The Roxy Music Story - Jarvis Cocker - Mon 17th Jan

Thanks to Robin Clark for taking the time to transcribe this radio broadcast.

“The Thrill of it All” (Part 1) – originally aired BBC Radio 2 17/01/2011

Narrator (n) – Jarvis Cocker.

N: Hello, I’m Jarvis Cocker, and welcome to a special two-part documentary exploring the group Roxy Music, one of the finest British bands of recent times. Welcome to “The Thrill of It All”.

Bryan Ferry (BF): Very important to me to bounce ideas off people and I guess I liked to direct what we were doing, I loved everybody to throw their ideas in, into the melting pot, and see what came out. It made creating things a great adventure, ‘cause you never knew quite what you were going to come up with really. But when you found something that you really liked, you’d say “ahh, that’s it.”

Andy Mackay (AM): Eno was doing a lot of stuff in the band. It was becoming clear that Bryan Ferry was the lead singer and the leader of the band, and I mean, you know, there’s no particular point in arguing about that. [The time?] pushed a little sooner than he would have chosen.

Chris Thomas (CT): There’s a lot of nostalgia attached to them. They had such a huge impact on British music, and it’s always great songs. And everything was designed to actually be there forever and ever.

Phil Manzanera (PM): Having our own studio, and the method of layering, having time to do it, not all going in and playing together, and using the desk as an instrument, with the evolving technology, meant that we started evolving a different kind of music.

N: Early 1980s Roxy Music – smooth, stylish, lush. Avalon, their biggest-selling album, marked a new high point in the group’s production and musical sophistication. The album’s elegant tracks and soundscapes are far removed from the edgy pop art of the group’s early records. Roxy Music epitomised glamour, cinematic imagery, and the pop avant-garde. They dressed with a cocksure sci-fi chic which separated the band from their contemporaries. The group’s early beginnings can be traced to the city of Newcastle, and the Fine Art department where Bryan Ferry enrolled in the summer of 1964.

BF: Well, it was incredible, for me, to find myself in an environment of artists, so it was a fantastic amount of freedom. Of course by this time I’d got a band together, a band called The Gas Board. We actually rehearsed in the university. So it was all very easy really. And the guy who played bass on the first Roxy Music album, Graham Simpson, was part of that band.

N: Ferry secured a scholarship, and moved to London in 1969 to pursue his art and music.

AM: I was introduced to Bryan in early 1971.

N: Saxophonist and oboe player Andy Mackay.

AM: From that point on, we actively worked together, then, in his flat over in Kensington, gradually adding other musicians; as it happens, we were both part-time school teachers.

BF: Andy had this synthesizer which became part of the sound of Roxy Music, although it was eventually played by Eno

AM: In the previous year, I had re-met Brian Eno, who I’d known when I was at university, and he was at art college, and by the strangest of chances, I bumped into him on a District Line train, somewhere around Earl’s Court, and started chatting; and so he came along, originally, to record what we were doing and to do a bit of synth programming, and it was clear that he was another person who had something to add to the mix.

N: So, thanks to London Transport, Brian Eno joined Roxy Music, with the synthesizers. The group continued to rehearse and refine their image. Dave O’List of The Nice was on guitar, and a Melody Maker advertisement in July 1971 secured drummer Paul Thompson.

Paul Thompson (PT): The thing that interested me the most about the band was the instrumentation, like the saxophone and the synthesizer, that was quite exciting. [laughs] They’re all a bit wacky, you know? David O’List was there and Eno was there and the concept of the whole band was, not just the music, but the visuals were very important as well.

AM: 1970/71, you had an amazing generation of brilliant fashion designers, also there were young film-makers, there were photographers, and we seemed to bump into people; I remember at one time, in a house in Clapham, Antony Price was living there, Malcolm Bird, who’s an illustrator and designer, and I think Juliet Mann and Keith Wainwright, who became my hairdresser, they were all living in the same house.

BF: There was a real team of visual experts.

N: Even at this early stage, Roxy Music had its own art and style department. But the band were getting noticed, securing substantial support from Richard Williams of the Melody Maker.

PT: Absolutely, yeah, he was also a presenter on the Old Grey Whistle Test, and he was like one of the top guys in the press, so it was really good.

N: In early 1972, guitarist Dave O’List left the group, to be replaced by a young Phil Manzanera.

PM: They were all great people, because a), they were all about five years older than me, had been to university, had bank accounts, [laughs], you know, they had jobs, they had a Mini with the front seat taken out that you could put the equipment in. And Eno used to mix the sound in the audience.

Brian Eno (BE): This was all fine until I started singing, when people would wheel round in alarm.

N: Brian Eno.

BE: You know, in the early days of Roxy, I wasn’t on stage. I used to mix, play a bit of synth, treat, that’s to say process the instruments that were being played on stage, and do backing vocals, from the back of the auditorium. I used to take the sounds from what other people were playing, feed them into my synthesizers and mutate them on stage. So, trying to take the things you could do in a studio into live performance.

AM: We always thought it was gonna work. I think we thought it was going to work, I don’t know, perhaps a slightly more album, art school-y level than it became. I don’t think we thought we were going to be big, conventional pop stars, which is what we became in 1972. But Bryan Ferry was a brilliant networker and talker and was very good at meeting people and charming them.

BF: [laughs] That’s very interesting, I hadn’t really thought of myself that way, but that’s good.

N: Perhaps, thanks to Bryan’s charm, the group secured another advocate, not in the music press, but a helpful soul, here, at the BBC.

PT: It was great to have somebody like John Peel behind you. I mean, everybody used to listen to John Peel, didn’t they? So it was just marvellous really.

AM: The John Peel sessions, it was unusual to be on that without having a record deal, you know, that was on the basis of seeing us at a club, and we were there the same night with Genesis, 200 people there I think. And we were terribly nervous, because you could of course see John Peel in the audience. Peel put us on Sounds of the Seventies, and was a total champion for us.

[excerpt from ‘Re-make/Re-model’ Peel session]

N: ‘Re-make/Re-model’, a Roxy Music Peel session from January 1972, and the first of many. Around this time, the group signed to EG Management, and later scored a deal with Island Records. The band went into a London studio, with King Crimson lyricist Pete Sinfield producing the debut album.

BF: We didn’t know anything about producing records, we didn’t know quite what a producer did. It was all kind of learning as we went along, you know. And Pete Sinfield was very good at helping us learn the process. It was really exciting.

PM: These numbers had been played live, considerably, so it was really a question of going in and trying to just play them; we had a very limited amount of time, I can’t remember, maybe two weeks this album was done in.

AM: 5 creative, 6 creative people had been working on it for so long, and that’s why the first album was done fairly quickly.

BE: I had a sort of system where I could take the signal from any instrument, and put it through something so it would turn out wobbly or very echo-y or something else would happen. So very often you had one sound being made by two people.

[excerpt from ‘Ladytron’]

AM: ‘Ladytron’ is the one; we kind of consciously tried to make it like a sort of classic pop single. Those elements are completely different, really, it’s a great song. Everything we’ve added onto it is to make it into a really strange sort of mixture of influences, so that it sounded a bit like a sort of string section I suppose. And then the opening, of course, was like, you know, collage of electronic sounds, and wonderful vocals. You know, ‘Ladytron’s a good example, little oboe break in the middle. I wanted it to sound a bit like the string break in ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow’, and so I actually triple-tracked it, so that it sounded a bit like an oboe section I suppose. Using the oboe, it never occurred to me that you didn’t normally use an oboe in rock ’n’ roll. As it was, we just did it!

N: ‘Ladytron’, just one of nine tracks on the debut Roxy Music album, all written by Bryan Ferry.

BF: I was interested in lots of musical styles, and I’d been an obsessive music fan. The first album, there was a lot of juxtapositions of different styles next to each other; in that way the first album was really interesting, you know.

N: Ferry blended strong imagery into the Roxy lyrics and music, taking the listener to far-away places and different times. This was typified by his tribute to Humphrey Bogart, on the track ‘2HB’.

AM: I think it’s a brilliant song, I think it’s one of Bryan’s best things at that time,

PT: It’s one of my favourite Roxy tracks, and one that I’ve been asking Bryan to do for ages.

BF: Well it was very distinctive, ‘cause it was very blatantly an homage to Hollywood. I just must have been watching Casablanca one night and thinking, oh, god, I love that phrase, and it led to ‘2HB’, basically.

PM: I obviously loved it ‘cause it was about Humphrey Bogart and Casablanca, and that’s part of the whole imagery of Roxy, that visual connection with old films, seemed to sum up a lot of Bryan-ness in there, that’s a good element to put into the Roxy soup.

[excerpt from ‘2HB’]

N: The Roxy Music debut was released in June 1972, and scored well with the album-buying fraternity of music fans, who saw Roxy as an art school band. At a time when a greatcoat and denim were deemed the height of fashion, the look of the group, tailored by Antony Price and his team, was beautifully captured on the album artwork. The band, resplendent in feathers, sci-fi chic and make-up, looked like they’d arrived from another, glamorous planet. Model Kari-Ann Muller languished seductively across the cover, in bright, bold primary colours. The album artwork and future covers would be overseen by Ferry’s keen artistic eye.

