Roxy Music

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.

They were a hugely disparate bunch, comprising former teacher and one-time soul singer Bryan Ferry, a pop theorist and avowed ‘non-musician’ who gloried in the name Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno, jazz-rock guitarist Phil Manzanera, ’50s-obsessed sax and oboe player Andy Mackay, bassist Graham Simpson and a rock solid drummer in Paul Thompson. Together they aimed to wed avant-garde experimentation to standard song structures in an attempt to drag popular music into the future by drawing heavily on the styles of the past.

With barely a handful of gigs under their belt when they entered London’s Command Studios in March 1972, there’s a distinct feeling that Roxy hadn’t fully planned how their debut album would sound. It’s all the better and fresher for that. It opens with party conversation and the tinkling of glasses until ‘Re-Make/Re-Model’ blasts in with a riff which sounds relatively straighforward. But it’s when Ferry’s distinctive vibrato begins that you realise there’s something not-quite-normal afoot here. Ferry sounds desperate, like someone who’s at last been let out of his creative cage and is determined to give it a shot as he might not have the chance again.

Short solos from all the band members mingle with burbling, seemingly random synth colourings and Roxy Music have arrived.

The following ‘Ladytron’ (once famously introduced on TV by Russell Harty as ‘Try On Lady’. Cue-cards, eh?) is where things start to become very unusual indeed. Unsettling noises give way to Ferry’s other-worldly warble and the band slip into an easy, castanet-heavy shuffle which rapidly changes gear with a completely unexpected burst of guitar from Manzanera followed by a series of rhapsodic woodwind forays from Mackay. The next track, though, ‘If There Is Something’, is where the listener decides whether they’re on the Roxy bus or waving it off into the distance muttering "Fuck that, I’m not going there".

What sounds for all the world like a pleasant, if lightweight country toe-tapper goes pear-shaped in under two minutes with Mackay’s sax echoing with the ghosts of dancebands in deserted ballrooms and Ferry sounding utterly demented, pledging his love with the promise that he’ll happily spend his days "Growing potatoes by the score" (Yeah, right!). The song eases to a conclusion with a multiple vocal chant almost Gospel-ish in tone. It’s six minutes and thirty seconds of masterly mood manipulation which never feels forced and still sounds as bizarre today as it did the day it was released.

The second side maintains the band’s quality and eclecticism with the warped rock ’n’ roll of ‘Would You Believe?’, the wracked balladry for ‘Chance Meeting’, the unsettling epic ‘Sea Breezes’ and what sounds like a tearoom tango band on the closing ‘Bitters End’.

As was the norm for the time Roxy performed on BBC2’s The Old Grey Whistle Test – and in the standard sea of long hair and scruffy denims looked as out of place as they sounded. Ferry had the look of an oriental Elvis impersonator, Manzanera wore sci-fi bug-eye shades, Mackay appeared to have been beamed in from two decades previously, Thompson wore a leopardskin leotard and Eno sported a short, fluffy silver jacket over a bare chest, together with a huge feather boa. You could say they kinda made an impression.

During the tour which followed Roxy Music and the demo sessions for For Your Pleasure tensions between Ferry and Eno increased, the latter wanting the freedom to muck about with the former’s voice the way he did with all the other components of the band.

Ferry wasn’t having any of it and in July 1973 Eno went off to pursue a solo career, invent ambient music and produce the occasional album for other artists. Roxy gradually lost their experimental edge but honed their pop sensibilities to a magnificent and lucrative degree. Yet despite numerous highpoints in the years that followed, their debut album stands as one of the most singular pieces of music in the past 30 years.

Roxy Music still sounds like music from another planet.

Six of the best:

ODD FACT: The chant "CPL 593A" which closes ‘Re-Make/Re-Model’ referred to the registration plate of the first car Ferry ever owned.

WHAT THEY DID NEXT: Within eight months Roxy recorded and released For Your Pleasure, a refinement of the debut’s blueprint and a magnificent record in its own right. In July ’73 Eno left to be replaced by keyboardist/violinist Eddie Jobson and in December of that year Stranded marked the beginning of a more direct, though no less inspirational, pop direction for the band. Oh, and Ferry managed to make his first solo album in the summer of ’73 as well.

STAR TRACK: ‘Ladytron’.

ACE LYRIC LINE: "Words don’t express my meaning/Notes could not spell out the score" - ‘2 H.B.’

MAGIC MOMENT: Ninety seconds into ‘If There Is Something’, a drum-roll takes the song out of a sprightly Country jaunt and Andy Mackay’s ghostly saxophone leads the whole crew on a five-minute trip through some very strange territory indeed. A chilling mood change.

RELATED ALBUMS: For Your Pleasure and Eno’s first two solo albums Here Come The Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy share the same sense of experimentation and humour. Since then maybe only Pulp’s Different Class has captured the spirit of Roxy.