Roxy Music

For many people, Roxy Music mean the Radio Two stalwarts of Jealous Guy, Love Is The Drug, Avalon, Dance Away and Oh Yeah!, performed by Bryan Ferry in a white tuxedo and played in lounge bars throughout the land.

For others, however, it is the strikingly innovative band that exploded on the scene with the single Virginia Plain in the late summer of 1972 that floats our boat. They are a band of two distinct halves, like Fleetwood Mac (actually they had three) - the pre 1975 incarnation and the post hiatus one of 1979 to 1983. I like both of them, as it happens, but it will always be the early years, those five great albums and the singles that do it for me. In 1973, along with David Bowie and Mott The Hoople, there was nothing my fourteen year-old self liked better. I found a danceable solution to teenage revolution.....

Did anyone really know what hit them in September 1972, when Roxy Music appeared on the scene with their wonderful, stand-alone single, Virginia Plain? They remain, to this day, a group that were totally impossible to pigeonhole and they were all the better for it. Who were Roxy Music? No-one really knew. They were a disparate bunch of middle class students (and down-to-earth drummer Paul Thompson) and they looked like Teddy Boys - like 50s revivalist members of Sha Na Na - dressed at times in what looked like bacofoil suits as if they were Dr. Who extras. They were simultaneously retrospective and futuristic both visually and musically - blaring rock and roll saxophone mixed with odd-sounding tape loops, weird synthesiser noises and powerhouse glammy drumming from Thompson sitting solidly behind Bryan Ferry's bizarre, quavering voice, the like of which had not been heard before. Take their frantically-madcap non-album first single, Virginia Plain, and its strange lyrics too as the perfect example, sonically and lyrically. What was that all about. I bought that single in 1972 and was hooked, though, and I remain so. By the way, the track should never, in my opinion, be included as part of the debut album, as it subsequently has been on CD. It just sounds out of place in there, however great a track it undoubtedly is. That said, it should have been on the album anyway, so the only reason I am saying this is because I am familiar with the running order of the original vinyl album.

Make me a deal and make it straight.

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