PM: What he does incredibly well is covers, and work with a team of people, Antony Price and Nick DeVille.

BF: Immensely talented, Antony Price, put his mind to anything, really, he’s very skilful. Terrific designer, draughtsman, and, yeah, I went to him and said “look, will you help me do this album cover?”

PM: I remember going to the photoshoot for the first album cover, and with something that my mum had sort of stitched together, but I mean I got there and there’s Antony saying “no, put this leather jacket on, I got these bug-eye glasses”, I mean, absolutely fantastic, Antony is just a genius really. Those were Antony’s, that he made up, and I’ve still got them. They’re bug eyes, and I’ve got a great picture of Jarvis Cocker wearing them, actually.

AM: We were going to have to look different, I mean that was the point at which I only started thinking about the image, how were we going to look good, and of course because there were all these designers and people around, the natural thing to do was to say, “have you got an idea?”, or, you know, “would you make me something?”, and, you know, it was definitely a conscious thing on the sort of first shows after the album, that we came out looking amazing.

PM: All this sort of talking amongst ourselves wasn’t done in a po-faced, intellectual way, that’s the thing. It had to be presenting stuff in an attractive way.

AM: I commissioned that green sort of space thing with the collar, you know, I just got someone to make it, so I thought, I want it to look like cheap science fiction.

PM: You know the first time we saw what each of us was gonna wear was just before going on, I said, “oh my god, oh that’s ridiculous!”

AM: Antony had made Bryan a nice leopardskin jacket.

BF: We weren’t very pushy people, we weren’t kind of naturals for performance, so that, you know, getting dressed up into a different kind of persona to go on stage seemed to make it easier to perform, you know. And also, we were very confident of the music, and we thought, well, be nice to make it look interesting as well.

PM: It was such a laugh, and we had such great fun. I said, “right, now let’s go out on stage” [laughs].

PT: Roxy really were just about trying to be fantastic musicians, and entertaining people and making people’s eyes come out on stalks. But the visuals were very important as well, it was a package.

[excerpt from ‘Virginia Plain’]

AM: ‘Virginia Plain’ was totally crucial for the way Roxy developed; getting a hit single changed the perception from us being an album, art school band, to being a pop group, and then we got kids listening to us in every town in Britain, suddenly we were greeted with huge enthusiasm and warmth.

PM: The beginning of the ‘70s, the new guys on the block suddenly popped up, and Bowie made the breakthrough in that period as well, you know, we were very much in there, the way fashion was changing, the way film was changing, you know, we locked in, in the arts and in culture and in music.

PT: A lot of people were jumping on the bandwagon, glam, you know, and it was called “glam rock”, I don’t think we were, really; I think we were art rock as opposed to glam rock, an art rock band, and it’s nice to be different. [laughs]

PM: ‘Virginia Plain’, we did get it right, and actually all the sounds on it still sound fantastic, and it still sounds great on the radio, because it’s only 2 minutes and 58 seconds, you know, there was this whole thing of trying to do the perfect pop single, really. But it combined all the elements of Roxy in one track. There’s a very different type of production to what subsequently happened, with Chris Thomas.

CT: Well it certainly sounded very different, it looked different as well.

N: Producer Chris Thomas.

CT: I was working with Floyd on the Dark Side of the Moon, and I got a phone call at Abbey Road from Bryan Ferry.

BF: Chris came on board, and it was great to have him because suddenly we felt we were working with the right guy.

CT: I mean they had rehearsed all the stuff and I just literally went down there, we did an evening session, it was 7 at night until 2 in the morning, and we did ‘Do The Strand’. Done.

[excerpt from ‘Do The Strand’]

AM: ‘Do The Strand’ was a new song on the second album, but we recorded it fairly quickly. You know, what’s noticeable about the early Roxy albums compared to the later ones is that there is much more immediacy about the playing, there’s a lot more saxophone, so that every song we did, everyone would play along as much as they could. And so, you know, I just played all the way through that song, with no solos, and, you know, Paul’s drumming in that sort of drive, I think that gives it a kind of energy, that song. I think it’s great, I love it.

PM: We were lucky to start our relationship with Chris Thomas.

BF: He seemed to really understand my songs, and he had ideas of his own which he was bringing in, and it was a very good interaction. I can’t remember there being much conflict, although conflict is sometimes very good, I think, for creativity. But it was good to have this competitive spirit in the studio, where you’d always try to better each other’s ideas

PM: Chris was absolutely brilliant, and he had learned his trade working with The Beatles, and throw in Eno’s methods of working along the way as well and that’s very much a perfect fit, and the difference in the sound recording between the first and the second album is spectacular. ‘The Bogus Man’ really has that sort of eerie dimension to it, slightly sort of left-of-centre kookiness about it, you know, it was also part of this idea of repetitiveness, of systems music, you know, that all comes from Steve Reich, from the whole sort of bringing those ideas into pop and rock music.

PT: It’s like trance-like, you know, and it’s mesmeric, and it just grooves along, I love that track, sort of chicken-skin guitar on it. Somebody later described it as “teutonic reggae”. To me that’s like the ultimate Roxy track.

AM: ‘The Bogus Man’ is interesting ‘cause that was definitely a song Bryan had, and I think more than almost any other Roxy track, that was a conscious effort by all of us to try and sort of put in our own contributions. And we had the lyric for that, so we sort of knew that it was a strange and menacing song.

[excerpt from ‘The Bogus Man’]

CT: I think he’s got a fantastic voice, I mean he had such a unique voice, we always used to comp the vocal – compile, edit, basically, you know, do a couple of very very good takes, and then take bits from those vocals, so I was always looking for anything that was extra-quirky, and put that in, obviously making it even more mannered, possibly, than it would be naturally.

BF: I remember it was always good doing vocals with Chris Thomas, ‘cause he was very appreciative when a lyric, or a performance, was good, and he was really great at pulling the best out of you and creating the right mood.

PM: A lot of these tracks being recorded, the moody tracks, you know, you’d create an atmosphere in the studio, turn the lights off or something, and just [dim the?] lights, or candles.

CT: [laughs] [Not aware?] that I brought any candles! [laughs], I dunno about that at all! [laughs]

PM: You know, recording is so much about how you feel psychologically, and the environment you’re in, the facility to be able to work well, you know, in terms of what we were hearing, where to position ourselves in the studio, how to set it all up, to be able to capture a moment.

N: There were several wonderful musical moments on the second Roxy Music album For Your Pleasure, released March 1973. Fun songs like ‘Do The Strand’ and ‘Editions of You’ were complemented with tracks that oozed a sense of menace. The song ‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache’ is an ominous monologue, part critique of the emptiness of wealth, part love song to an inflatable doll, and reveals Roxy Music at their most sinister.

PT: I like that album better than the first one, actually, I think sonically it’s better. It’s dark, and when I heard the vocal and the idea for the title, you know, about an inflatable doll, it was just so outrageous.

BF: I like all the dark stuff. It’s nice to be able to do light as well as dark, because life is full of both, you know, and I also myself wanted to try and be all things to all men, and try and have lots of different moods.

PM: We can do texture very well. ‘Dream Home’, which has a long monologue, we created our own special texture to go with that song, it just worked really well, it’s a brilliant lyric.

AM: Certainly ‘Dream Home’ is very much kind of Bryan’s creation, and Phil and I and Eno would create different atmospheres, but obviously on something like ‘Dream Home’ we knew that we were creating a spooky, atmospheric track, usually without knowing what the final top line and lyrics were going to be. And Bryan would be writing them in the course of the recording.

CT: And he was writing such great lyrics. He obviously had an idea of what it was gonna be about but he didn’t let on. We didn’t know what it was until he actually came in and sang the lyric. [laughs] It was amazing, it was great.

[excerpt from ‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache’]

N: A short extract from the dark and moody sounding ‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache’. The For Your Pleasure artwork once again caught the eye, with all five band members wearing their Antony Price designed stage clothes, and posing with guitars. The cover featured transsexual Amanda Lear, slinking across a cityscape towards a parked Cadillac, with a panther on a lead.

PM: I thought it was terrific, you know, I didn’t know what a sex-change person was, and then I was, you know, found out Amanda was, wow, what have I got myself into, this world they’re in is absolutely incredible, and there it is, on the cover, that world, beautifully done, the cover, very very strong.

BF: Well Amanda was another model that Antony worked with, she looked very different from Kari-Ann, the first album cover, you know, and the music was on the dark side. It matched the whole kind of slight S&M thing about it, she’s in this PVC kind of outfit , and the black panther, and then we’ve got this futuristic cityscape in the background. I think it worked incredibly well then, oh yeah, I got into a kind of chauffeur’s uniform as well with this beautiful Cadillac that we had in the picture and that worked very well.

