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The Times OCTOBER 8, 2022 - by Will Hodgkinson

"IT WAS A ZEITGEIST THING" - GLAMOUR, GIRLS AND THE RISE OF ROXY MUSIC

As they prepare for their fiftieth anniversary tour of the UK, the band discuss returning to the stage

Has there ever been another band like Roxy Music? Driven by their frontman Bryan Ferry's impossible quest for perfection and taking a self-conscious approach that gave fashion designers and hair stylists precedence over producers on album credits, Roxy Music were a triumph of style as substance.

Then there was the music. Andy Mackay was the first - and may well be the last - oboe player in rock. For the first two albums Brian Eno played "tapes". The guitarist Phil Manzanera brought a Latin influence from his childhood in Cuba and Venezuela, and the drummer Paul Thompson gave a solid sense of workmanship to the whole thing. It shouldn't have worked but it did - and still does. On the fiftiethth anniversary of their debut, Roxy Music have just completed their first arena tour of America.

"What kind of a band is Roxy? Is it even a band?" Manzanera asks. "We grew up with The Beatles and The Stones, the band of brothers, but then The Beatles split and the dream was over. So we were more a collective, and there was never a career plan. In fact, it was a disaster. Whenever we should have been together - such as following the success of Avalon - we went off and did something else."

Manzanera is in a nondescript hotel room on the morning after Roxy Music performed a rapturously received show at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles. They received a very different response on first coming to California in 1972, when they were bottled off by a denim-clad crowd amid accusations of being "limey faggots".

Since then, Roxy have become US favourites. Bill Murray's character doing karaoke to More Than This in Lost In Translation and Love Is The Drug featuring in Martin Scorsese's Casino helped to imprint their songs on to the American consciousness, while in the UK Roxy Music have always been the art student's band of choice. And although they are the sum of their disparate parts, you cannot help but sense the exacting vision of Ferry in everything they do.

"It's not for me to say," Ferry says from his hotel room on the morning after the LA show when I ask what he considers to be Roxy's legacy. He will, however, expand on what they mean to him today. "Roxy represents the first ten years of my life in music. It was a really important time and the songs still resonate with me, even though they were written in what you might call the bloom of youth. Andy, Phil and Paul are characters with distinct musical personalities and when we play together it feels like something special."

Ferry was teaching English and pottery at Holland Park School in west London when he conceived of Roxy Music in 1970. Two years previously, he had completed a fine art degree in Newcastle, where he had fallen under the influence of the pop artist Richard Hamilton and his idea of collaging diverse aspects of twentieth-century culture to create something new.

When Ferry left his teaching job after spending too much time holding listening parties for American soul and jazz records at his flat on Kensington High Street, he came up with the idea of forming a band that would sit on the line between art and performance, indulging his love of American glamour along the way.

"Richard Hamilton was a cool and charismatic figure, and a big influence on me and my fellow students at art school," Ferry says. "I shared his enthusiasm for American pop culture, and like him I was interested in the idea of collage. I saw poetry in the glamorous images of America, from magazines and film and music." In Every Dream Home A Heartache, Ferry's dark, impassioned, faintly ridiculous tale of a man who falls in love with a blow-up doll, was a product of this. "It deals with how the material things we sometimes strive for in life don't always bring happiness. Tragic but true."

Tragic indeed for a man who escaped a working-class background in Tyne and Wear to pose in a white dinner jacket, swimming pool in the background, on the cover of his 1974 solo album Another Time, Another Place. But Ferry was too complex a figure to simply revel in success in the way, say, Duran Duran did a decade later. You can hear his torments on Mother Of Pearl, from Roxy Music's 1973 album Stranded, which dissolves from a party rocker into a lamenting ballad and features the observation "If you're looking for love in a looking glass world, it's pretty hard to find." For Ferry, whose girlfriends have included the models Amanda Lear, Marilyn Cole and Jerry Hall, Mother Of Pearl was his moment of truth.

"I had already written In Every Dream Home A Heartache on the previous album, For Your Pleasure, and this form of monologue was an area I could explore further," Ferry says of Mother Of Pearl's reflection on the limits of glamour. "It was a song in two parts, the first uptempo and the second half slow and introspective, and I felt these were two parts of myself that I wanted to exist in the same song. I think everything I'd seen in my life up to that point was an inspiration for it. Sadly, I don't perform it much these days because it is like a whole show in one song. It's one of the best things we did."

Ferry's road-to-Damascus moment, which took him away from his intended career as a painter, came in 1967 when he hitchhiked from Newcastle to London to see the Stax Road Show featuring Otis Redding. "It was amazing to see that great music presented in such a strong visual way and the audience was ecstatic. That's when I began to think this was something I'd like to do." Combined with a fascination for Humphrey Bogart, James Dean and Marlon Brando - "the cool people who affected me when I was growing up" - he resolved to put together a band in which all of his obsessions could bear fruit.

"It was a zeitgeist thing," says Mackay, who like Ferry was working as a teacher at Holland Park at the time. "In 1970/71 the '60s were clearly over and there was a lot of fairly rubbish pop around. I had been trying to get into a band, as had Bryan, but neither of us had rock'n'roll backgrounds. So I put an ad in the NME for a rock'n'roll oboist and got very little back, funnily enough. The Englishness of Roxy is a product of total American aspiration and that came from Bryan. The first time I went to his flat I saw this remarkable record collection of soul, jazz, blues, musicals from the war years... all American."

