Release Date: August 1972. Label: E.G. Records/Island. Producer: Peter Sinfield.

The common misconception of the Glam Rock era today is of a time when silly clothes and dumb but diamond ditties ruled the charts. Up to a point that’s correct, but while Slade, Sweet, T.Rex and Gary Glitter were carving out multicoloured monuments in the three-minute format, there were weirder scenes inside the velvet goldmine.

Roxy Music are lazily bracketed alongside the Glam Gods by dint of their flamboyant visuals – of which more later – and the classic single ‘Virginia Plain’ (recorded after the debut album but included on CD reissues since 1984 and brilliantly, but affectionately, parodied on Big Train), yet the music they created sat as uneasily in 1972 as it does 27 years later.