AM: On For Your Pleasure, I mean it was a very sore point at the time, Bryan went off and shot the cover without anyone knowing, and put himself in the picture. Eno was very annoyed and so was I, and it was one of the things that was starting to kind of make the tensions in the band rise, you know, it was one thing for Bryan to do the covers ‘cause he’s very good at doing it, but it was beginning to be done in a way that felt like plotting, you know, you don’t need any more paranoia in groups; it was certainly something that added to the kind of darker period of the sort of early Roxy.

PM: This whole period really was just “eyes down, get on with it”; we had been booked on tours, we had an allocated time to do albums, you know, you’re on a treadmill, just keep going. That momentum and that pressure, I think, made it work.

[excerpt from ‘Pyjamarama’]

N: ‘Pyjamarama’, a top ten UK hit single in March 1973.

AM: I don’t think ‘Pyjamarama’’s that great a song, as our follow-up single, I think there may have been other better songs around.

N: Despite this, ‘Pyjamarama’ remained on the UK singles chart for 12 weeks. That spring and summer, Roxy Music played a series of tours in the UK and across Europe, and then, on the 21^st of July 1973, Melody Maker announced that Brian Eno was to leave Roxy Music, replaced by Eddie Jobson, citing the musos’ favourite cause, “musical differences”. Brian Eno again:

BE: It was quite a big step for me to take. I really enjoyed being in the band, I mean, it was a step along the way but it was a very important one, because I had been really grappling with this problem of whether I was going to become an artist or whether I was going to become a pop musician. So Roxy Music being a success kind of confirmed my decision to follow that course.

AM: Again, there was a certain amount of plotting, and Eddie Jobson was invited to come and see us play by Bryan, at the last gig that Eno did, and no-one was told, you know, Bryan had sort of done it and then afterward sort of got us to all agree, you know, got Eno to agree to leave, effectively,

PM: After the last gig, on that tour, the 1973 tour, up in the north-east of England, I’ve just got a picture of him waving goodbye [laughs].

AM: At the time, that was an unhappy time, and I think unnecessary. Again a bit too much plotting, and sort of, you know, you’ve got to be able to trust someone, and I think our management company didn’t help, I think they had tremendous faith in Bryan Ferry, I think that they thought he was going to be, you know, a big star, and they were quite right.

BF: It’s a shame in a way that he did leave, looking back, but then I guess what had to be, had to be, and I think he had his own ambitions that he wanted to follow. I think that’s probably the bottom line of it really.

PM: Eno wasn’t a person to be in a band, and actually, neither was Bryan Ferry, really. Obviously I was very very close to Brian Eno and I was sort of upset about it, and I, you know, both me and Andy considered, you know, maybe that’s it then, maybe we should just finish now, but then we thought, well hang on, we’ve only been going for about 18 months, we’ve done some good work, seems crazy at this point to implode. And so that’s really the end of phase one of Roxy.

[excerpt from ‘Street Life’]

N: ‘Street Life’, another major UK hit for Roxy Music in November 1973, and the opening track to their third album, Stranded, which featured multi-instrumentalist Eddie Jobson. Phil Manzanera again:

PM: I was still grumpy about Brian Eno leaving, but then suddenly we’re presented with this sort of child prodigy, who’s incredibly good technically at piano and violin. The emphasis now, rather than from the sort of electronic systems music, we’re going into expanding our musicality.

BF: And yes it became less experimental, but it was kind of refreshing for me to have this extra musicality going on, it was very important.

PM: You have to develop what you do, your range of music, and everybody expects something new and innovative from a new album.

AM: You know, Eddie’s a very good musician, there’s no doubt that we went on to make some great records, so it did work, but, on Stranded, we co-wrote songs, obviously things like ‘Song For Europe’, which I co-wrote, benefitted hugely from having Eddie play keyboards on it.

CT: Bryan was always little bit nervous about his piano playing.

N: Producer Chris Thomas again.

CT: To me one of the things that made those first two albums sound rather alien was the fact that it’s Bryan’s keyboards everywhere.

BF: I was self-taught, and I hadn’t really been playing for very long, ‘cause I wasn’t like an Elton John kind of a brilliant piano player, I mean I was an interesting piano player, and when I was doing my own songs, nobody else could play them as well. [laughs].

CT: And when Bryan plays keyboards he nearly always, this is technical now, he always leaves the third out, so you don’t know whether it’s minor or major, so it leaves you in this sort of very strange sort of alien sort of state when you hear it, but once you get to the other stuff where Eddie was playing, say ‘Song For Europe’, where Eddie’s playing the piano, then it’s a completely different thing.

PM: You know, having Eddie Jobson was fantastic, so we were sort of stretching our musicality and of course, ‘Song For Europe’, now that’s the sort of track that couldn’t have been done in the previous years.

[excerpt from ‘A Song for Europe’]

AM: Bryan was the best lyricist in Britain at that time without any doubt

CT: I don’t think there’s one spare syllable in those lyrics that Bryan wrote that he wouldn’t have been happy with. That’s why, you know, there’d be days in the studio where it’s like, “not ready, haven’t got the lyric”, you know, and he’d be working on it all the next day, had to be absolutely right.

BF: Yeah I always find it quite tough, finding the right words. Sometimes if it was a kind of emotional song, I mean, you’d have to dig deep to find the right place. I marvel at people who say they write a complete lyric in one hour, or whatever. It takes a long time for me.

PT: The concepts of his songs are just absolutely brilliant. Bryan’s stuff’s a bit more quirky, and you’ve got to kind of look into what Bryan’s saying as well. Some of the lyrics aren’t obvious, you know, they’re clever but kind of hidden and a little bit subtle. I don’t think everybody can grasp it straight away.

AM: The third album; ‘Street Life’ is a great track ‘Song For Europe’ is good, it still works really well, ‘Mother of Pearl’ is a fantastic track.

PM: There’s a lot of lyrics in ‘Mother of Pearl’, and they’re great, you know, whereas ‘Dream Home’ had been almost a monotone of delivering a large bulk of lyrics, you know, here we’ve got a much more melodic way, and it flows along beautifully, and he was really into delivering them.

AM: You know, on two or three of the songs, Bryan would come in and do a sort of bravura performance of a finished lyric and top line that we hadn’t heard at all, ‘Mother of Pearl’ is the one that particularly stands out. Bryan came in and did the whole thing and we just sort of sat back and thought, “well that’s amazing”.

[excerpt from ‘Mother of Pearl’]

BF: Lyrically it’s one of the strongest things I’ve done, and it was a good cornerstone of Stranded, I think. That and I suppose ‘Song For Europe’, which was the first time I’d written with somebody else in the band, or written with anyone, in fact. And Andy came to me with the basis of ‘Song For Europe’. It’s so much more musical than any of the things that I’ve written, and the others were anxious to try and write some stuff as well.

AM: Roxy songs are not easy to cover. Whether that’s because we make them very distinctive and there’s nothing left for people to sort of drag out of them, or whether it’s because Bryan’s lyrics are kind of so wonderful and sort of important, without Bryan singing them, maybe they just don’t work.

N: Ferry stepped out of the ranks of Roxy Music with an album of covers, These Foolish Things in November 1973, and a second solo album in July 1974 called Another Time Another Place.

PM: It’s obviously something he wanted to do, I think I played on a few tracks, they were all covers, that have been written, and he had the opportunity to do it.

BF: So as a singer and arranger, it’d be nice to do a record like that, and take away the burden of songwriting, and this was an opportunity to do songs by other artists, other writers, people I admired that had gone into the making of my own songs, you know. But I felt it was time to just do something a bit different and broaden my horizons a bit.

AM: Good idea, I think, you know, if one should do as many projects as they can. But, you know, that was very clever, it was very good that he created such a distinct sort of solo career. And again, I don’t think he gets enough credit for that.

PM: You know, he had his own things that he wanted to pursue that he couldn’t pursue within Roxy, you know, he didn’t want to be constrained by Roxy, and in fact gradually, that whole idea of, bit of a cliché, but, “why don’t you do it on your solo album?” [laughs]

PT: I seem to remember there was a little bit of, maybe, I don’t know if jealousy’s the right word, but there was a little bit of kind of discontent in the camp, but it was a good thing, I mean, I was involved in some of Bryan’s earlier stuff.

AM: No, I didn’t have any problem with Bryan’s solo albums, I mean, you know, part of his audience would not really be big Roxy fans, and some Roxy fans would really not be interested in Bryan’s solo albums, and in between, there’s a large-ish group who like both, and we’re kind of reasonable people, and I think that keeps you focused. Nothing feels better than standing on stage playing music that the audience are enjoying, you know, I mean, it’s what we do.

[excerpt from ‘All I Want Is You’]

N: ‘All I Want’ [sic], another top ten hit for Roxy Music and lifted from their fourth studio album, Country Life, released in November 1974.

PM: By the time we get to Country Life, singles weren’t seen as something vulgar, we all loved the Motown singles and the perfect three-minute single is like a little haiku, so, you know, you can combine, totally valid, and be proud of doing singles.

