FEATURE:
For Your Pleasure
Ranking Roxy Music’s Studio Albums
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FEW would have thought…
PHOTO CREDIT: Virgin Records
that Roxy Music would go back on tour! Announced recently, they are marking fifty years of their debut album. That is fifty in June. To mark that, I want to rank their incredible eight studio albums. I am not sure whether the tour will tempt them to release a ninth album! With Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno, Andy Mackay, Phil Manzanera and Paul Thompson in the original line-up (Brian Eno since left the band), they were a band with no equals! Pitchfork were among those who announced the good news:
“Roxy Music are heading out on tour for the first time in 11 years, celebrating the 50th anniversary of their debut album. The current lineup of Bryan Ferry, Andy Mackay, Phil Manzanera, and Paul Thompson will play across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom in September and October, supported on most of the North American dates by St. Vincent. (Support for shows in Boston and the United Kingdom has not yet been announced.) Check out the dates below.
Roxy Music recently announced an anniversary-themed vinyl reissue campaign for all eight of their albums.
Read Pitchfork’s Sunday Review of For Your Pleasure and the rundown of “The 200 Best Songs of the 1970s.” In 2013, Bryan Ferry spoke to Pitchfork about the soundtrack to his life for a “5-10-15-20” feature”.
To celebrate the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of Roxy Music and the fact they are touring to mark that album release, here are their eight studio albums ranked. I feel they are all fantastic, though there are some that have that extra touch of class and gold. Maybe you have your own views. See what you think about my views on which…
ROXY Music album goes where!
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8. Flesh and Blood
Release Date: 23rd May, 1980
Labels: E.G./Atco/Reprise (U.S.)
Producers: Rhett Davies and Roxy Music
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/release/1442813?ev=rb
Standout Tracks: Flesh and Blood/My Only Love/Over You
Review:
“It featured not one but three classic singles (‘Oh Yeah’, ‘Same Old Scene’, ‘Over You’), two distinctive cover versions, and was arguably one of the most influential collections of the 1980s.
It also perfectly compliments such contemporary new-wave/disco work from Blondie, Duran Duran and Japan (also sharing with those acts a reliance on the Roland CR-78 rhythm box, heard prominently in the intro of the below).
Flesh + Blood is the last Roxy studio album where Andy Mackay (sax) and Phil Manzanera (guitar) were major players if not songwriters (all tracks were written by Ferry apart from the covers, though Manzanera had a hand in ‘Over You’, ‘No Strange Delight’ and ‘Running Wild’). Both add memorable solos and nice ensemble work throughout.
It’s also a classic early-’80s bass album: reliably excellent Alan Spenner and Neil Jason joined new boy Gary Tibbs, fresh from his acting role in Hazel O’Connor’s ‘Breaking Glass’ movie and about to become one of Adam’s Ants.
The great Andy Newmark piled in on drums, having just completed work on Lennon/Ono’s Double Fantasy, alongside fellow NYC sessionman Allan Schwartzberg (who plays a blinder on ‘Same Old Scene’).
Londoner Rhett Davies was on board as co-producer, fresh from groundbreaking work with Brian Eno (both are apparent influences on the psychedelic/ambient outros to ‘My Only Love’ and ‘Eight Miles High’, and atmospheric overdubbing throughout), working with the band at his favourite Basing Street Studios (later Sarm) in London’s Notting Hill. There were also occasional sessions at Manzanera’s Gallery Studios in Chertsey, Surrey.
Burgeoning star NYC mixing engineer Bob Clearmountain took time off his work with Chic to add some hefty bottom-end and fat drums at the fabled Power Station studios. Bob Ludwig’s ‘definitive’ 1999 CD remaster is one of the loudest, bassiest re-releases of the last few decades (but not a patch on the original cassette!).
