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Uncut JUNE 2022 - by Bryan Ferry
ALBUM BY ALBUM: ROXY MUSIC
As Roxy reunite to mark their fiftieth anniversary, Bryan Ferry looks back at the group's eight fabulous creations
Fifty years ago this month, Roxy Music emerged from an old movie theatre on London's Piccadilly clutching the master tapes for what would turn out to be an epochal debut. Though conceived by band-leader Bryan Ferry as an "exploration of many styles" created by six wildly diverse musical personalities, the glamour-starved audience instantly recognised it as something fresh, urgent and seductively postmodern. "Making the Roxy Music albums was a life-changing experience for me," reflects Ferry today - and also for everyone who devoured them at the time.
Like a swan gliding across a moonlit lake, Roxy Music often gave the impression of moving with effortless grace. But what Ferry remembers most is the hard work going on beneath the surface, "working intensively with such a unique group of people. It was an amazingly productive time." Ahead of Roxy's fiftieth anniversary tour in the autumn, he recalls intense recording sessions and painstaking photoshoots, chasing something "in the air" from The Strand to The Bahamas. "I have many good memories of the camaraderie we shared, as well as the tensions that are a part of the collaboration. I'll be looking forward to celebrating all of this with our audience later in the year." - Sam Richards
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ROXY MUSIC [1972] - Re-Make! Re-Model! Roxy strike gold straight away with an enthusiastically arch rifle through pop's dressing-up box.
I started putting the band together in 1970 when I began working with Graham Simpson, who had played in my college band, The Gas Board. Later that year I met Andy Mackay and he joined us with his synthesiser and oboe, and later saxophone. At this point I was writing the songs on piano and at the same time trying to put together the band to play them. We didn't have a tape recorder, so Andy suggested his friend Brian Eno could come and record us. Eno brought his huge reel-to-reel Ferrograph machine, and ended up staying on and becoming part of the band, using Andy's VCS3 synthesiser to create sounds and treat the instruments we were playing. We hit it off, and by the time we started recording the album we had the complete band.
I liked many kinds of music, so stylistically I was keen for the songs to be wide-ranging and not follow one particular channel. I was lucky with this band in that we had so many different sounds to play with and it was a great opportunity for me to write interesting stuff. Consequently, the first album was an exploration of many styles and so diverse that it indicated many different futures the band could follow. The first Roxy album is an unusual collage of musical elements, and the songs themselves, if you break them down, are just simple experiments in different genres.
This was the first album that any of us had made. We were all hungry to learn and new to the experience of being in a recording studio. It was a dream come true to be able to do this.
EG Management signed us up to Island Records, and they brought in Pete Sinfield from King Crimson to produce us. He seemed to be ideal, very enthusiastic and cheerful. The whole process was a delight The record was made in a rather bizarre place called Command Studios on Piccadilly, an old movie theatre. How appropriate.
FOR YOUR PLEASURE [1973] - And for his next trick, Ferry poses as a languorous insider, exposing the darkness at the heart of la dolce vita.
After we toured the first record, I had quickly come up with a new batch of songs for the second album. I moved into this flat in London's Earl's Court and started writing there, and my friend Nick de Ville also lent me his cottage where I worked on songs before taking them to the band.
After we toured the first record, I had to quickly come up with a new batch of songs for the second album. I moved into this flat in London's Earl's Court and started writing there, and my friend Nick de Ville also lent me his cottage where I worked on the songs before taking them to the band. It seems we'd learned a lot on the road in the intervening months since making the first album, and now the band was much stronger and the songs were more knowing.
We went into Air Studios and recording in this great place above Oxford Circus was really a career high for me. By this point I had a better idea of what each musician could bring to the record. There was a new bass player, the guitarist John Porter, who, like Graham, had been at university with me, and he brought a certain funkiness to the record. He played an important role, as did Chris Thomas, who we met at Air Studios and who ended up producing the record. He fitted in really well and his enthusiasm brought out the best in me and all the others in the band. Highlights included the solos by Eno and Phil on Editions Of You, Andy's sax on The Bogus Man and Paul's powerful drumming throughout.