N: But it was not only the music on Country Life that was gaining attention, but yet another Ferry album sleeve creation. While away in Portugal, the singer photographed two girls, Constanze Karoli and Eveline Grunwald, in their underwear. The revealing shot on the Country Life cover left little to the imagination. In 1974 it was seen as highly controversial, and banned in several countries.

BF: I was out in Portugal, I’d taken a house out there to try and get away. Antony Price joined me, and Eric Boman. Eric was a brilliant photographer. We tried to do the cover out there, we went to a bar one night and met these girls, who were German, let’s try and do it on the spot, wasn’t really much clothing involved but Antony Price, he sort of looked after that, Eric did the make-up, did the picture, I think we used a car’s headlights to light the girls, we wanted it to look as if they’d just come out of the undergrowth, just a different angle you know, on glamour.

AM: I was surprised that people found it so controversial; in America it was sold in a shrink-wrap, and there’s another edition without the girls on, just the hedge. [laughs]

PT: It certainly caused a stir in America, you couldn’t, as you say, it was sold in a paper bag, or it was sold with just the foliage in the background. I don’t think they had Photoshop in those days, I wonder how they did it. So it did cause a stir, but very provocative.

AM: It poked fun, in a way, at the earlier Roxy cover, because instead of having a very careful, studio shot of a top model, it’s two old boilers running round in their knickers.

PM: Even I was shocked, but I mean obviously, very sexy, and I’m a guy, you know, so it’s “wow”. But I was worried, I thought, “oh my god”, you know. But they repackaged it in so many different ways that, in fact, it caused a controversy, and then everybody wanted to see it.

N: As mentioned, the Country Life album was censored in America, a market Roxy Music had yet to infiltrate in the mid-1970s.

AM: America was very difficult for us. I think we were too strange, too European, we were playing totally unsuitable venues, our equipment didn’t really work very well.

PT: I remember playing in one place, it was Miami Speedway, they just didn’t get it at all, and the equipment was going wrong, and, oh, it was just a nightmare. [laughs] But the south, hmmmm, difficult. Too kind of like redneck, you know. They thought we were just a bunch of faggots, you know. [laughs]

AM: Except where we were playing faggots[?], in which case, you know, it went down really well, but we had one or two places like Akron, Ohio, and Detroit, and we went down really well in New York, and in San Francisco, and not much in between.

PM: Playing Bakersfield, it’s a redneck country, we come on all dressed up, you know, you can imagine the beefs we got. People said, “what’s going on here?”, you know, “this is totally bizarre”, you know, and it was great, actually, to shock, and we did go out, you know, in lots of places and say “this is gonna be great because they’re just not expecting this”.

AM: There’s just not enough time to successfully tour Europe and the rest of the world, and America. So we concentrated on Europe. Although rock ‘n’ roll really is at the heart of what Roxy do, but it didn’t come across to Americans. And I guess the lyrics are too subtle, too ironic; they heard the stuff on the top, they heard the kind of, the weirdness, and the saw the weirdness, and didn’t really hear what was going underneath. And rock ‘n’ roll is there, that’s, you know, what it’s all about.

[excerpt from ‘Both Ends Burning’]

N: ‘Both Ends Burning’, lifted as a single from Roxy Music’s fifth studio album, Siren.

AM: There’s a lot of different directions in Siren. I think Phil does a lot of really good things on there, quite a guitar album, and I think it’s a very slightly kind of uneven album, it has ‘Love Is The Drug’ on, so that was another of the sort of, you know, key Roxy singles.

PM: That originally was just gonna be a b-side, because it didn’t have the top line on it. It was only when, I think, Johnny Gustafson played that bass riff, and it was suggested to Paul that he take the snare off his snare and that groove started going.

BF: It’s always very important to me, the bass guitar. Singers like to have a good bass line, which I think made the track.

PM: It transformed itself into something, and then Bryan took it away to try and write a top line.

CT: He came and he did a rough vocal in the sense that that’s where you set the level, but we always used to take everything anyway, and at the end of it I said, “that’s fantastic,” I said, “that’s the single”, and he got really annoyed. And he said “what do you mean? ‘Both Ends Burning’s the single”. I said “no”, I said “that is a hit single”. And he said “no no, ‘Both Ends Burning’s the single”. But he was annoyed and so he did one take after that. And the comp was literally from just those two takes, from the run-through and one take. That was the finished vocal.

[excerpt from ‘Love Is The Drug’]

PM: A brilliant line, you know, the one that Bryan came up with, it’s just absolutely brilliant. In pop music there’s certain lines that are classics, and I think that is the Roxy one.

N: ‘Love Is The Drug’ was the group’s biggest worldwide hit, in November 1975. In the UK, it sat at number 2 in the charts, held off the top spot by a reissue of David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’. The Siren album peaked at number 4, before slipping down the UK album charts.

PM: The only track [that I?/they?] really think of on there, really, is ‘Love Is The Drug’.

AM: We got rather jaded by then. It’s a difficult point in a band’s career because we’d reached the sort of level of playing, you know, big theatres and arenas, and so we’d be going back to the same place and playing the same place we played 2 years before, say, and it felt like we were working pretty hard but it wasn’t quite sort of falling into place. And I was quite pleased when we took the break.

PM: It really, this end of this 5-year period, Siren, was pretty much coming back from the tour every night to continue working on the album. So, you know, during this period, the most stress was probably for Bryan.

CT: You know Bryan and I went in and we did an EP, with ‘Let’s Stick Together’ and ‘Price of Love’ on it. In fact they were both hits, and so that then became an album that was Let’s Stick Together. And then he went in to do another solo album because his solo career now was riding up very high.

BF: I went on a solo tour, shortly after the Siren album, I think I did In Your Mind, and then I did a tour with that album, and after that I travelled a bit and I lived in LA for a while, I just wanted to do other things and different adventures.

PM: So there’s a hell of a lot of activity going on at this period, and I guess we just overflowed with solo stuff, and Bryan went off. I got on with a hundred and one other things, I did the 801 project with Brian Eno, and all sorts of stuff, I was producing. I see the whole history of Roxy in a series of 5-year periods. It seems like we can work for 5 years together and need a break [laughs]. And this is the end of the first period.

N: In part two next week, we continue to explore the recordings of Roxy Music, hearing about their return, their subsequent flirtation with disco, and their continued success.

(Part 2 should be available next week)

“The Thrill of it All” (Part 1) – originally aired BBC Radio 2 17/01/2011

Narrator (n) – Jarvis Cocker.

N: Hello, I’m Jarvis Cocker, and welcome to a special two-part documentary exploring the group Roxy Music, one of the finest British bands of recent times. Welcome to “The Thrill of It All”.

N: Ferry secured a scholarship, and moved to London in 1969 to pursue his art and music.

AM: I was introduced to Bryan in early 1971.

N: Saxophonist and oboe player Andy Mackay.

AM: From that point on, we actively worked together, then, in his flat over in Kensington, gradually adding other musicians; as it happens, we were both part-time school teachers.

BF: Andy had this synthesizer which became part of the sound of Roxy Music, although it was eventually played by Eno

BF: There was a real team of visual experts.

N: Even at this early stage, Roxy Music had its own art and style department. But the band were getting noticed, securing substantial support from Richard Williams of the Melody Maker.

PT: Absolutely, yeah, he was also a presenter on the Old Grey Whistle Test, and he was like one of the top guys in the press, so it was really good.

N: In early 1972, guitarist Dave O’List left the group, to be replaced by a young Phil Manzanera.

Brian Eno (BE): This was all fine until I started singing, when people would wheel round in alarm.

N: Brian Eno.

BF: [laughs] That’s very interesting, I hadn’t really thought of myself that way, but that’s good.

N: Perhaps, thanks to Bryan’s charm, the group secured another advocate, not in the music press, but a helpful soul, here, at the BBC.

PT: It was great to have somebody like John Peel behind you. I mean, everybody used to listen to John Peel, didn’t they? So it was just marvellous really.

[excerpt from ‘Re-make/Re-model’ Peel session]

AM: 5 creative, 6 creative people had been working on it for so long, and that’s why the first album was done fairly quickly.

[excerpt from ‘Ladytron’]

N: ‘Ladytron’, just one of nine tracks on the debut Roxy Music album, all written by Bryan Ferry.

AM: I think it’s a brilliant song, I think it’s one of Bryan’s best things at that time,

PT: It’s one of my favourite Roxy tracks, and one that I’ve been asking Bryan to do for ages.

[excerpt from ‘2HB’]

PM: What he does incredibly well is covers, and work with a team of people, Antony Price and Nick DeVille.

PM: All this sort of talking amongst ourselves wasn’t done in a po-faced, intellectual way, that’s the thing. It had to be presenting stuff in an attractive way.

AM: I commissioned that green sort of space thing with the collar, you know, I just got someone to make it, so I thought, I want it to look like cheap science fiction.