But basically Flesh + Blood is very much Ferry’s show, layering Yamaha CP-80 piano (in his trademark ‘no thirds’ style) and synths to great effect, and even adding some amusingly sleazy guitar on the title track. He also sings superbly, delivering a particularly impassioned performance on ‘Running Wild’” – Moving the River.com
Key Cut: Same Old Scene
7. Manifesto
Release Date: 16th March, 1979
Labels: E.G./Polydor/Atco
Producers: Roxy Music
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/release/223314?ev=rb
Standout Tracks: Manifesto/Trash/Angel Eyes
Review:
“Returning to action after four years of solo projects, Roxy Music redefined its sound and agenda on Manifesto. More than ever, Roxy sounds like Bryan Ferry's backing band, as the group strips away its art rock influences, edits out the instrumental interludes in favor of concise pop songs, and adds layers of stylish disco rhythms. Although the songwriting is distressingly inconsistent, there are a number of wonderful moments on the record, particularly in the sighing "Angel Eyes" and the heartbroken "Dance Away." Still, trading sonic adventure for lush, accessible disco-pop isn't entirely satisfactory, even if it is momentarily seductive” – AllMusic
Key Cut: Dance Away
6. Siren
Release Date: 24th October, 1975
Labels: Island/Atco
Producer: Chris Thomas
Standout Tracks: Sentimental Fool/Both Ends Burning/Just Another High
Review:
“Abandoning the intoxicating blend of art rock and glam-pop that distinguished Stranded and Country Life, Roxy Music concentrate on Bryan Ferry's suave, charming crooner persona for the elegantly modern Siren. As the disco-fied opener "Love Is the Drug" makes clear, Roxy embrace dance and unabashed pop on Siren, weaving them into their sleek, arty sound. It does come at the expense of their artier inclinations, which is part of what distinguished Roxy, but the end result is captivating. Lacking the consistently amazing songs of its predecessor, Siren has a thematic consistency that works in its favor, and helps elevate its best songs -- "Sentimental Fool," "Both Ends Burning," "Just Another High" -- as well as the album itself into the realm of classics” – AllMusic
Key Cut: Love Is the Drug
5. Avalon
Release Date: 28th May, 1982
Labels: E.G. Records/Polydor
Producers: Rhett Davies/Roxy Music
Standout Tracks: Avalon/While My Heart Is Still Beating/Take a Chance on Me
Review:
“Flesh + Blood suggested that Roxy Music were at the end of the line, but they regrouped and recorded the lovely Avalon, one of their finest albums. Certainly, the lush, elegant soundscapes of Avalon are far removed from the edgy avant-pop of their early records, yet it represents another landmark in their career. With its stylish, romantic washes of synthesizers and Bryan Ferry's elegant, seductive croon, Avalon simultaneously functioned as sophisticated make-out music for yuppies and as the maturation of synth pop. Ferry was never this romantic or seductive, either with Roxy or as a solo artist, and Avalon shimmers with elegance in both its music and its lyrics. "More Than This," "Take a Chance with Me," "While My Heart Is Still Beating," and the title track are immaculately crafted and subtle songs, where the shifting synthesizers and murmured vocals gradually reveal the melodies. It's a rich, textured album and a graceful way to end the band's career” – AllMusic
Key Cut: More Than This
4. Stranded
Release Date: 1st November, 1973
Labels: Island/Atco
Producer: Chris Thomas
Pre-Order: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/roxy-music/stranded-half-speed-remaster
Standout Tracks: Amazona/Psalm/A Song for Europe
Review:
“Two British bands are genuinely stretching the dimensions of pop music. One, 10 c.c., has already found a degree of popularity in the States. Roxy Music has been unable to cross the Atlantic so far, but that should change with this album. Stranded is one of the most exciting and entertaining British LPs of the Seventies.
Roxy has constructed the modern English equivalent of the wall-of-sound. One instrument, either the guitar or a keyboard, will sustain or repeat a note, and the other instruments will build on top of it. Added to the thick mix is the unique voice of Bryan Ferry, who sounds alternately tormented (“Psalm”), frantic (“Street Life”), or about to sink his teeth into your neck (“Mother Of Pearl”). He delivers his consistently clever lyrics in the most disquieting baritone in pop. Everywhere there is menace.
Andy Mackay, whose searing sax made Mott the Hoople’s “All the Way from Memphis” an American favorite, has written the tune for “A Song for Europe” — the most impressive track on the album. It’s an awesome example of self-disciplined hard rock. Instead of flailing frantically away, the musicians, including Ferry on piano, limit themselves to maintaining musical tension. Here is emotion without lack of control. Ferry’s tortured recitation is supported by an eerie, pained musical backing. Mackay’s sax is mournful, Phil Manzanera’s guitar lines are expressive, and the drumming of Paul Thompson is dramatic.
Like “Street Life,” “Psalm” fades in, with an organ swelling slightly to introduce Ferry’s half-intoned, half-sung ode to the Divine. As the group slowly joins in and increases volume, there’s a bolero effect, and toward the end of the extended piece a Welsh male choir enters. Soon, the group sounds frenzied, yet not irreligiously so. Ferry is a possessed man offering a prayer, and this exceptional “Psalm” sounds like a wily demon’s prostration before God.
