FEATURE:
No Need to Re-Make/Re-Model!
The Extraordinary Roxy Music at Fifty
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THERE are a couple of articles and reviews…
IN THIS PHOTO: Roxy Music in July 1972/PHOTO CREDIT: Brian Cooke/Redferns
that I want to bring in, as Roxy Music’s sensational eponymous debut album is fifty on 16th June. Produced by Peter Sinfield and featuring a collection of incredible tracks by the band’s lead, Bryan Ferry, the band – also featuring Phil Manzanera and Brian Eno -, delivered this remarkable debut. Although Ferry might say Roxy Music recorded better and more representative albums, there is something very special about their eponymous debut. There is a lot to love and discuss when it comes to Roxy Music. Bryan Ferry has just brought out a book of lyrics, as it is almost fifty years since this classic debut arrived. Why I love Roxy Music is because it is so different to anything that was around in 1972, expect for maybe David Bowie. Opening with Re-Make/Re-Model and Ladytron, Roxy Music kicks off supremely! The U.S. release of the album featured the classic Virginia Plain. Ahead of its fiftieth anniversary next month, I wanted to highlight the remarkable Roxy Music. First, this interesting June 2021 feature from udiscovermusic.com took a detailed look at Roxy’s introduction. There are a few parts of the feature that I wanted to include:
“Still astoundingly modern today, Roxy Music remains not only one of the finest debut albums in history, but rock music’s first true postmodern masterpiece. What follows is an attempt to trace the influences and pop culture references in an album that continues to go beyond all expectations – not only of what a rock group can do, but what a true work of art can accomplish.
“Hollywood’s Golden Age
“I’ve always been star-struck, basically. Hollywood has always been Mecca,” Bryan Ferry told Rock Scene magazine in 1973. In the same interview, he also revealed the list of vintage cinema names he’d once considered for the band: Roxy, Ritz, Granada, Odeon, Regal, Astoria. Roxy Music the name, then, harks back to the glamour of the original movie theatres – most specifically New York’s Roxy Theatre, which opened on March 11, 1927, with the promise of offering cinemagoers a luxurious viewing experience.
Looking at it, “Chance Meeting” could almost have been titled “Brief Encounter,” after the 1945 Noël Coward-written film. Then there’s “Virginia Plain,” Roxy Music’s debut single, littered with references to movies from Hollywood’s Golden Age: the 1962 Bette Davis and Joan Crawford classic, Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? (“Baby Jane’s in Acapulco…”); Flying Down To Rio, the 1932 movie that first paired Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers on the silver screen (“… We are flying down to Rio”); the Oscar-winning The Last Picture Show, a 1971 film whose title recalls old Hollywood (“Last picture shows down the drive-in”); and Teenage Rebel (“… of the week”), a 1956 movie that not only also features Ginger Rogers, but whose title would, to listeners in 1972, have evoked the original teenage rebel, James Dean.
For Bryan Ferry, however, there was no Hollywood icon greater than…
Humphrey Bogart
Speaking today, guitarist Phil Manzanera recalls “sitting down with Bryan at the first audition and talking about Humphrey Bogart and all the films we loved.” For later solo albums and Roxy Music appearances, Ferry would adopt the image of Bogart as Rick Blaine in Casablanca, suave in a white dinner jacket. On Roxy Music, Bogart is homaged in “2HB,” the lyrics directly quoting his Casablanca catchphrase: “Here’s looking at you, kid.”
Former art student Ferry, however, could not have been unaware of the song title’s other connotations. Speaking to Michael Bracewell for the latter’s scholarly study of the group’s early years, Re-Make/Re-Model: Becoming Roxy Music, Ferry recalled telling fellow art student – and a future artist in his own right – Mark Lancaster about the song. “He said, ‘Oh that’s so great – writing a song about a pencil,’” Ferry recalled, adding, “Which is a very Pop Art concept, really – except that I was writing a song about Humphrey Bogart.”
Breaking Down Virginia Plain
Even while paying homage to their own heroes, Roxy Music ensured their own legend was being written. “We’ve been around a long time/Trying, just trying, just trying to make the big time,” Ferry declares in ‘Virginia Plain,’ a song originally released as a non-album A-side. Neatly, his allusion to the year-and-a-half that had passed since he started to form the group came in the very song – their debut single – that would take them into the big time when it hit No.4 in the UK charts.
Roxy Music themselves weren’t the only ones entering history with “Virginia Plain”: “Make me a deal and make it straight/All signed and sealed, I’ll take it/To Robert E Lee I’ll show it,” Ferry sings at the start, directly name-checking his lawyer. As with “2HB” – and almost everything Roxy Music did – the reference is doubled: Robert E Lee was also a Confederate Soldier in the American Civil War – fittingly, in command of the Army Of Northern Virginia.
The title “Virginia Plain” itself was a reference to an earlier work of Ferry’s: a painting that he made in 1964 as a first-year art student in the Fine Art department of Newcastle University. Influenced by British pop art pioneer Richard Hamilton – one of Ferry’s Newcastle tutors, and the man behind The Beatles’ “White Album” artwork – Ferry described the piece to Michael Bracewell as “a surreal drawing of a giant cigarette packet, with a pin-up girl on it, as a monument on this huge Dalíesque plain.”
