Roxy Music’s Avant-Garde Origin Story

National Review Online, January 1 2023

The stylus descends on the first LP by a new band. “You’ve never heard anything like this,” says a friend one day in 1972 — half a century ago, good Lord.

Track one, side one: Glasses clink, conversation, a cocktail party. A piano starts up: insistent, repetitive, fast. Drums pound, guitars surge, a singer begins, his voice distinctive, mannered.

A chorus joins in, an enigmatic, vaguely retro chant — “CPL593H.” Later, the command, “Show me.” A sax wails and shrieks, the volume heads towards eleven, and the pace accelerates. Something electronic is going on in the background, and the singer returns to his earlier lament:

I tried but I could not find a way
Looking back, all I did was look away
Next time is the best time, we all know
But if there is no next time, where to go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go?

The song races on in exhilarating, not-quite-controlled chaos, its mad rush turning herky-jerky as each instrumentalist plays a short solo (the saxophonist takes the opportunity to hop on the Ride of the Valkyries). A more orderly disorder is restored, the tempo eases, the music mimics an engine slowing down. Finally, an electronic squelch. Done.

Roxy Music was the band (and the name of the album), “Re-Make/Re-Model” the song. Different? Yup.

CPL593H? A sequence taken from the license plate of a car containing a woman who had previously caught the eye of the band’s lead singer, lyricist, and composer, one Bryan Ferry. The two never met.

Based on intuition, a few numbers, and my unscientific scrap of a survey, Americans are largely unaware of or uncaring about Roxy’s avant-garde origins. They tend to see the band through a later perspective, as purveyors of the smooth, the suave, and the louche: exemplars of disco-era sophistication and creators of part of the soundtrack of the Reagan years. Recordings by Ferry, by then the band’s avatar (Roxy went on a lengthy hiatus after 1983), appear — of course they do — in four episodes of Miami Vice. With his working-class past a distant memory, Ferry adopted the persona of a worldly, elegantly dressed man too cool to be confined to the here and now. A king of cover versions, some of songs stretching back to the 1930s, he could be imagined performing at the Overlook in happier days, or at Rick’s as no gambling went on. He sang at the Moka Efti in Babylon Berlin, Netflix’s Weimar noir. Of course he did.

This was not the Ferry shown on the inner side of the gatefold housing on that immodestly eponymous debut. Long hair greased and ending in a ski-jump quiff, he’s wearing a shiny tiger-stripe jacket, fusing glam rock and vintage rock ’n’ roll. Andy Mackay (oboe, sax) and Phil Manzanera (guitar) resembled rockers fresh from a gig at the Mos Eisley Cantina. Drummer Paul Thompson looked like he belonged in an early-’70s band, which, come to think of it, he did. Graham Simpson, the first of many Roxy bassists, just looked uncomfortable. The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau mocked this “fop finery,” singling out electronics maniac/maestro Brian Eno (yes, that Brian Eno, although at the time a monomial “Eno”) as a “balding, long-haired eunuch lookalike.”

Whatever. By many accounts, the ladies weren’t put off. And, despite its elements of rock ’n’ roll cosplay, the fop finery helped signal that Roxy was no mere revival act. A similar message was delivered by the depiction of the woman on the album’s front cover. Teeth bared, legs bare, and clad in blue and pink, she simultaneously channeled and subverted the pin-ups of earlier decades.

If much of this conveyed what the band was not, ridiculous but oddly informative sleeve notes written by Simon Puxley, an academic and an old friend of Ferry’s, were an attempt to explain what Roxy was about — and, critically, offer a preview of what was lurking in the vinyl:

Rock n’ roll juggernauted into demonic electronic supersonic mo-mo-momentum . . . Wailing old-time sax, velvet/viscous or ensemble jamming (& more) . . . synthesized to whirls & whorls of hardrock sound . . . mixed/fixed/sifted/lifted to driving, high-flying chunks & vortices of pure electronic wow.