PM: You know the first time we saw what each of us was gonna wear was just before going on, I said, “oh my god, oh that’s ridiculous!”

AM: Antony had made Bryan a nice leopardskin jacket.

PM: It was such a laugh, and we had such great fun. I said, “right, now let’s go out on stage” [laughs].

PT: Roxy really were just about trying to be fantastic musicians, and entertaining people and making people’s eyes come out on stalks. But the visuals were very important as well, it was a package.

[excerpt from ‘Virginia Plain’]

CT: Well it certainly sounded very different, it looked different as well.

N: Producer Chris Thomas.

CT: I was working with Floyd on the Dark Side of the Moon, and I got a phone call at Abbey Road from Bryan Ferry.

BF: Chris came on board, and it was great to have him because suddenly we felt we were working with the right guy.

CT: I mean they had rehearsed all the stuff and I just literally went down there, we did an evening session, it was 7 at night until 2 in the morning, and we did ‘Do The Strand’. Done.

[excerpt from ‘Do The Strand’]

PM: We were lucky to start our relationship with Chris Thomas.

[excerpt from ‘The Bogus Man’]

PM: A lot of these tracks being recorded, the moody tracks, you know, you’d create an atmosphere in the studio, turn the lights off or something, and just [dim the?] lights, or candles.

CT: [laughs] [Not aware?] that I brought any candles! [laughs], I dunno about that at all! [laughs]

PM: We can do texture very well. ‘Dream Home’, which has a long monologue, we created our own special texture to go with that song, it just worked really well, it’s a brilliant lyric.

[excerpt from ‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache’]

[excerpt from ‘Pyjamarama’]

N: ‘Pyjamarama’, a top ten UK hit single in March 1973.

AM: I don’t think ‘Pyjamarama’’s that great a song, as our follow-up single, I think there may have been other better songs around.

PM: After the last gig, on that tour, the 1973 tour, up in the north-east of England, I’ve just got a picture of him waving goodbye [laughs].

[excerpt from ‘Street Life’]

BF: And yes it became less experimental, but it was kind of refreshing for me to have this extra musicality going on, it was very important.

PM: You have to develop what you do, your range of music, and everybody expects something new and innovative from a new album.

CT: Bryan was always little bit nervous about his piano playing.

N: Producer Chris Thomas again.

CT: To me one of the things that made those first two albums sound rather alien was the fact that it’s Bryan’s keyboards everywhere.

[excerpt from ‘A Song for Europe’]

AM: Bryan was the best lyricist in Britain at that time without any doubt

AM: The third album; ‘Street Life’ is a great track ‘Song For Europe’ is good, it still works really well, ‘Mother of Pearl’ is a fantastic track.

[excerpt from ‘Mother of Pearl’]

N: Ferry stepped out of the ranks of Roxy Music with an album of covers, These Foolish Things in November 1973, and a second solo album in July 1974 called Another Time Another Place.

PM: It’s obviously something he wanted to do, I think I played on a few tracks, they were all covers, that have been written, and he had the opportunity to do it.

[excerpt from ‘All I Want Is You’]

N: ‘All I Want’ [sic], another top ten hit for Roxy Music and lifted from their fourth studio album, Country Life, released in November 1974.

AM: I was surprised that people found it so controversial; in America it was sold in a shrink-wrap, and there’s another edition without the girls on, just the hedge. [laughs]

AM: It poked fun, in a way, at the earlier Roxy cover, because instead of having a very careful, studio shot of a top model, it’s two old boilers running round in their knickers.

N: As mentioned, the Country Life album was censored in America, a market Roxy Music had yet to infiltrate in the mid-1970s.

AM: America was very difficult for us. I think we were too strange, too European, we were playing totally unsuitable venues, our equipment didn’t really work very well.

[excerpt from ‘Both Ends Burning’]

N: ‘Both Ends Burning’, lifted as a single from Roxy Music’s fifth studio album, Siren.

BF: It’s always very important to me, the bass guitar. Singers like to have a good bass line, which I think made the track.

PM: It transformed itself into something, and then Bryan took it away to try and write a top line.

[excerpt from ‘Love Is The Drug’]

PM: A brilliant line, you know, the one that Bryan came up with, it’s just absolutely brilliant. In pop music there’s certain lines that are classics, and I think that is the Roxy one.

PM: The only track [that I?/they?] really think of on there, really, is ‘Love Is The Drug’.

N: In part two next week, we continue to explore the recordings of Roxy Music, hearing about their return, their subsequent flirtation with disco, and their continued success.

“The Thrill of it All” (Part 2) – originally aired BBC Radio 2 24/01/2011
Narrator (n) – Jarvis Cocker.

N: Hello, I’m Jarvis Cocker, and welcome to part 2 of our documentary exploring the group Roxy Music, one of the finest British bands of recent times. Welcome to “The Thrill of It All”.

CT: Don’t forget, he was the writer, Bryan Ferry, you know, he wrote all those songs, he wrote the lyrics, so naturally if you write the lyrics and you sing the songs, then the focus is gonna fall on you. Roxy were a big influence, Bryan was the leader from the beginning, no question about it.

BF: It was suddenly, you know, well, here’s another record to make, you know, what collectively can we do, what songs do you have, do you have anything? So there’s a couple of co-written things, what do I have to say this time?
Rhett Davis (RD): For early Roxy Music fans, I’ve been criticised as the producer of the second period of Roxy, of making them too smooth and too over-produced. I don’t know whether that’s wholly my fault [laughs].

AM: I certainly think it helps that Phil and Bryan and myself have different musical sensibilities and different backgrounds, and I think that that balances things.

N: So far we’ve heard how in the ‘70s Roxy Music epitomised glamour and pop art, with their unique musical style and bizarre sci-fi wardrobe. In today’s programme we will explore how the band developed, recording some of the most sophisticated music of the ‘80s, including their platinum-selling album, Avalon. Producer Chris Thomas:

CT: The way that we approached making those records, we did want them to last. We’d always try to do something where people would talk about it in 20 years’ time. The way that we worked on these things, I mean, it was hard work, but it was actually a real labour of love, I mean, it was thrilling to be able to do this.

N: Roxy Music were one of the most innovative British bands to emerge in the early ‘70s, drawing on a diverse range of influences from popular culture and art. They released 5 influential albums, but went their separate ways in the summer of 1976. After a break of a couple of years they regrouped to record, with key players Bryan Ferry, Andy Mackay, Phil Manzanera and drummer Paul Thompson, but the musical landscape had changed. When they emerged in 1979 with their Manifesto album, would it find favour with the new wave of punk rockers? Guitarist Phil Manzanera:

PM: For some reason they seemed to like Roxy, and the point is, you know, what we said as Roxy was, anybody with a good idea can have a go in the music business. Transpires now that when we did get back together, and we were worried about, we had survived. But you’ve got to remember Chris Thomas actually produced the Sex Pistols, and there’s a connection with Roxy. So we obviously were sort of accepted.

PT: I met Paul Cook a couple of times.

N: Roxy drummer Paul Thompson.

PT: Paul [called to?] me personally and Roxy Music as an influence, and then there’s Duran Duran, and Mark King, you know, from Level 42, he loves Roxy Music. Lots of people have been influenced by the band.

AM: I used to be friends with Joe Strummer, who sadly died a few years ago.

N: Saxophonist and oboe player Andy Mackay.

AM: Joe absolutely loved Roxy. Funnily enough, punk was surprising, well we’d have expected them to turn against us somewhat, and they didn’t.

BF: It was another generation, and they had to do their own thing.

N: Frontman Bryan Ferry.

BF: There was something in the spirit of Roxy which appealed to the punk generation, obviously it was enough modernity in the Roxy catalogue up to that point that they found sympathetic.

PM: We always said that we inspired amateurs, and it’s exactly what the punks were doing, and if you come up with something like that at a time when everything else is just a bit vague in the music business, you can be successful, and there they were, they took control, almost like a sort of revolution, ‘let’s wipe away all the dinosaurs from the past’, this is the future. One of the tracks that I co-wrote, ‘Trash’, I had a riff, and I thought, well this could be a sort of punky type track.

AM: ‘Trash’ is a conscious attempt to try and do something a bit punk and I’m not sure quite how successful it was. [laughs]
[excerpt from ‘Trash’]

BF: Phil has always been very good at providing textures, that’s been one of his great skills as a guitarist. He could create these different shades, different colours and textures. He’s not a one-sound guitar player; some people get one sound, stick with it forever, and that’s their sound, Phil is very different, and that’s why he was very important in Roxy.

N: From the album Manifesto, the single, ‘Trash’, which scraped into the lower regions of the UK charts, written by Phil Manzanera.

PM: Our first single back after being away and it gets to number 40, everybody is very concerned! Trash by name, trash by nature, it wasn’t particularly great, although I have a slightly soft spot now that I know that the so-called New Romantics loved it, that it ended up being played all the time down at the Blitz club, well I had no idea, I only found out a few years ago, I just assumed that it was a failure.