This album contains some of my best songs: Do The Strand, In Every Dream Home A Heartache and Editions Of You. There was something about the record that felt complete to me. Everyone excelled themselves and whereas the first album was us throwing ideas in different directions, this was more focused and darker in mood. It captured that time pretty well, I think. I can't quite explain what was in the air, but we were right on it. I'm very proud of that album.
STRANDED [1973] - Eno out, Eddie in - but any potential turmoil is obscured by another set of terrific, swaggering songs.
By now everything was running very fast and one album or tour would merge into the next. While we were touring, studio time was being booked for us and I was under pressure to write more songs. I didn't have much going on in my life apart from touring, my flat and my piano. While recording For Your Pleasure, I'd found this lovely old Steinway grand which has been my great friend ever since. I've written most of my life's work on it.
I remember a couple of different locations when I was writing Stranded. I went to Greece to write some of the songs, including Mother Of Pearl. I wrote the lyrics for A Song For Europe at a friend's place down in Sussex, and then Sunset in Tenerife, where I was resting after a tonsil operation. One of the album tracks was Psalm, which was in fact one of the first songs I'd written in 1971, but hadn't been finished in time for the first Roxy album.
The big change in the band of course was that Brian Eno had left and Eddie Jobson had joined. In between For Your Pleasure and Stranded, Eddie had worked on These Foolish Things (my first solo album), and his playing had really impressed me. Sadly we lost Eno's amazing talent. but we gained a prodigious all-round musician, a supremely gifted piano player and violinist. He brought a new musical dimension to the band. Looking back, it would have been so great to have had both of them on the same record.
COUNTRY LIFE [1974] - A more self-conscious Roxy sound and style is cemented.
When we did the first Roxy Music album, I didn't really know who would be listening. At some point as the albums went on, I began to realise we had an audience who were eagerly anticipating each record, listening hard, and some of them being quite critical. It was an audience who seemed to be interested in what I had to say and how I was saying it. In retrospect, it raised my sense of responsibility for the work.
For Country Life, Air Studios continued to be our second home. We had essentially the same team as we did on Stranded. John Punter, the chief engineer, produced it with us. Eddie Jobson crafted some great string arrangements, especially on The Thrill Of It All, and played a memorable solo on Out Of The Blue, which I co-wrote with Phil Manzanera. Once again we were expanding our musical range, and solidifying the repertoire. This time period is all a bit of a blur to me because we were rushing from one thing to another. All we were doing was touring and making these records, working hard, and living and breathing the music. So the recording was intense and hands-on. We all worked late nights. I think this album has some outstanding performances by the musicians, and also some of my best lyrics.
SIREN [1975] - Jerry Hall graces the cover, while a memorable bassline drives the band's biggest hit to date.
We did record once again at Air Studios. The assistant from , Steve Nye, was now engineering, and Chris Thomas returned to produce. At this point I'd moved from Earl's Court and I think I wrote most of the songs in my basement in Holland Park. Back then we would work incredibly late, until the sun came up the next day. One of the unsung stars of Siren, Country Life and Stranded was the bass player John Gustafson. He had played in one of the Liverpool bands in the 1960s and was an incredibly gifted musician who brought so much life to the songs on these albums. Mother Of Pearl, The Thrill Of It All and Love Is The Drug were all transformed by his inventive playing.
The album had a strong cover. I'd seen pictures of a girl in Vogue magazine, Jerry Hall, who I thought looked like a mermaid with long wavy hair. I showed them to the fashion designer Antony Price, who had worked on all the Roxy album covers, and he started doing these drawings of mermaids. We went down to Wales with the photographer Graham Hughes. My old friend from art school Nick de Ville went there first on a reconnaissance trip, and he said it was perfect, wild and stormy with huge waves lashing. However, the day we went, it was the hottest day in the British Isles for three hundred years or something, with eerily still water. It looked great though, very Ancient Greece. Graham put this blue filter on the shot, enhanced by Antony with blue paint. We went to great lengths to get things right. It was all done in the shot, and you'd sort of cross your fingers and hope the pictures would turn out OK when they were developed. It was all very hands-on and 'cottage industry' in those days.