Puxley’s exegesis, the model on the cover, the clothes, the camp, even Roxy’s name (both a pun and a salute to old cinemas) were all part of an artistic package of which the music was only a part. Roxy played at being glamorous at a peak denim moment — while reveling in a voracious eclecticism as they ransacked the past, fooled around with the futuristic, and made things up as they went along.

“what’s the date again?” asked Puxley, dropping capital letters as he did so. “1962? or twenty years on?”

The time traveling went further back than that. The delicate 2HB is dedicated to Humphrey Bogart but is mainly a tribute to Casablanca’s Rick Blaine. Image thus outdoes and outlasts reality, appropriate enough territory for a band exploring the boundaries between the two.

Oh, I was moved by your screen dream
Celluloid pictures of living
Your death could not kill our love for you

Roxy obsessives will note that this particular image (“The white jacket, mm, black tie wings too”) anticipates a later Ferry, or, more likely, the one already waiting under the tiger-stripe tat. “2HB,” underpinned by a haunting tune played on an electric piano, embrace the past (a sax solo borrows from As Time Goes By), as well as contemporary experimental music, and a notion of the future. By the end, Eno’s tape treatments have taken listeners a long, long way from a gin joint in a Vichy town.

Roxy Music is a postmodern (not a word that widely used in 1972) construction, a work of unabashed artifice. And where surface can be substance, there’s room for pastiche (doo-wop, old-school rock ’n’ roll), a tip of the hat to Joe Meek and, even within the course of just one track, a wild pick ’n’ mix. If There Is Something begins country-style, then moves into prog rock before reaching an emotional peak dominated by the interplay between guitar and sax, all held together by the band’s indispensable drummer. Ferry’s voice is at its most histrionic (no mean feat) even in the song’s closing section, by which time it’s clear that the frantic suitor of the song’s early stages has achieved his heart’s desire:

Shake your hair girl with your ponytail
Takes me right back (when you were young)

Chance Meeting — for me the album’s high point — is another number inspired by an old movie, in this case Brief Encounter. This exquisitely respectable British classic from 1945, a kind of Bizarro World Anna Karenina, summoned up something dark and strange within Ferry. The melody is sparse and prettily melancholic, but Ferry’s singing is chilly and detached, with every syllable enunciated. Gradually, the melody is overwhelmed by the increasingly harsh guitar work, feedback, and Eno’s electronically manipulated noise, a combination far removed from the Rachmaninov that accompanies Brief Encounter’s terribly decent torment.

Roxy Music projected nothing if not self-confidence — there’s a gold record too on that cover — and the last line of the last track throws out a challenge:

Should make the cognoscenti think

The album has its flaws. The production could have been better, one track should never be mentioned again, and I have yet to warm to the abrupt change of mood in the middle of another. But the cognoscenti, at least in Britain, were impressed. In an age when rock was taken seriously, very seriously, by those paying attention, one of its highest priests, DJ John Peel (his late-night radio show was indispensable listening at the time, I can tell you), had already taken up Roxy’s cause, even if another, TV’s “whispering” Bob Harris, saw them as a triumph of “style over substance.”

Writers in the U.K.’s then-all-important music press gave their blessing. Reviewing Roxy Music, Melody Maker’s Richard Williams, who had been quick to spot the band’s potential, wrote that Roxy “can bring pictures to your head like no-one else and they’ve only just begun.” To New Musical Express’s Tony Tyler it was the best first album that he could “EVER” remember, quite a claim given that the Velvet Underground had released theirs only five years before.

Roxy Music reached No. 10 in the British charts, pretty good for a sometimes-puzzling art-rock confection. A hit single, Virginia Plain — a brief, brilliant three-minute synthesis of Roxy’s dreamworld — followed and so, more prosaically, did a tough touring schedule across England (Croydon! Leicester! Plymouth!), and then on to the U.S., where audiences were, well, not yet ready. Early the following year came another hit single, and then their sophomore album, For Your Pleasure, the band’s masterpiece. Months after that, Eno quit — he was pushed out — and, for all Roxy’s later success, they were never quite so unpredictable, or quite so original, or quite so good, again.