AM: Some people really really like that track. I think the album, though, is really good.

N: Manifesto was recorded in late 1978. Bryan, Andy and Phil had all enjoyed success with their own solo projects. The new Roxy album, their sixth, began in a residential studio in the rolling hills of Surrey.

BF: I had just been living in America for quite a long time, I had worked on The Bride Stripped Bare with some of the great American session players, and I guess I felt I’d learned a lot about space in music, I’d matured a bit.

PM: We were back to basics, really. Bryan, Andy, me and Paul as a sort of core.

AM: When we came back to do Manifesto we actually went and did something we’d never done before, took a residential studio, and rehearsed and did some recording, which kind of got us back really playing like a band again.

PM: Studio called Ridge Farm, which was great ‘cause it had tennis courts and swimming pools, obviously we’re thinking of all that [laughs]. The musical side was very very basic, it was in a barn, and it had a bit of ropey old equipment, and you had to climb up a ladder to listen back to the stuff upstairs, and I’d fell over, running with my dogs, broke my leg, so it turned out to be a nightmare for me, I had to be transported to Ridge Farm strapped to an armchair in the back of a Transit van, and then the roadies were sort of carrying me in, and it was hilarious recording there because every time we did a take, I was on crutches and everything, and everyone would climb up this ladder to listen upstairs, by the time I’d got up the ladder, they said ‘no, no, that’s no good, let’s do it again’, and I’d have to come down, absolute nightmare!

PT: Good ideas for bands to have a break, and then you come back with fresh ideas, you know, and a bit more kind of energy. The sound of Roxy has changed, gradually, over the years anyway so it’s just a kind of transition, you know, a different sort of landscape, or soundscape.

PM: The music that we bring to the table is obviously influenced by what we like and what we listen to. So on Manifesto, the title track ‘Manifesto’, there’s that sort of chord sequence that I had, that just goes from A to B, it doesn’t have a chorus or anything, and basically the front part of it is just a jam

BF: Manifesto has this great, kind of raga-esque beginning. I think it’s beautiful, tis bass playing by Alan Spenner, who was the new bass player, and he’d worked with me already on the Bride Stripped Bare album; down in this place called Ridge Farm late one night, he did this thing, and it was fantastic, I thought.

PM: So that was quite a different structural element to the track, from a musical point, then of course Bryan, very cleverly, stuck on “manifesto”, because we were starting again, he was setting out a series of beliefs, I think that was absolutely terrific, conceptually; it’s his version of, sort of, ‘My Way’.

BF: And then I did one of my better lyrics, something anthemic about it, about the return of us, you know, as a band. It felt like, here we are, back, as a band, back with a record, and it was like a statement of intent, it was a manifesto, basically, this is what we’re about, this is what I’m about, and here we are, and hello again. [laughs]
[excerpt from ‘Manifesto’]

AM: I certainly think it helps that Phil and Bryan and myself have different musical sensibilities and different backgrounds, and I think that that balances things.

PM: Again, you expect to come up with something different and innovative, and you just do your best. We came back into a scene that had changed a lot, the whole thing had happened, Saturday Night Fever, fours on the bass drum, Manifesto, it was there, all that sort of thing, and that becomes an issue

PT: It was getting into the whole disco-y type era, wasn’t it, I thought we were selling out a little bit then, diversifying a bit too much, you know, because the spirit of the band was changing. It started off as an experimental kind of arty band, dedicating to, like, being different, and then with the likes of ‘Dance Away’, I got the feeling that we were trying to be disco, and I like some disco music but to me that was, you know, a complete change of spirit.

PM: We changed our method of working as well, we went to New York, and that’s when Studio 54 was happening and [Armit Erskine??] used to pop in every night, after he’d been socialising, with his dinner jacket on and everything. At the time, the track ‘Dance Away’ didn’t sound like it ended up, and he, right from the beginning, said, “that’s gonna be a hit, but you need to put fours on the bass drum”. But as a result of that, we changed it, that’s why it was a hit, and he was totally, totally right, and that saved our bacon, basically ‘Dance Away’ being a big hit put us back on the map.

AM: [??] was very supportive, they really wanted to get a good Roxy album for America. It still eluded us for a while; I can remember the sort of feel of working in New York was important, you know, it did make things feel different.
[excerpt from ‘Dance Away’]

BF There was a hit there, which was very useful, which gave the record a kind of public hearing, you know, gave it some radio life, which was ‘Dance Away’, but that was a song I’d written some time before, so we re-recorded it, and it became the hit of Manifesto.

AM: Bryan does bring a lot to a song, he teases words out well. At this time he was writing very good songs.

PM: ‘Angel Eyes’, which is a completely different version on the album to the single that came out, because having had a hit with ‘Dance Away’, in the sort of dance idiom, we thought we needed another single, so we went and re-recorded ‘Angel Eyes’.

AM: The album version is really quite sort of rocky and sort of pushy.
[excerpt from album version of ‘Angel Eyes’]

AM: ‘Angel Eyes’ obviously was the one that did us the most good, because that great remix foresaw a lot of later dance remixes, the whole sort of feel of dance music, and that really got played a lot.

PM: So we went and re-recorded ‘Angle Eyes’ in disco style. At that stage we thought, you know, ‘let’s just join in the party, and instead of standing on the side and not dancing, let’s get in and start dancing’.
[excerpt from remix of ‘Angel Eyes’]

PM: We went and recorded it and it was great fun, and it really worked. We knew that that mix, when Bob Clearmountain mixed it, he put an extra gloss of magic on it. I knew it was great.

AM: It was very nice to hear your records in a club, you know, club soundsystems are so loud, and it had never really happened before; ‘Love is the Drug’, some DJs would play it, but it doesn’t really make people dance, whereas ‘Angel Eyes’ did, you know, it actually got people moving, so ‘Angel Eyes’ and ‘Dance Away’ certainly made us seem like a contender for being a commercial singles type band, as well as selling albums and make people surprised.

N: Manifesto, recorded in Surrey, London and New York, was a success, and signalled the return of Roxy Music. The album’s two different sounding sides - we are talking vinyl here - were titled “East Side”, for Europe, and “West Side”, for the American flavour. The two singles ‘Angel Eyes’ and ‘Dance Away’ confirmed a change in musical direction. But as the band regrouped in early 1980, to record with producer Rhett Davis, drummer Paul Thompson, who had been with Roxy Music since its inception, declined to be on the next album, Flesh + Blood.

PT: I always think if I’d been an outsider, and not been a member of Roxy Music, I think I would have loved the band in the beginning, and I would have started to lose interest with Manifesto. It was musical differences.

AM: The way of working in the studio had changed totally. What Paul found difficult at that time was working with click tracks and re-doing small drum parts. Paul likes to play right through. By the time we got to Manifesto and, even more, Flesh + Blood, we were working as a studio band, and we were looking for other things, more percussion, a drummer, maybe, who could sit back a little bit more and let other things come out

.
PM: Then everything changed, really, because I built a studio, a recording studio, which was finished pretty much before we started recording Flesh + Blood.
PT: I didn’t play on that album, but they asked me to do the tour, and I actually crashed my motorbike on the way to the rehearsals. I mean I’d kind of technically left the band before then anyway, but, you know, I think there was somebody up there [who] made the road a little bit slippy that day [laughs], said ‘Paul you’re not meant to do this, don’t do it!’
[excerpt from ‘Flesh and Blood’]

N: The title track from the 1980 album Flesh + Blood. So, this record would be recorded with Bryan, Phil and Andy as the creative heart of Roxy Music, plus some of the world’s finest session players. Producing was Rhett Davis.

RD: The more I listen to the early Roxy albums, the more amazed I am at how good those albums are and how strong those songs are. For early Roxy Music fans, I’ve been criticised as the producer of the second period of Roxy, of making them too smooth and too over-produced. I don’t know whether that’s wholly my fault [laughs], but it’s a process that I think Bryan was moving towards, and as the technology progressed, I think he wanted to explore the music in an atmospheric way a lot more.

PM: So, you know, we all have our own say about whether that part’s right or not, though it’s a different type of production; Chris Thomas was much more like, you know, the George Martin school of producing, when we get to Rhett, it’s co-producing. So he was sort of an interface between the musician and the technology. It’s almost like an extra sound band member. So, having our own studio, and the method of layering, having time to do it, not being under constraints, not all going in and playing together, and using the desk as an instrument, with the evolving technology, meant that we started evolving a different kind of music. It led to starting on Flesh + Blood and led to the fruition of that on Avalon. The first thing we wrote was called ‘Over You’, which became the single.
[excerpt from ‘Over You’]

RD: Flesh + Blood was a very creative situation. Phil’s songs were easier to work on, musically, Andy’s songs were more intricate, Bryan struggled with Andy’s songs with there being too many musical changes, but there were some interesting musical ideas in there that were pushing, as a writer, to add to that, and when the three of them were in the room, there’s a chemistry that absolutely works, much as they can fight and, you know, I can remember one classic day when we were doing Flesh + Blood and Bryan felt that he needed a day, you know, just with me, just to write some songs and to lay some tracks down. He obviously had sketches, had piano ideas, and, you know, we worked out some grooves and cut the tracks, and in that one day we cut three songs. We wrote ‘My Only Love’, and two other songs that were on the record in that one day.