MANIFESTO [1979] - Ferry reconfigures the band just in time to grab a slice of disco glamour.
I had been concentrating on my solo career for a couple of years, touring and living abroad, mainly in America. In Switzerland I made an album called The Bride Stripped Bare, a collection of new songs and cover, with what I felt was an interesting gang of great English and American session musicians. This record meant a lot to me at the time and I was disappointed by its reception. So I decided to put Roxy Music back together.
This time the band included some of the people I'd been playing with on The Bride Stripped Bare, plus Phil, Andy, and Paul. We went to a studio in the English countryside, Ridge Farm, to record most of it, and the rest was done at Basing Street Studios in London, and a session or two at Atlantic Studios in New York. We split the album into two halves, East and West. The West side had the songs with a more smooth, mainstream, American-influenced sound, and the East side was slightly more edgy and European in feel.
By this time I was living in Sussex, and I remember driving home through many misty mornings. Some nights we would stay overnight at Ridge Farm - being in a residential studio was good for night music. The track Manifesto is one of my favourites, like a call-to-arms, and featured some marvellous soulful and inventive bass playing by Alan Spenner, who together with guitarist Neil Hubbard became an important part of my sound.
Dance Away was the hit, of course, and was a track I'd tried to do a couple of years before on my solo album In Your Mind and then again on The Bride Stripped Bare, but i could never get it right. I felt it was too much of a pop song. Then I played it to my friend in New York, Earl McGrath, who said you should give it to Bob Clearmountain to mix. Bob made it a hit.
FLESH + BLOOD [1980] - The slick pop-rock sheen tilts at the mainstream, though there are intriguing covers of In The Midnight Hour and Eight Miles High.
We had started working with Rhett Davies, who had come in halfway through the Manifesto album. He had been an assistant years ago on Another Time, Another Place, my second solo record. He soon became my go-to producer, and this fruitful relationship has lasted for many years. We did this album at Basing Street Studios and also at Phil Manzanera's Gallery Studio.
It has the ballad My Only Love, which I wrote in Sussex. I remember referencing a beautiful willow tree in the sunken garden and that came into the lyric. I was writing a lot of it down there and completing the songs in the studios in London. The rhythm section on the album were Neil Hubbard, Alan Spenner, Paul Carrack and Andy Newmark, great musicians who lived and breathed American R&B. They brought a lot to the record. Our audience was becoming increasingly sophisticated, and I so much wanted to please them. I was also anxious for each Roxy Music album to sound different horn the last.
AVALON [1982] - "Now the party's over..." An exquisitely managed exit from the dukes of decadence.
Avalon represented about as far as I could take that sound. Some elements of Manifesto led to Flesh + Blood and some of Flesh + Blood led to Avalon. So those three albums are linked as a trilogy in a way, just as Stranded, Country Life, and Siren had been years before.
I wanted our records to reach people's ears in America, the place where most of my musical heroes had come from. And at the time they didn't really want to hear things like The Bogus Man. I wanted to make a record that was going to be played everywhere. It was ambitious. And Avalon was that record. We made some of it at Phil's studio, some in New York, and some in the Bahamas at Compass Point. I especially loved recording in New York, and staying at the hotels Stanhope and Carlyle on the Upper East Side, where I developed a taste for dry martinis.
Phil and Andy made some great contributions, Phil with Take A Chance With Me, and Andy with While My Heart Is Still Beating. On our last day of recording we had one more song to complete and I remember being in the Carlyle the night before, writing the lyrics to Avalon, thinking I've got to sing this tomorrow or we miss the deadline. I went into The Power Station studios the next day, Sunday. It was just me, Rhett and Bob Clearmountain, and I was singing the song. I went out to the coffee machine and heard this girl's voice coming from the studio next door. And I thought, what an amazing voice, I've got to get her to come and sing on this track. She was called Yanick Étienne, a girl from Haiti. I asked her to try some scat vocals. It sounded so great - this lovely voice floating through the outro. It was one of those lucky, magical things. Rhett and I had slaved over this record for months and this felt like the pay-off. Avalon was a sound that people wanted. Like For Your Pleasure, it was another high spot in my career.
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