the 1970s, the band released its first album, , to wide acclaim in 1972 and swiftly followed up with the ground-breaking single 'Virginia Plain'. Ferry, Andy Mackay, and Phil Manzanera remained Roxy's core players over seven more albums in three distinct phases.

   The debut and (1973) featured all manner of electronic weirdness from Brian Eno, while (1973), (1974), and (1975) marked the peak of Ferry's songwriting and struck a delicate balance between edgy art and gorgeous craft. Finally, (1979), (1980), and (1982), the last two without powerhouse founding drummer Paul Thompson, framed Ferry's tales of doomed romance within a sophisticated wash of sound that used the studio itself as an instrument.

   The members of Roxy Music have had long and distinguished careers outside the band, but nothing can surpass the eight albums they made together. This book tells the musical story of this most enigmatic of British bands.

Michael Kulikowski's day job is teaching about ancient Rome as the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History and Classics at Penn State University, USA. He is the author of academic books and articles, as well as (2016) and (2019), which are written for the general reader and narrate the history of ancient Rome from its height around AD 100 to the end of the western empire in the fifth century. He writes regularly for the and has been listening obsessively to Roxy Music for forty years.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kulikowski, Michael

Leseproben

Chapter 3

For Your Pleasure (1973)

Personnel:

Bryan Ferry: voice, keyboards

Andrew Mackay: oboe, saxophone

Eno: synthesizer, tapes

Paul Thompson: drums

Phil Manzanera: guitars

John Porter (Guest artiste): bass

Produced by Chris Thomas and Roxy Music

UK and US release date: March 1973

Charts: UK: 3, USA: 186

Running time: 42:24

In today’s music business, if an established artist releases an album every second year, they are regarded as unusually prolific, so one can easily forget the kind of productivity demanded of bands in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The number of Roxy-adjacent releases that appeared in 1973 is really quite staggering, even for a group of hungry young men on the make. In addition to the ‘Pyjamarama’ single, there was For Your Pleasure (March), Stranded (November) and its attendant ‘Street Life’ single, Mackay’s deranged sax contribution to Mott the Hoople’s Mott ( July), Eno’s Here Come The Warm Jets (recorded in September, though released the following February), featuring all of Roxy except for Ferry, and Ferry’s These Foolish Things (October) with the whole band except for Mackay and the by-then-departed Eno. Even more surprisingly, every one of these releases was first-rate.

But For Your Pleasure remains Roxy’s great leap forward. The inspired amateurism of Roxy Music was still present and correct, but the vision was more precisely articulated, and crucially, the band’s skill sets had improved to where they could actually achieve what they intended, rather than just approximate the sounds they heard in their heads. While Thompson’s drumming had started out fully formed, the other core musicians had now moved ahead in leaps and bounds. Manzanera’s technique is much improved without losing any unpredictability. You can hear Mackay’s new mastery of breath control on the sax (he only squawks when he means to), and Ferry’s piano playing is less haphazard. All of this gives Eno far more to work with so that he becomes the guiding chaos agent rather than one lunatic among many. Yet the really astonishing development is Ferry’s voice. Though he’s still nothing like a conventional singer, all the vocal gaucherie is gone, along with the last trace of Geordie vowels. He’s yet to perfect the very bottom of his eventual range, but he can now maintain the crooner tone all the way through a song. His falsetto, too, no longer runs ahead of his ability to catch his breath, and he’s just starting to use his vibrato as a deliberate mannerism and not a trick for staying in key. It’s hard to believe that Roxy had come so far in less than a year, with nothing but a little bit of experience and practice.

And then there’s the artwork. Kari-Ann Moller, on the front of Roxy Music, did more than anything to demonstrate the breadth of the band’s ambitions, but it succeeded because Nick de Ville and Antony Price had the skills to realize Ferry’s concept and also because – in 1972 – Ferry still understood art better than music. By the time of For Your Pleasure, his musical proficiency was starting to equal his visual proficiency, and the still more elaborate cover concept was carefully goosed to the exact boundary of the ridiculous with the sublime. It’s a gatefold. It’s wrapped in sumptuous glossy laminate at Ferry’s insistence: that kind of expense took foot-stamping on the artist’s part. There’s model Amanda Lear in full dominatrix pomp, parading a leashed black panther in front of a cityscape as rain-soaked and gleaming as a Ridley Scott movie. Awaiting the supermodel is a limousine and a cheeky chappie chauffeur straight from central casting. But wait, it’s not just any cheeky chappie – it’s Bryan!! And wouldn’t you know it, by the time the album arrived, Bryan and his cover star were indeed stepping out together: the first of many such liaisons between the artiste and his sleeve muses.