PM: The American influence was in there quite a lot, I mean you’ve got soul, you’ve got psychedelia, ‘Eight Miles High’, so I guess you could say, you know, we’d moved away from Europe a bit, and have a lot of American influence on that album.

BF: There’s something more assured about the playing on Flesh + Blood, I mean, we did one or two covers, which was, you know, slightly unusual for us, ‘Midnight Hour’ was an old favourite of mine; I remember seeing Wilson Pickett singing it, Club A Go-Go in Newcastle in the ‘60s when I was an art student, and ‘Eight Miles High’, also from that period but from the west coast of America, from the psychedelic rock ‘n’ roll era, and we were kind of confident enough to be able to throw these covers into the mix. One of my favourite songs I’ve ever written, ‘My Only Love’, was in there, and Rhett Davis was in charge.

RD: It’s a more popular period, it fitted the time maybe, and fitted where Bryan wanted to go, you know, he has a particular style and I can see why some people would not think of him as being a classic singer, but when I’ve worked with him in the studio I’ve always been amazed, you know, at how good a voice he has and how well he sings, when he works out how he wants to sing, and it might take him a while, but when he gets it right, his phrasing, he sticks with that, you know, he’ll do performance after performance, and he knows exactly how he wants it to be, and he has a fantastic voice.
[excerpt from ‘My Only Love’]

RD: Bryan’s writing is sustained, you know, through all of those generations, that is class writing, I think he’s one of the greatest British songwriters of our generation. They’re classy records. They’re a classy band.

BF: It’s a very interesting collection of songs, I think, I mean, ‘Oh Yeah’ was, I think, the radio hit, ‘Same Old Scene’ did quite well too. Quite a bit of ground covered in it, we had a second guitar player, Neil Hubbard was in it, as well as Alan Spenner, Paul Carrack guested, so we had some really good English players playing with us as well as the core band, you know. Andy Newmark of course, great player, different from Paul Thompson, a different kind of player, both wonderful at what they do, you know. And that must have coloured the record a bit.

PM: Gradually, we evolved this method of working at our base, and then going to New York to put on fantastic session players.

RD: The way that we started to cut the tracks then, was that we were laying down the grooves with the machine, and the musicians were adding to it.

PM: They’d just invented the thing called the Linn Drum, so you could actually make good sounding tracks, but with something that sounded like proper drums.

RD: Bryan and Phil and Andy enjoyed working that way because it was putting down machine-based grooves, and musicians would then react to that, and we’d then play along to the rhythm box or groove that we had created, and drums sometimes went on quite late into the process.

N: You’re listening to The Thrill of It All, exploring the recordings of Roxy Music with me, Jarvis Cocker, on BBC Radio 2.
[excerpt from ‘Same Old Scene’]

RD: It was a time in the ‘80s where, you know, we reflecting what was going on, Bryan listens to a lot music, was into Chic, the whole thing that was going on, and there was some great disco music as it was at the time then, and we started working with Bob Clearmountain as an engineer who was responsible for working with Chic. Influences were coming from all around, and they were playing on the music so that’s gonna change it. We started working with a lot of American musicians, augmenting Phil and Andy, so different things came out of that. It wasn’t the young band in the ‘70s that was going into the studio with just their ideas, but I think Phil and Andy, especially, I think, Andy, would have preferred to have stayed on the more experimental musical side, not go so much towards the mainstream. Bryan is always the driving force behind how the record will be, finally, certainly on these later albums, on Flesh + Blood and Avalon. I think it’s where he wanted to go, musically.
[excerpt from ‘Oh Yeah’]

N: A major hit, ‘Oh Yeah’. Along with ‘The Same Old Scene’ and ‘Over You’, all three went sailing into the upper regions of the singles chart in 1980. As a result, Flesh + Blood went to Number 1, and stayed on the UK album charts for over a year.

AM: I don’t know why albums turn out like that, ‘cause I think in general, you know, bands go into the studio with much the same attitude every time, unless they’ve got a concept album or, you know, something specific they’re thinking of, but they do turn out differently, you know, sometimes there’s a sort of atmosphere or a magic that comes across a whole album that makes it work; I can’t really account for it.

N: Roxy Music were to exceed all expectations on their next album, Avalon. But in the winter of 1980, as the band were preparing for a performance in Germany, they, like millions worldwide, were affected by the shocking news coming out of New York.
[excerpt from news report on John Lennon’s death]

PM: I remember exactly hearing it on the news and everything you know; if I’d looked back and visualised the expression on my face, it was just, totally shocked, probably the same with hundreds and thousands of people all over the world, and obviously it did have a big affect, and I think at that time we were contracted to go and play some gig in Germany, it was before Christmas, got a copy of ‘Jealous Guy’.

AM: Bryan had the idea of doing that song in the set as a tribute.

PM: And we played it at that gig in Germany. And then we decided to record it.

AM: I think I, actually, was quite against it. There was a fear that it would look as if we were cashing in in the wrong sort of way, and I also didn’t think it would do very well, so, I stand corrected by the verdict of history.

PM: Everybody was caught up in that tragedy, and the emotion of it, and it was a number 1 single. All the feeling is in there, you know, when you’re doing it, you’re thinking of him and everything.

AM: It did incredibly well and it’s sort of almost become a Roxy song.
[excerpt from ‘Jealous Guy’]

AM: There’s a sort of starkness about the way Bryan does it but it’s quite sort of melancholy, there’s a sort of quality that there isn’t so much in the John Lennon version.

RD: It just struck a chord at the time and it was a great version that was done, had to be done, really quickly. We recorded it at Phil’s studio as a tribute, and it just worked out beautifully, I mean it was over 6 minutes long and, you know, the thought of editing it for a single seemed, you know, we can’t do that, this is what we wanna say, this is what the band wanted to say as their tribute.

AM: It’s really strange, you know, to actually hear John Lennon perform it. People sort of assume that Roxy will somehow soften someone who is famously hard and sarcastic and witty, but in fact the John Lennon version sounds remarkably soft, I think.

N: Roxy Music’s version of ‘Jealous Guy’ was the group’s only UK number 1, and the record remained on the UK chart for 3 months in 1981. Later that year, in between solo projects, the band joined producer Rhett Davis to record their eighth album, Avalon.

AM: We were all determined to get our songs out at that time, you know, it was a big fight to have a song on an album, partly because songwriting royalities are a very important part of the way you live, but much more, you know, if you’ve written a good song, I wanted it to be on a Roxy album because that would be where it would get the best possible treatment, with Phil and Bryan and other people, the best pulled out of it.

RD: Bryan is seeing the whole thing much more pictorially, he wants to paint pictures with music. My input into Avalon, I realised that we could, rather than say ‘this is gonna be chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight and chorus out’, we let the tape run; I said, ‘Bryan, we need to cut this down now’, he said, ‘no but it might develop somewhere’.

PM: It’s very much Bryan’s album, and I think he really embraced that method of working, and I think he’d found a way that he’d liked, and he’s sort of continued to do that ever since. New technology had come out, new keyboards had come out, new sounds, and the good thing about it is that it’s got a very strong mood

BF: Of course it was beautifully mixed by Bob Clearmountain, who by this time had done a few of our records, yeah, he did a wonderful job with Avalon. Rhett Davis, of course, I worked very closely with him on this as well, it was a great team effort, a lot of people, and I managed to come up with a decent song, ‘More Than This’, which was the song that the people heard on the radio, which I guess told them about the album.
[excerpt from ‘More Than This’]

AM: ‘More Than This’ is a great song, there’s a lovely sort of melancholy, and great guitar, I liked the sort of openness of it. Avalon was good songs.

RD: We weren’t restrained at all, you know, we let the tape run, and we wanted to see what would happen, we did do a lot of editing on it but some of the tracks were a lot, lot longer.

BF: Rhett Davis, he was so patient, he put so many hours and months into the making of this record, so it’s just another job to do.
AM: Avalon wasn’t the happiest album we ever made. Bryan was restless, I think he was feeling he could do this on his own, and almost that it was irritating to have to work with other people, and maybe it’s that sort of combination of a degree of irritation, and a certain amount of melancholy, and to write good songs, that sort of somehow pulls it together, there’s a sort of a quality, a sound quality, over the whole album that I think is distinctive. Also Rhett, I think, may have had some influence.