“Street Life,” a highly enjoyable entry (and British hit single), opens with what sounds like a UFO coming in for a landing and ends with fading finger-snapping. Ferry spits out his literate lyrics to chaotic uptempo support. The reference to “pointless passing through Harvard or Yale” as “only window shopping … strictly no sale” may draw a few Ivy League smiles.
Only on “Amazona” does Ferry’s cleverness get the better of him — a couple of puns provoke groans. But the intriguing instrumental track, with its several shifts of mood, dynamics and tempo, helps save it.
Roxy Music can no longer be ignored by Americans. They may not achieve the commercial success they have in Britain, where Stranded reached Number One, but their artistic performance must be recognized. Stranded is an eloquent statement that there are still frontiers which American pop has not explored” – Rolling Stone
Key Cut: Street Life
3. Roxy Music
Release Date: 16th June, 1972
Labels: Island/Reprise
Producer: Peter Sinfield
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/roxy-music/roxy-music-half-speed-remaster
Standout Tracks: Re-Make / Re-Model/2HB/Bitters End
Review:
“Falling halfway between musical primitivism and art rock ambition, Roxy Music's eponymous debut remains a startling redefinition of rock's boundaries. Simultaneously embracing kitschy glamour and avant-pop, Roxy Music shimmers with seductive style and pulsates with disturbing synthetic textures. Although no musician demonstrates much technical skill at this point, they are driven by boundless imagination -- Brian Eno's synthesized "treatments" exploit electronic instruments as electronics, instead of trying to shoehorn them into conventional acoustic patterns. Similarly, Bryan Ferry finds that his vampiric croon is at its most effective when it twists conventional melodies, Phil Manzanera's guitar is terse and unpredictable, while Andy Mackay's saxophone subverts rock & roll clichés by alternating R&B honking with atonal flourishes. But what makes Roxy Music such a confident, astonishing debut is how these primitive avant-garde tendencies are married to full-fledged songs, whether it's the free-form, structure-bending "Re-Make/Re-Model" or the sleek glam of "Virginia Plain," the debut single added to later editions of the album. That was the trick that elevated Roxy Music from an art school project to the most adventurous rock band of the early '70s” – AllMusic
Key Cut: Ladytron
2. Country Life
Release Date: 15th November, 1974
Labels: Island/aTCO
Producers: John Punte/Roxy Music
Pre-Order: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/roxy-music/country-life-half-speed-remaster
Standout Tracks: The Thrill of It All/Out of the Blue/Casanova
Review:
“If there's a note-perfect song on a note-perfect album, though, it might have to be 'All I Want Is You', three songs into the whole thing and so perfect it's no surprise Country Life almost feels front-loaded. Manzanera's introduction is a fanfare for six-string and feedback; and from there it's another quick stomper, fast and fun without being ponderous or simply skipping by, Ferry splitting the difference between main verses and breaks and making both equally memorable and immediate. There is a full instrumental section that lets everyone show off collectively, while still wrapping it up in three minutes. And all the while Ferry deliciously - there's no other word for it, he sounds like he's savouring every last syllable as he delivers it - seems to just throw out lines like, "If you ever change your mind/ I've a certain cure/ An old refrain, it lingers on/ L'amour, toujours l'amour" and "Don't want to know/ About one-night-stands/ Cut-price souvenirs/ All I want is/ The real thing/ And a night that lasts/ For years." Take it at face value, read it all as a ploy, or both, it all works, and when he bows out with "Ooo-oo, I'm all cracked up over you!" there could be no finer flourish; his heart, or something close to it, worn on his sleeve.
And speaking of sleeves, I can't not mention the actual cover art itself. Appropriate given that the album specifically referencing a British magazine of the same name, all veddy English and proper about rural life, another bit of aspiration that Ferry and company proceeded to pulverize and celebrate all at once. The result: the male gaze and then some, one year before Laura Mulvey coined the term. Not that Roxy hadn't already been associated with this kind of idea given their three previous covers, of course, but when you have two women on the front, one woman using her hands in place of a bra, looking directly out at the viewer, another with a bra that leaves little to the imagination but while holding a hand in front of her panties just so, also giving you a direct look back as she holds her other arm to her forehead, it's a little hard to miss. Ferry met Constanze Karoli and Eveline Grunwald on a Portuguese trip, persuaded them to do the cover, British Vogue photographer Eric Boman did the shot and the rest was fairly notorious history, ranging from alternate cover shots of just the background trees following refusals to stock the album to innumerable parodies and references from other bands and publications in later years and more from there.
