The Sphinx and Mona Lisa, Lolita and Guernica ...

Tired of the tango? Fed up with fandango? Why not take a trip to future past and clean out your synapses with some of the sharpest pop music ever made? I give you Roxy Music - a love song about a blow-up doll that could have been written by J.G. Ballard ( "I blew up your body/But you blew my mind"); a new dance that promises "A danceable solution/To teenage revolution"; ten minute free jazz and Krautrock workouts; hypersmart hit singles ... this band had an almost indecent array of talents. Some fool once wrote that The Doors were the first rock band that could read and write ... so, so wrong. If The Velvet Underground were the first such band, Roxy were certainly the second. I had an older brother, a Bowie obsessive, with a sideline in Roxy and Reed ... this stuff turned my head around and upside down at a young age. There's a picture of Bryan Ferry in his late teens, white suit and quiff ... this is the mid 60s; his heroes were Otis Redding and Marcel Duchamp (subsequent song and album titles would reference Duchamp and Richard Hamilton, among others). While Bowie was still a bepermed hippy troubadour, all flared denim and acne, Ferry was immaculate ... indeed Roxy were formulating their unique sound while Bowie was still bothering with sad folk and Tin Pan Alley ... it's too damn easy to take Roxy for granted these days ... they were, at the time, the best thing I'd ever seen or heard. Ferry, the ringmaster and song writer; Phil Manzanera and Andy Mackay, guitars and saxophones,experimental music buffs; Eno, the conceptualist and technician.
When I was young, being the sax player with Roxy Music seemed the best job in the world ... you got to sport a green quiff and were paid to wear fabulous clothes and duckwalk on stage, you got to hang out with Bowie and Mott The Hoople and beautiful women ... your life was unimaginably glamourous, witty and amusing.
Noel Coward and Terry Riley jamming with The Velvet Underground; music as hard as anything being produced by the heavy rockers; 20s and 30s crooning, doo wop and 50s rock'n'roll, prog and art rock; avant classical and glam pop; literate, arch, multi-layered lyrics and complex arrangements ... often all within the space of a single song.
Roxy Music had everything I look for in pop - they had wit, intelligence, humour, irony, cynicism, glamour, danger, sex; they were pop and avant garde simultaneously; they were retro and futuristic, they were science fiction; they were cruel, they were heartless in the best sense.
No one before or since looked or sounded like Roxy - a singer in tiger print or tuxedo, sporting a louche quiff; a balding ostrich-feathered androgyne teasing an unearthly range of sounds from his synths and tapes; a 23rd century Teddy Boy playing sax like King Curtis, oh and that very unrock'n'roll instrument, the oboe; a guitarist in insect shades playing experimental, psychedelic, prepunk riffs and white noise. They were beloved of both glamkids and grown ups. They had, I repeat, everything.
They stood out from the dandruff and denim morass of early seventies rock music like a diamond in a mud bath. Roxy were disliked, they weren't trusted ... there was a sneaking suspicion that they hadn't paid their dues, as if that counted for anything. Roxy's first public performances were at art gallery soirees, they had a management and record company prepared to sink a fortune into fine-tuning the band before they ever appeared live. Instead of spending years in a transit van playing the less salubrious venues of the gig scene, Ferry decided to start at the top - this alone made them a target for the puritans and fundamentalists of the music industry. Spurious notions of authenticity were to be disregarded, Roxy valued distance - even the love songs contained a shard of ice in the heart.
(And yet, and yet ... take '2 H.B.', a lovely punning play on words, a paean to romance and Humphrey Bogart - the way that "fade away never" drifts off, the poignancy of the keyboards ... it can bring tears to the eyes ... I tried to describe it to my wife recently and had to stop, a lump in my throat. Actually, I was nine years old the year the debut album was released (16th June, Bloomsday, 1972 ... a pleasingly Joycean congruence) and that song and the rest of the lyrics struck me as wonderfully clever ... I have experienced three decades since then of heavy literary and academic reading and art appreciation ... I've read Finnegans Wake five times, and do you know what? That song still strikes me as pretty damn clever).


Of course, something so precious was fated not to last ... tensions between Ferry and Eno couldn't be contained; as Ferry suggested at the time, two non-musicians in the band was one too many.
Rumours that Eno left to take up the role of Riff-Raff in a second-rate production of 'The Rocky Horror Show' touring the provinces are cruel and unfounded.
Ferry subsequently began to inhabit his lounge lizard persona a little too diligently; the tuxedo had become a straitjacket - what was once presented with wit and distance began to seem increasingly humourless and restrictive.
The Roxy purist will consider only the first five albums , the pre-split ones, as truly part of the cannon; indeed, the purist's purist will accept only the first two as the genuine article ... post-Eno, the band began to lose something of that experimental edge that had made them so significant in the first place. Let me be clear, there are some very great moments on the next three ... some of the best music of the seventies can be found there. And, indeed, there are some fine songs on the albums made after the 1979 reunion. But what might they have done had Eno remained with the band? It's one of the great pop imponderables, second only to what could the Velvet Underground have accomplished had Cale remained ... well, one can but dream ... just imagine the third Roxy album with Eno still on board ... it would have been stupendous, thrilling, so, so glamourous.