RD: There was a lot of experimenting going on, they had the ideas and they had the chord sequences and then it was, ‘OK, well how will we cut this?’, but if it didn’t turn into a song, it didn’t matter because we were still enjoying the process and pushing ourselves and the band were pushing themselves into a new direction, those are the kind of things where we were coming in and experimenting and spending half a day and saying, ‘well where can we take this, what can it turn into?’; didn’t turn into a song, but, you know, it was so good, or so interesting as a groove, an atmosphere that we managed to cut it into the record.
[excerpt from ‘India’]

AM: We were established artists, people expected certain things from us. The albums had to be very well produced, and, you know, the sort of sounds are important, tours had to be much more professional; you know, it’s very nice to get your limo to drive right into the back and right up to the dressing rooms, you know; big concerts in America, sports stadiums, and all of that is very nice. I mean, I suppose the fun had slightly gone, but there was a certain amount of respect, and we were making a reasonably good living from it, so I think we weren’t really complaining.

PM: We decided to go and do a bit of it, we went to Compass Point in Nassau for a couple of weeks, and we went to New York for a bit, put some stuff on.

AM: Strangely, Avalon was the one that, we recorded it all over the place.

RD: The nucleus of the recording, you know, was started with Bryan, Phil and Andy, we would never ever go to a studio in New York or in the Bahamas with, you know, a top session player or a top musician from around the world and, a lot of those guys had never played on music like this before, you know, so unstructured. Spenner on bass, I mean he was a mainstay, and Neil Hubbard, that was the basic band; I mean we added the drums, Andy Newmark, most of the drums on Avalon were added afterwards. We never gave anyone direction, we always wanted them to react, to listen to the track, and we would want them to input into it, without giving them too much guidance.
BF: It was suddenly, you know, well, here’s another record to make, what do I have to say this time? You know, what collectively can we do, what songs do you have, do you have anything? So there’s a couple of co-written things, ‘Take A Chance With Me’, with Phil, then a great song to do live, it just has a different feel from any of the other songs.
[excerpt from ‘Take A Chance With Me’]

RD: If you’re working with great musicians, you know, they were given a freedom. Suddenly they weren’t given a chord chart, just play what you wanna play. Made for a lot of work afterwards, sorting it all out.

BF: It had quite a long life, Avalon, I mean, a lot of work went into it, and here we were in Nassau, and there was one track we were working on, I can’t remember what on earth it was, but we weren’t getting anywhere with it, and I was kind of in a bit of a bad mood, but anyway I was in the studio room and they were in the control room and I just started improvising on the piano and playing this thing, this tune, which was ‘Tara’, basically. Through the glass they had the mic on, and luckily, they heard me.

AM: And Bryan was sitting, playing this little chord sequence on the grand piano, and I picked up soprano, and I just started playing along, and made up a little tune that went with it, which is why there’s no real separation between the sax and the piano, it’s all on one mic.

RD: I remember it well, we hadn’t miked anything up, the two of them were just out in the studio, and the classic thing, you know, Bryan turned round and said, ‘did you get any of that?’, and I‘d got it. [laughs]

BF: Andy played this soprano thing, and it was just really beautiful, ‘cause Andy was a trained player, and it was basically just a duet with me and Andy. And when Andy hits a note, he feels it.
[excerpt from ‘Tara’]

AM: When we recorded ‘Tara’, that was actually a total, improvised accident. I didn’t expect it to be used on the album, it was just one of those many things that you do.

BF: And ‘Tara’ is really beautiful, I think, and I wanted to have the sound of the sea, and it was where we were making the record. We got these stereo mikes out on the beach, outside the house I was living in; the house I was living in reminded me of the house, Tara, in Gone With The Wind, that’s where we recorded the sea, right outside, we put the mikes and then we got the sound just right, and we added that, and there was ‘Tara’.
RD: There’s a craft in making an album, and how it runs, and plays, and flows, and quiet areas, and it’s nice to deliver a piece of work and you hope that people are gonna enjoy that as a piece of work, and we perfected it with that, if you like. We kind of got away from that a little bit in the modern era of downloads.
PM: And of course the great thing was that all the time and investment in getting the sounds to be really good paid off because they happened to invent CDs, and so it was one of the first 4 albums that ever came out on CD, and no-one had heard that quality of sound before, so you almost heard it as it was in the studio, on a CD. You know, I think that had a lot to do with its success as well.

RD: ‘Avalon’, the actual track, it was the first song that we actually went for the eight-track, ‘cause we just had a weekend, crazy weekend; on the Sunday we went in, we were working on Bryan’s vocal.

BF: Yeah I think we only had two days left to finish the album, in fact it was the last night, and the studio, the Power Station, where we were finishing off the album, we were mixing and recording at the same time. And we had one track left to do. Andy and Phil were gonna come in later that evening, and I got there at tea time or something, and as far as I know they didn’t know what the song was gonna be called, or what the album was gonna be called at that point. So this was the last song which ended up being ‘Avalon’. Tried out the lyric, and it worked great, in the Power Station, it was so quiet, being a Sunday, was such a beautiful room to sing in.
[excerpt from ‘Avalon’]

BF: So, I’d sung the song, and I was in the corridor, walking down to the coffee machine, and I heard somebody singing, coming through from the other studio.

RD: And a Haitian band was in there, Bryan and I were having a cup of coffee, and we went, ‘wow, what is that voice, that is incredible. I wonder if we can get her to come and sing on ‘Avalon’’.

BF: So I went and asked if she could come and, you know, and sing on our track next door.

RD: Yanick Etienne. We explained what we wanted to do, we wanted her to sing the ‘Avalon’ on the chorus, just to sing that.

BF: Yanick was, this voice of an angel really. I asked her to do a kind of scat vocal on that track, and it sounded incredible.

RD: We just wanted her to ad-lib, just to be free, totally free with whatever she wanted to do. One take. Absolutely blew us all away. And the track was finished.

N: Avalon, released in May 1982, was Roxy Music’s final album. It was a soar-away success with 3 international hit singles, ‘More Than This’, ‘Take A Chance With Me’, and the title cut, ‘Avalon’. The album would stay on the UK chart for a year, and reached the coveted number 1 slot. Avalon splits Roxy fans - for some, it’s bland; for others, it’s a creative high point.

PM: It was, at the time I seem to remember, being a bit too polished for my liking, but tailor-made for Bryan.

RD: You know, there’s a lot going on in there, you can put it on in the background, it’s a great Sunday morning record, but there is a lot of depth to it.

PM: A culmination of 10 years of work, you know, we’d put in all that time and graft, by the time we get to the end of the Avalon touring cycle, we’re able to play some 10-, 15-thousand seaters in America.

AM: Queen and Pink Floyd and Aerosmith doing stadiums, it was the point at which Roxy might have moved just up one more stage to be the premier league.

PM: All the solo albums that Bryan, and all the solo projects that I’d done, you know, enormous amount of music out there.

AM: I wonder whether we hadn’t sort of weakened ourselves by doing too many other projects, we could have gone that bit further. Avalon, we didn’t think it was our last album [laughs], at least I didn’t, but, you know, as it happens, so far it is our last album, you know, ‘and now the party’s over’ is a good way of putting it.

N: Roxy Music called it a day at the Spectrum, Philadelphia, the 28th of May 1983, the last time they played together as a group for 18 long years. Bryan, Phil and Andy pursued solo interests and then in 2001, they regrouped as Roxy Music, playing an extensive world tour. Then, in 2005, it was reported that Roxy, with Brian Eno, had gathered at London’s RAK recording studios, with producer Chris Thomas. So far, no new Roxy Music has emerged from those sessions. Later that year, they played the Isle of Wight Festival, and went on to do their bit to make poverty history at the Live 8 concert, from the Berlin stage of the event.
Roxy Music are an English rock group with a pioneering spirit. They influenced generations of musicians, like elements of the glam rock movement, and later, the punk rockers. They also provided a model for many of the experimental electronic groups of the early ‘80s. There’s little doubt that Roxy Music were distinguished by their visual and musical sophistication, and preoccupation with their musical craft. Ferry, and co-founder Eno, have also had influential solo careers, the latter becoming one of the most significant record producers of today.

RD: Who would have thought that 40 years on, we’d still be doing interviews and talking and listening to this music and still marvelling at it? We would never have thought that. Their music will live on for generations.

N: And we’ll leave the final words to the creative heart of Roxy Music – Andy, Phil and Bryan.

BF: Yeah, it’s been a kind of interesting band to be associated with. Each album has had its own life and so there have been several lives in one, which is basically a nice thing to have. We did kind of grow up musically as we did each record. Also the fact that every now and then a new person would be added to the group, guest players who would bring different shades to it, you know? And I think we were very good at absorbing these new people and play a big part in the Roxy history.

AM: Most Roxy songs are pretty simple, but there is a depth and a complexity to it. Some of the early ones are incredibly simple, but we concentrate a lot into those. That early sort of optimism and sort of swagger that we had surprisingly carried through for a long time, and there is still tremendous confidence in it.

PM: I thank God that I met those people in that particular time. Totally transformed my life, you know, from the age of 9 I wanted to be in a band, been obsessed by bands ever since I was little, and wanted to be a musician. To then be able to join a band and to be in a successful band, I’m very very proud of Roxy. It is a dream that came true, totally, yeah.

Previous Article | Next Article