Things started moving when Mackay bought an early synthesizer called an EMS VCS3, which he used to pursue his interest in the electronic music of avant-garde pioneers such as Cornelius Cardew and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Once he hooked up with Ferry and stuck to oboe and saxophone, however, someone else was needed to play the synthesizer. That's when he thought of an odd, prematurely balding friend from his college days called Brian Eno.

"We hadn't seen each other for a couple of years and then we bumped into each other on the Circle line," Mackay says. "Eno was a unique character and I realised he was the man to come and work this machine. It's funny, Bryan and I are both quite shy, but something irresistibly drew us towards being in a rock band. We had the arrogance of youth - and the fear of youth going. I was twenty-five."

"It sometimes seems strange to me, being on stage. I'm rather reclusive by nature," Ferry says when Mackay's point is put to him. "I started off performing to one side, sitting at the piano, and the whole thing didn't come naturally. I must say, the studio has always been my preferred workplace. I enjoy the thrill of making new work." Famously so, to the extent that Ferry's legendary perfectionism has been known to drive other band members to the brink of insanity.

"Bryan tinkers all the time because he wants his work to be beautiful, perfect," Manzanera says. "I'm much more intuitive and rough around the edges - bish bash bosh and get on with something else. He's like a fine artist and I can accept that now. Avalon is very much a Bryan album. You can see why we didn't work together for ages after that."

Roxy Music emerged from what Eno (who won't be on the tour) has since called a "scenius", a collection of like-minded people spurring each other on to do great things, and Ferry wasn't alone in his postmodern take on American glamour. The cover of Roxy Music's 1972 masterpiece For Your Pleasure features Amanda Lear, a French woman whose birth sex has long been a matter of debate, contorted into a skin-tight black rubber skirt, teetering on sadistically high heels as she strains to keep her pet panther on a leash. Lear's outfit was designed by Roxy's stylist in chief, Antony Price, while inside the gatefold sleeve Eno wears a feather-clad ensemble by Carol McNicoll, Manzanera and Ferry are in black toreador shirts by Wendy Dagworthy, and Mackay has a white boiler suit by Jim O'Connor and Pamla Motown. All were young designers, mostly from the Royal College of Art, who appeared to be waging a stylistic war against hippies in denim.

"David Bowie was part of our community and he would talk about high glam and low glam - and we were definitely high glam," Manzanera says. "All these people were friends of Bryan, Andy and Eno and they were very impressive to me. I was pretty primitive, really, and when I turned up to the photoshoot in some pathetic outfit Antony Price would say, 'No, no, no, put this on instead.' He glued diamanté to bug-eyed sunglasses and there it was, my signature look. It was all very W Heath Robinson, but we set out to do what we are still doing today: make interesting music and present it in a visually arresting way."

In the early days, to be a fan of Roxy Music was to be in an elite society. "In the mainstream we were getting rejected everywhere, but in each town in England we attracted four or five people who saw themselves as a bit different," Mackay says. "Maybe they were gay, maybe they just liked glamour and were bored with their surroundings, but the girls had laced gloves and little hats, the boys wore eyeliner, and it was like a secret none of us knew about. We would be supporting some rock band in denim and there would be two audiences: one booing us, the other booing them."

The music became increasingly serious as the years passed. Roxy left the high jinks of the early favourites Do The Strand and Editions Of You for the melancholic beauty of More Than This and Avalon, although according to Mackay, Ferry's obsessions have never changed. "Re-Make/Re-Model is the first song on the first album and the first song we play in concert, and it is about a girl Bryan saw in a car. He made a note of the number plate and never saw her again. Bryan's quest for love, the brief glimpses across the room, has always been a theme of his writing and his sensibility. I guess that's what makes Roxy aesthetes: the idea that perfection is out there, somewhere, but you can never realise it in ordinary life."

"As I've said before, the intention with each album was to try and make it a bit different from where we'd been before," Ferry says, sounding as though he might be rather tired of defending Roxy's shift towards commercial acceptability. "I guess the last album was bound to have a different mood because we were ten years older. The same emotional impulses were there from the first album to the last one, but the forms they embraced were different."

All these years later, Roxy Music's vision has aged like the vintage wines you imagine Ferry has stored away in some dusty corner of his country pile. Even the notorious album covers, once decried as sexist, now seem like encapsulations of powerful women, Lear on For Your Pleasure being a case in point. "Extremely glamorous, with a razor wit and a wicked sense of humour," Ferry says of Lear. "She was a close friend of Salvador Dalí and I met him with her a couple of times in Paris. She certainly brought a lot to the party."

As to the future of this most futuristic of bands, it is up in the air. "The way I see it, you start doing stuff, after five years you get fed up with each other, you go and work with someone else, then someone randomly makes a phone call and the whole thing starts up again," Manzanera says shortly before leaving America to bring the Roxy party to the UK.

"It has been ten years since the last tour and twenty since we last played the States, so at the end of each concert I say goodbye to the crowd because it might be the last time. All I'm sure about is that we are still alive. Beyond that, with Roxy Music... anything is possible."

Roxy Music's 50th anniversary UK tour, with dates in London and Manchester, begins in Glasgow on October 10.