But that wasn’t the only meaning behind the song’s title…
Tobacco
As alluded to in Ferry’s painting of the same name, “Virginia Plain” didn’t only conjure up a landscape, it was also a variety of cigarette tobacco, as well as being…
Fashion Models
… A fictional girl’s name. But while Ferry might not have known an actual Virginia Plain, the song nodded to the real-life model Jane Holzer, a Warhol girl (known also as Baby Jane Holzer – there’s that film reference again) who appeared in a number of the artist’s 60s movies, among them Couch and Camp.
Fashion models would be a recurring fascination for Ferry and the group, beginning with the album cover’s depiction of Kari-Ann Muller, a former Bond girl who had starred in the 1969 George Lazenby 007 flick On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Startling both in its simplicity and in the way it cut against the grain for rock and pop albums of the early 70s, the Roxy Music album cover came across more as a fashion shoot than a sleeve for a vinyl disc. Simultaneously glamorous (in the old Hollywood sense) and “glam” (in the dressed-up-for-the-70s sense), the image set the tone for all Roxy Music albums to follow, while also drawing on the group’s own connections with the fashion world.
A Car License Plate
Not content with throwing music’s past and near-future into its heady mix, “Re-Make/Re-Model” also, by way of its title, alludes to a 1962 painting, Re-Think/Re-Entry, by British Pop artist Derek Boshier, and a one-that-got-away romantic “what if?” for Bryan Ferry – albeit in a typically oblique fashion.
Chanted throughout by Eno and Mackay, CPL 593H is actually a car license plate. Ferry recalls attending Reading Festival on his own and seeing a girl he liked in the crowd. “When I was driving back to London there was a car in front of me and it had the same girl in it,” he says today. “I memorized the number. It was a Mini of some sort, and I think it was red. I know where she lived because I saw the car again a few times.”
Ferry had an eye for cars, and the mystery girl’s Mini is not the only automobile referenced in the album. In “Virginia Plain,” Ferry looks “Far beyond the pale horizon/Somewhere near the desert strand/Where my Studebaker takes me/That’s where I’ll make my stand,” referencing the classic American 1957 Studebaker Champion that he bought while a student – a decision made more on the strength of the car’s design than on its performance ability. “I blew my university grant on that one,” Ferry later admitted, adding, “It cost me £65 and it was amazing. It was very sleek and very restrained with beautiful lines”.
I am going to end with a review from Louder Sound. They listened to the Super Deluxe Edition of the album 2018. I do feel Roxy Music is an underrated album. Not as celebrated as other albums in their cannon, the 2018 release helped to recontextualise and reframe the album:
“The early 70s were a golden age for prog, pop, glam, proto-metal and art rock, and Roxy Music somehow fitted in all of those categories. Or rather they didn’t actually fit in any.
Considering their original guitarist, Davy O’List, was in The Nice, frontman Bryan Ferry had auditioned for King Crimson, they shared management and Crimson’s lyricist Pete Sinfield was their producer, you would imagine Roxy had most in common with the prog fraternity, and indeed there are examples of sectional songwriting – notably the six-part The Bob (Medley) – and far-out spacey noodling on their self-titled debut that are very prog indeed. Then again, their first single, Virginia Plain, was a succinct concoction that reached No.4 in the UK, placing them immediately in a pop context. They certainly dressed glam, but theirs was a cooler, more fashion-forward image than the bacofoil yobbery of The Sweet et al. They could do Sabbath-heavy bombast, yet they could contrive a memorable melody and were made for Top Of The Pops.
If anything they belonged with those other artful outfits that didn’t belong: 10cc and Sparks, who like Roxy were also busy in 1972 formulating a new kind of patchwork pop out of the remnants of not just rock’s recent past but almost all of 20th-century music.
There was obviously something in the air. David Bowie released Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars in June 1972, just two weeks before Roxy’s debut. Now here was a visitation from an unheralded future by another bunch of alien insect-humans in gaudy, shiny finery.
Roxy Music’s debut appearance on TOTP performing Virginia Plain was as abrasively, thrillingly strange as Bowie doing Starman. That was where the great British public got their first glimpse of the heavy-lidded Ferry, Brian Eno grinning impishly behind his synth, sax-mad Andy Mackay in sparkly yellow and green, louche, long-limbed bassist Rik Kenton, guitarist Phil Manzanera, all beard and outsize shades, and drummer Paul Thompson, his leopardskin off-the-shoulder number notwithstanding, the sole concession to normal blokedom. Individually odd, they just about cohered as a unit.
Their self-titled debut album was an equally gobsmacking clash of styles and sonics. Track one Re-Make/Re-Model – the greatest song ever to have a chorus based on a car number plate – opens with the hubbub of guests mingling at an art gallery, Roxy’s natural milieu. Thereafter it is barely controlled chaos, all sax squawks, honky-tonk piano, snarling guitar and Eno’s synth disturbance: where 50s rock’n’roll meets avant-garde sound collage. Or, considering its arch provocation, think punk five years ahead of schedule. ‘I can talk, talk, talk, talk, talk myself to death,’ Ferry sneers. Ladytron finds the singer revisiting pop-romance tropes (‘You’ve got me girl on the runaround, runaround’), but the sci-fi/tomorrow’s world title evinces the distance travelled since The Beatles’ Love Me Do”.
I think that Roxy Music sounds timeless. It is one you can play to someone who does not know about the band and they will take something from it. Maybe some of the Glam does date it a bit, but I actually feel the songwriting and performances are so incredible and unique that it elevates Roxy Music. There will be new discussion about the album as we close in on its anniversary on 16th June. The sublime Roxy Music is in no need of a remake or remodel: it is absolutely…
PERFECT as it is!