Saying everyone involved knew exactly what they were doing might be too much for anyone to claim - but then again, the shot used did have them both looking right out at any viewer, and their look was not so much inviting as challenging, even cold. One other detail too: Karoli and Grunwald are both specifically credited on the album's inner sleeve with helping Ferry on translating the German verses for 'Bitter-Sweet'. That Ferry's son became famous - or infamous - in later years with the kind of talk about fox hunting that might as well have come from the actual Country Life magazine being referenced seems perfect irony, but that's the danger of aspiration and subversion in the end, when everything becomes heritage history, even when it still works on a late night evening out on the town thousands of miles and two decades away” – The Quietus
Key Cut: All I Want Is You
1. For Your Pleasure
Release Date: 23rd March, 1972
Labels: Island/Warner Bros.
Producers: Chris Thomas/John AnthonyRoxy Music
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/roxy-music/for-your-pleasure-half-speed-remaster
Standout Tracks: Beauty Queen/Strictly Confidential/In Every Dream Home a Heartache
Review:
“For Your Pleasure’s two longest songs, “The Bogus Man” and the album-closing title track, leave plenty of time for Eno’s deviations. This first sketches out a musical design for trance, years ahead of it, with a long, minimalist break that confirms Eno’s mantra, “Repetition is a form of change.” Each instrument mutates, minutely transmogrified, on some mysterious cycle. On “For Your Pleasure,” Ferry makes only a brief vocal appearance. Over the last four and a half minutes, producer Chris Thomas and Eno are playing the recording studio as though it’s an instrument, conducting the song at a mixing board, and building a panoramic disorientation. They add more echo on the electric piano, more reverb on the guitar, phasing, tremolo, the drums slip away, and it gently becomes hazy and puzzling: Chopped-up bits of “Chance Meeting” from Roxy’s first album come in—Roxy are sampling themselves—then Judi Dench murmurs, “You don’t ask why,” and almost randomly, la fin. An album that began with Ferry’s request for your attention ends with Eno placing you in the strange new world you were promised. A new sensation has delivered new sensations of arousal and uncertainty.
Roxy aimed for a melding of American R&B and avant-garde European traditions (Mackay’s oboe on “For Your Pleasure” sounds like the last thing you’d hear before bees stung you to death). You don’t hear a struggle between Ferry and Eno, just two guys with similar ideas and a band juiced on its early success and acclaim, trying to get farther from earth while still holding on to the Marvelettes and the Shirelles. The playing is so adept and surprising, and Thompson and Manzanera do such strong jobs of grounding the music’s outlandish shifts, that you only slowly realize none of the album’s eight songs has a chorus.
A few months after For Your Pleasure was released, Eno left the band, quitting before he could be fired, and starting an unparalleled career as a solo artist and producer. Bryan and Brian were incompatible. Ferry was a neurotic—Woody Allen trapped in the body of Cary Grant—while Eno was a disruptor. In interviews, Ferry withdrew like a turtle; Eno excelled at them, and talked fluidly about Marshall McLuhan, Steve Reich, or his ample pornography collection. Eno most avidly pursued the band’s androgynous style, and dressed like he was Quentin Crisp’s glam nephew (leopard print top, ostrich feather jacket, bondage choker, turquoise eye shadow). Out of the chute, he was a cult hero, and Ferry grew tired of hearing punters yell “EEEEEE-NO!” in the middle of ballads, or seeing Eno credited as his co-equal.
The music had no immediate impact in the U.S., where it grazed the album chart at number 193. The band’s two-album deal with Warner Bros. had expired and the label happily left them go. American audiences, Ferry told a British interviewer, “are literally the dumbest in the world, bar none.”
But in England, it was the album of the moment, and Roxy returned to TV’s Old Grey Whistle Test, where Whispering Bob Harris, a stodgy presenter who was still stuck in the ’60s, sneered at them, as he had the previous year as well, dismissing them as great packaging with no substance.
The notion that style and substance were contradictory was a holdover from the ’60s, and it’s one that has never gone away, revived periodically by fans and critics who long for seeming authenticity. Years later, those Roxy TV appearances would start to feel almost as significant as the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Harris’ contempt was recommendation enough for lots of kids, of myriad genders and sexualities, who would soon come to Roxy shows dressed in sparkling tunics, glowing frocks, and immaculate dinner jackets, boys and girls both in drag. But glamor and self-invention were only part of the aftereffect: Within the next few years, plenty of future punks and new wavers went on to art school, where they immediately started acting, dressing, and playing like Roxy Music” – Pitchfork
Key Cut: Do the Strand