By the time of the Reprise release Simpson had left the band, replaced by Rik Kenton whose photo appears on Reprise MS 2114. Island pressing but not on the American Reprise original. 11.įerry formed Roxy Music with bassist Graham Simpson whose picture appears on the original U.K. The song was reissued in 1977 b/w “Pyjamarama” to promote a “greatest hits” package and it again charted, reaching No. “Virginia Plain” recorded after the album’s release reached #4 on the U.K. While the band was way over the top for culturally conservative America (and by that I mean the “hippie enforcers”, not the Nixonians), the eponymously titled first album Roxy Music (ILPS 9200) got to No.10 on the UK album charts. Though Ferry’s background was working class-modest he clearly was fixated on the trappings of wealth and privilege and not at all shy about going there both visually and musically, despite the hippie era’s egalitarianism.
In the era of women’s lib, the first Roxy Music album cover was more than provocative, it was “sexist” and a throwback to a bygone era-one that the counterculture had abandoned and left for dead.īut Bryan Ferry (who’d been fired from a ceramic teaching job at a swank girl’s school for throwing ‘record parties’) knew what he was doing. These glam-rockers were trying to move beyond 60’s culture but to do so they had to look both backwards to the 1950s for the roots of both the music and the culture, and forward to wherever that might lead. Or so he’d have us think.Ed Note: rather than wait to publish after reviews are complete of all eight albums, the first review is here now and the rest will be added here as they are completedĪ pin-up cover girl in 1972? Slicked back greaser hair, and while you’re at it an album jacket clothes, make-up and hair credit? Maybe you weren’t around for it in 1972 but back then this-not long hair, sandals, checked flannel shirts and bell-bottom jeans- was outrageous. The jaded young fop didn’t know he had it in him. Here, he twists Pickett’s howl of discrete carnality into the moan of an aesthete’s orgasm. This leads the singer into a melancholy mood in which he’s dithered and distracted by rock music on a car radio (“Oh Yeah”) or simply bitter and self-mocking (“Rain Rain Rain”).įlesh + Blood‘s one clearheaded success, Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour,” is a brilliant choice for Ferry, who loves to find ready-made existentialism in such unironic styles as Sixties pop and soul. Again and again, he admits to being passionately in love with a woman who can’t stand him (“My Only Love,” “Flesh and Blood”). In more ways than one, Flesh + Blood is Ferry’s cry for help. He seems to be trying to get his messages out to us without the other musicians hearing him. The best he can do is add a little tension by muttering the lyrics through clenched teeth and a constricted throat.
Perhaps he’s just being defensive, because if the rest of Roxy Music is as bored as they seem, Bryan Ferry sounds positively bound and gagged. Meet the Creators and Activists Leading Social Media's Next WaveĬhasteness, Soda Pop, and Show Tunes: The Lost Story of the Young Americans and the Choircore Movement Nowhere are the rhythms stiffer than when bassist Neil Jason teams up with drummer Allan Schwartzberg for an almost glacial cover version of the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High.” It’s as if everyone had decided to recapture the feeling of the good ol’ psychedelic era by dropping lots of good ol’ acid: the melody sounds like something that resembles the theme from Hawaii Five-O, while Ferry munches on the words, savoring only random, emotionally pointless lines and phrases. The rhythm section’s personnel varies from cut to cut, which probably accounts for the beat’s distant, rigid quality. These days, the group has pared itself down to a hard core: Bryan Ferry on vocals and keyboards, Phil Manzanera on guitars, Andy MacKay on saxophones. The line on early Roxy (when Eno was a member) was that the band radiated high-tech decadence, and Flesh + Blood connects with this historical interpretation by confirming the decadent part: e.g., what could be more outré right now than an art-rock disco album? Flesh + Blood is such a shockingly bad Roxy Music record that it provokes a certain fascination.
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