Inside the gatefold, the image-making continued – a series of portraits of the band members (but not ‘guest artiste’ John Porter) holding guitars in full- length action poses against a stark white background. Karl Stoecker’s photos are heavily treated, so they look more like painted illustrations. From left to right there’s Eno, standing on one foot as if walking out of the picture, peacock feathers sprouting from his jacket’s enormous shoulder pads, blue eye shadow and tweezed eyebrows drawing attention to the white expanse of his balding head; Manzanera, bearded, long hair flowing, eyes closed, mouth half open, deep in the reverie of a solo; Ferry, absurd navy bolero jacket with a splash of violet, navy flares over golden moon boots, channelling Elvis’ hip shake while looking down at his guitar; Mackay in profile, white silk jacket, silver cooking-foil codpiece and lavender brothel creepers, his classic quiff streaked with shiny highlights, pretending to play some sort of archaic six-string lute. Finally, there’s Thompson, three-quarter profile, but looking backwards into the white ground, blue jumpsuit with yellow-piping, black suede thigh-high boots on stacked heels. Each figure is named in an elegant sans-serif font printed vertically at the bottom right of the portrait. It’s such an arresting visual that Roxy’s most convincing 21st-century heirs, the Scissor Sisters, paid explicit homage to it on the sleeve of their first album.

Expectations were high and, commercially, For Your Pleasure exceeded them. It sold 50,000 copies in the UK in its first week, hitting number four in the charts, spending six weeks in the top ten and six months in the top 100. Reviews were universally glowing. Even the habitually peevish Charles Shaar Murray called it a ‘staggeringly fine piece of work’.

Having failed to conquer America, the band set out on a European tour, which they purportedly enjoyed. Certainly, their continental fan base was and remains broader and deeper than the American one. But unbeknownst to their growing audience, trouble was brewing in the Roxy ranks. Eno’s comfort with the press led many European journalists to describe Roxy as his band, which rankled with Ferry, and their onstage competition was bad for everyone. The European tour ended in late May, and their next commitment was the York Festival on 8 July. With rumours of Bryan-vs-Brian friction now circulating in the press, Eno abandoned the stage at York, hoping that would quieten his highly partisan fans and stop them from drowning out Ferry’s vocal on ‘Beauty Queen’. The gesture failed, neither rescuing the performance nor mollifying Ferry, who informed E.G. that he would no longer work with Eno before jetting off to Greece in a huff. Not for the last time, Ferry’s passive aggression had the desired result and spared him any need for actual confrontation. Eno was out, and the future of Roxy seemed terribly uncertain. But Ferry had a more pliant Eno substitute in mind, while Thompson, Mackay and Manzanera reconciled themselves to a new model Roxy while continuing to collaborate with their ousted friend on other projects. Fifty years on, For Your Pleasure reliably ends up in best-album lists. Many – including Ferry himself – now regard it as Roxy’s peak, although Stranded – released mere months after Eno had left the band – has an equal claim to that title.

‘Do The Strand’ (Ferry)

The pinnacle of Roxy Mk I, this would’ve gone to number one if only they’d released it as a UK single. The high-octane arrangement doesn’t waste a note on gratuitous experiments, because ‘Do The Strand’ is all about the words. ‘There’s a new sensation’, proclaims Ferry and then Mackay’s sax blares. ‘A fabulous creation’. This danceable solution to teenage revolution is nothing and everything: a fake dance craze that you can – that you, in fact, must – do everywhere. On moonbeams or rainbows (perhaps in a moonage daydream?), at Quaglino’s in St. James’s, or Mabel’s in Scunthorpe – God help you either way. And if you’re beginning to get bored with the beguine, then Toulouse- Lautrec up the Strandsky with La Goulue and Lolita in tow. The listener is bewitched by the intelligence of it all, the sense that deeper meaning lurks behind the absurdism. That the music is so compulsive only increases the fascination of the song, while the bridge – an entirely new musical figure carried by the piano, bass and drums, but melodically dominated by Mackay’s treated saxophone – isn’t so much a pause for breath as a pause for thought. And then they’re off again, having had their fill of quadrilles.

There’s an essay by Dr. Simon Puxley – easily found on the internet – that demystifies the lyrics of ‘Do The Strand’ with the same po-faced attention to detail he had brought to his mumbo jumbo on the Roxy Music gatefold. Don’t go find it. Instead, try to work out all the references yourself because this is the young Ferry at his most surreal and clever, proving that, whenever he felt like it, he could polish the nonsense lyrics of ‘Virginia Plain’ and ‘Pyjamarama’ into something worth decoding. Just don’t try to make sense of the greatest ever couplet in rock history: ‘Rhododendron is a nice flower/Evergreen, it lasts...